Alan Cross - Linkin Park: the secret history

The late 90s were a difficult and dark time for rock and roll. If you were around back then, you probably remember how the world was awash in pop music: 'N Sync, The Backstreet Boys, The Spice Girls, Britney Spears.

Meanwhile, rap was huge and getting huger. Some critics were saying that hip-hop was so popular that it was just a few months away from killing off rock altogether.

At the same time, various forms of keyboard-based electronic music were making waves. Electronica was all the rage: The Prodigy, The Chemical Brotherseven U2 got into it with their Pop album.

People were actually saying that rock was dead. We were just waiting for the funeral to start. You have to admit that rock wasnt doing much to help the cause, since the best trend we could muster after Britpop was nu metal.

Nu metal sought to splice the DNA of heavy, aggressive rock onto heavy, aggressive hip-hop. The results, to the say the least, were mixed. Korn was okay, but with them came Limp Bizkit. Kid Rock was cool for a while, but then he became a cartoon.

And if there was ever a single event that buried nu metal, it was the disastrous 1999 Woodstock Festival. Along with all the fires and violence, much of the backlash hung on the crowd that went nuts during Limp Bizkits set. It wasnt long before the worst thing that you could call a band was nu metal. It was seriously uncool.

There are few survivors of the nu metal era, and those that are still around are limping through the twilight of their careers.

But theres one band that not only survived, but actually got bigger and more successful. This is the story of the best-selling American rock band of the 20th centuryas of 2008, anyway.

Since their first album was released on October 24, 2000, Linkin Park has sold over 18 million albums in the US and another 1.3 million in Canada. Then there are all their overseas sales, which are substantial. Lets go with a total of anywhere from 30 to 35 million. The only band that has come close to posting numbers like these is Nickelback.

And like I said, Linkin Park is pretty much the only group to emerge from nu metal sound of the late 90s and get bigger and stronger.

Everything with this band starts at a high school in Agoura Hills, which is a town about 30 miles northwest of Downtown L.A. The core of Linkin Park is three guys who went to school there: MC and singer Mike Shinoda, trumpet player-turned-guitarist Brad Delson and drummer Rob Bourdon. They all attended Agoura High Schoolwhich, by the way, is the same school that gave the world Hoobastank.

Brad and Rob were the first to play together in a group called Relative Degree. When they broke up, they found Mike and formed a band called Super Xero, which was eventually shorted to just Xero. This was while they were still in high school.

When everyone graduated, they kept playing together even while they were enrolled in college. Brad enrolled in UCLA, where he became roommates with a bass player named Dave Phoenix Farrell, a former member of a Christian ska-punk band called Tasty Snax. They called him Phoenix because he has two big phoenix tattoos on his back. (The guy is also quite the cook, especially when it comes to barbequing.)

Mike went to graphic design school, where he met a wannabe comic book artist named Joseph Hahn, who also worked on some of the special effects seen in The X-Files TV series.

These four guysRob, Dave, Mike and Josephall came together in Xero. There is one known demo tape in existence: a four-track EP released in 1997, which featured a singer named Mark Wakefield. This tape shows up on eBay from time to time and sells for hundreds of dollars.

But back in 1997, no one cared. Xero had, well, zero luck. There were lots of rejections of those original demossome say as many as 50. In the end, their singer got bored and left to become the manager of a band called Taproot.

This experience was discouraging for the band, but it wasnt exactly a waste. Xero had made contact with Jeff Blue, the vice president at a label called Zomba. In March 1999, he suggested that Xero talk to an Arizona singer named Chester Bennington to see what could happen.

At first glance, Chester Bennington didnt seem to be much of a catch. He was from a broken home and spent the money he made at Burger King on coke and crystal meth. The only thing that kept him going was his dream of being a rock staralthough his heroes were Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode. These are not exactly role models whose lifestyles should be emulated.

While living in Phoenix, Chester became the singer of a band called Grey Daze. But there were disagreements so Chester decided to move to LA.

Xero sent Chester some demos. One tape featured Mark Wakefields original vocals and the other featured instrumentals. Do your thing were the instructions. Chester wrote some new lyrics, recorded his vocals and sent everything back. And that sealed it. Chester passed the audition.

The group changed their name to Hybrid Theory, and began to work on new stuff. But they still couldnt find a record deal.

In fact, they were turned down dozens of times in 1999 by both major and indie labels. Chester remembers playing close to 50 showcases without any interest or offers. It also didnt help that Dave had left the band to tour the Christian circuit with Tasty Snax that year.

But the band kept at it, even deciding on another name change. Hybrid Theory became the deliberately-misspelled Linkin Park. They were inspired by an actual park of the same name in Santa Monica that they drove by almost every day. The band reasoned it was a fairly universal name, since most American towns have a Lincoln Park, too.

The label that finally took a chance on Linkin Park was Warner Brothers. Even they had told the band to go away many times, but there was something different about this last nine song demo. Their champion was Jeff Blue, who had since quit Zomba and moved over to Warner Brothers.

This time, the band invested heavily in producers and contributors. Starting with raw material from their nine-track demo, they got to work with a producer named Don Gilmore. The guy hired to mix the album was Andy Wallace, the same dude that gave Nirvanas Nevermind its final sheen.

It took all of four weeks to finish the record. Because Dave Farrell was touring with his Christian band, two bass players were hired for the bottom end. Anything they didnt play was played by Brad.

The lyrics and rap parts were re-worked, and so were the beats, some of which were provided by the Dust Brothers production team.

Finally, the record was done. The first proper Linkin Park single One Step Closer (which was supposed to have been called Plaster), came out in the summer of 2000. The single got a critical pasting as being more of the same old nu metal.

But to fans, it was different. Sure, there was rapping, scratching, screaming, big riffs and beats, but there was also more of a pop thing going on. One Step Closer was catchy, while still being angry and powerful.

There were three more singles from the album. Number two was Crawling, which was followed by Paper Cut and finally, In The End. That track was based on an old poem written by Chester and its still probably Linkin Parks biggest hit.

Hybrid Theory was the biggest-selling album of 2001, peaking at number two on the charts. Sales began at about five million copies and peaked at nearly 10 million in America. Canadian sales were north of half a million.

And just so they could capitalize on all this successincluding the wild reception they got on the 2001 Ozzfest tourLinkin Park hustled out a remix album entitled Reanimation.

The Reanimation album bought Linkin Park enough time to record a second CD. It also allowed Dave Farrell to rejoin the group on bass. But making a second record was a challenge for the band. Linkin Park had more than eight years to refine material for