Cover Story: Linkin Park - Rap Metal Rulers

The same policy applies to the band's dressing room at shows. "We just like having a clean working environment," says Bourdon, who got "way into partying" at the end of high school but has been sober for five years. "We don't believe it's an industry standard — to be a band on the road, partying and drunk. Would you go to work drunk every day?"

"We don't have moral issues about it — for God's sake, we're taking Cypress Hill on tour," Shinoda says with a big laugh, then refers back to his time in art school. "People I knew then would rather paint or get together and talk about art than go out and party. That's where we're at as a band. You can tell by the way we practice and hang out now — music is not a means to another end."Music," he says, "is the end."

In 1998, almost a year to the day before he talked to Jeff Blue on the phone, Bennington came home from a frustrating rehearsal with another band in Phoenix and swore to his wife he was quitting music.

"He was screaming and yelling, 'I'm not doing music anymore!' " Samantha remembers. "I looked at him and said, 'I'm not letting you quit. You owe me an hour of practice, whether you're singing to the radio or playing your guitar.' I also told him, 'One day, you're going to get a call from L.A. I just know it. You need to be ready.'

"When you really love someone, you want to support them," she contends as Chester nods his head in adoring agreement. "He needs to be happy in what he is doing — and doing his best." When Chester left for L.A., Samantha insists she had no doubts about letting him go. "I believed that it would work out. I also knew that if he didn't give it his all, saying 'What if?' would have driven him crazy."

Bennington did not just fall into stardom with Linkin Park. In L.A., he was essentially homeless for months, shuttling between friends' and relatives' sofas, as Samantha prepared to join him. Bennington even slept in his car, which was a piece of shit. "It wouldn't go over thirty-five miles an hour," he says. "Two lights were burned out. I had no money to replace them." During the Hybrid Theory sessions, Bennington bunked in the car when the studio closed for the night. After it reopened in the morning, he would crash on a couch inside until the rest of the band showed up for work.

"It was weird," Bennington recalls. "They're all best friends, and I was so focused on not going insane. When I would lose my mind, I couldn't lose it with them — why would they want to put up with my ass? I didn't want them to think I had lead-singer's disease — always unsatisfied with everything."

Bennington's dedication had the opposite effect. "We each made our own sacrifices, but Chester's was unique," Delson admits. "Because he had so much to risk, he was extremely motivated. He would actually tell us, 'Guys, I don't think we're working hard enough.' "

Bennington, the youngest of four children, was not always that way. "I was an ambivalent kid," he says. "I floated around, coasted through." When he was eleven, his mother, a nurse, and his father, a Phoenix police officer and detective for thirty years, split up. "It was just me and him for a long time," Bennington says of his dad, who worked for many years investigating child-sex crimes. "He was hardened by dealing with the shit of the world every day. So he brought a lot of that home. It was a very emotional situation."

In Linkin Park's first interviews, Bennington alluded to periods of sexual abuse and drug use in his own past. He says he did so in defense of his lyrics: "It was like, 'There's a lot of songs about depression, fear and paranoia. Are you just making it up?' And I said no."

When asked about those experiences now, Bennington speaks with wary candor, emphasizing hard lessons over prurient detail. "No one in my family molested me," he says firmly. "It was people who were around me. Coming from a broken home, it was easy to fall into thinking, 'This is OK.' " The abuse — and that self-delusion — lasted for about five years, into his early teens.

"I was a lot more confident when I was high," he goes on. "I felt like I had more control over my environment when I was on hallucinogens or drinking." Bennington ended his romance with cocaine and methamphetamines before he met Samantha in 1996. But on tour with Linkin Park last fall, he hit a black patch of heavy drinking in which, he confesses, "I found myself not saying no to other things, things that would have made me another rock & roll cliche." The rest of the band felt the strain — between shows, Bennington traveled by himself on the studio bus.

"It's easy to fall into that thing — 'poor, poor me,' " he says. "That's where songs like 'Crawling' come from: I can't take myself. But that song is about taking responsibility for your actions. I don't say 'you' at any point. It's about how I'm the reason that I feel this way. There's something inside me that pulls me down." On January 2nd of this year, Bennington took his own advice and quit drinking. He is now totally clean.

In that Santa Monica restaurant, Chester and Samantha cheerfully raise their glasses of mineral water in a toast to his sobriety. "It's going to be more difficult for me to bitch on the new record," he concedes. "Because life is great."

After rehearsal, in the loading area where Linkin Park's road crew rolls the band's gear into trucks for the drive to the first Projekt: Revolution date in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Rob McDermott runs down the schedule for the year ahead: this last leg of touring behind Hybrid Theory; personal and writing time in the spring; recording sessions in the summer. "Do I think it's better for them to have another record this year?" he says. "We've always been a gambling group of people. If they tell me, 'Rob, it's not there yet,' then it's not there. But if they say, 'We've got eighty songs, we've got to cut this shit now,' we can do it."

The present is already packed solid. Bennington turned up for his interview straight from an overdub session for "System," a song he's cut with Korn's Jonathan Davis for the soundtrack to Queen of the Damned. A remixed version of Hybrid Theory drops later this year, with contributions from friends and all-stars such as Marilyn Manson and Orgy's Jay Gordon. Shinoda has produced a track for legendary DJs the X-ecutioners, "It's Going Down"; Hahn co-wrote the song with Shinoda and directed the video.

"We don't need a break," Bennington claims. "We've got three albums to do before we take a break. We just started." But he can't help thinking that too much has come too fast. "I'm kind of pissed off," he admits when pressed. "We have the Number One record of the year; we're nominated for all these Grammys. Why did it have to be the first record? Now every record we make is going to be compared to this.

"But we deserve it," he snaps excitedly. "Nothing was handed to us. Everything you see, we did. Every note of the music — we wrote, practiced and performed it. Every piece of art you see, we designed it. When people said that nobody was going to get it, we said, 'You're fucking wrong.'

"It's paid off, because we work fucking hard. Come and see how, for two hours after the show, we talk to people and hang out and sign everything they want. We won't deny anybody anything. We'll chew our legs off to satisfy people who want to see us." Bennington pauses, glances down at his legs as if to make sure they're still there and laughs.

"I think I just spoke for everybody."

[From Issue 891 —