ONLY ON OMG! On Linkin Park’s Manila concert and joining Stone Temple Pilots
“No I haven’t dealt with Scott. But when I was a kid, STP was one of my favorite bands in the world and…Hold on, my friend is asking me a question, hold on real quick.”
The hyperactive voice fades for a moment and then a child’s voice takes over.
He returns to our phone interview chuckling. “Kids are real cool because they don’t give a shit what you’re doing you know? They don’t care that I’m doing an interview with whoever, they just come in and go (imitates kid’s excited tone), ‘Can I go to my friend’s house??’”
Chester Bennington: multi-platinum vocalist of Linkin Park (and now also of Stone Temple Pilots) is powerless over his children—last count: 6, including one he adopted.
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Johnny-come-lately of ‘nu metal’
Briefly marginalized as Johnny-come-lately’s of the “nu metal” scene more than a decade ago, Linkin Park started out as the most commercially successful of the ilk: their debut album “Hybrid Theory” has sold 24 million copies worldwide since its release in 2000. It is still considered one of the most auspicious debuts in rock history.
Subsequent albums continued the debut’s rap metal-with-pop-hooks approach, maintaining Linkin Park’s commercial success. Their last two albums, 2010’s “A
Thousand Suns” and last year’s “Living Things,” play up the band’s always present electronica leanings.
On August 13, Linkin Park will bring its electronica-to-rap-to-metal hybrid back to Manila at the Mall of Asia Arena. The band played a successful concert here in 2004 and it was a turbocharged tour de force.
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First concert in Manila was ‘effing awesome’
“I remember leaving, thinking, ‘THAT was fucking awesome,’” Bennington recalls, “We’ve played in a lot of places but for me, playing in the Philippines had a lot of familiarity, just being there. Like I was kinda at home a little bit; there’s a lot of Spanish influence like where I’m from… that made it feel not so far away.
“In terms of the show, I thought we played well that night. We like to play live as good as on the record, if not even more aggressive, more intense. Right at that time we were peaking in terms of being able to really clicking in to what we do on the records and what we do live. Those were the tours that helped where are now at live. We knew we were clicking and in the moment.”
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A gift for The Pop Hook
Linkin Park, despite their superstar stats, are not necessarily critics’ darlings in the way of say, Radiohead, except for comparisons made between “Kid A” and “A Thousand Suns” (where both bands eschewed their respective “formulas” and risked alienating their massive fanbases with unexpected sonic approaches).
The band, regardless of the aggro-to-ethereal twists and turns they execute underneath the vocals, has a superlative gift of producing The Pop Hook. Rare indeed is a Linkin Park song that's less than catchy, and even the most hardened critic would be stone deaf to not recognize it.
So, where do they keep their Box of Hooks?
“The secret is—and I’m gonna let this out now, so everybody can get one—I order mine from Sears Catalogue. ‘Musical hooks for sale! You can buy batches of them in dollars for a hundred different hooks!’”
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Likes: deathcore, pop, hip-hop, punk
Turning serious, Bennington adds, “I think the fact that we all like different styles of music, deathcore, pop, hip-hop, punk rock… the one thing that I find similar to all of them especially the songs that I like is that they all have really great hooks, they all have great melodies.”
He also scoffs at so-called “artists,” who pretend to write only for themselves and not for their audience.
“Like, gimme a fucking break. if you’re gonna write music for yourself, then don’t try to play shows, don’t go out and show people how to listen to it. If you do want people to listen to what you’re doing, then you have to be sensitive to the fact that you have to make it fuckin’ hook-y.”
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No lineup changes in 13 years
Also extraordinary is the fact that for the past 13 years, they’ve never had changes in their lineup.
“In the context of six different, creative guys who all have different personalities, we’re extremely respectful of each other for the most part. That’s really been a key thing to keeping everybody in the band happy,” Bennington explains.
Plus, he sums up, “We like each other as people.”
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Replacing Scott Weiland
Most recently, and perhaps even controversially, he replaced the legendary and legendarily troublesome Scott Weiland in Stone Temple Pilots.
“I absolutely love the band… and I love Scott! He’s a great singer and I have zero qualms with Scott myself. At the same time, you know, his personal life has kind of…gotten the guys to a point where they wanted to move forward in a different direction. When they asked me, my first reaction was ‘Fuck yeah! Let’s do this!’ And then the fear of that answer set in, you know? Like, ‘Oh shit, I just fuckin’ said yes to this…’”
He also understands the apprehensions of longtime STP fans.
“Some fans are like ‘Fuck this, we want Scott,’ and I get it. But you’re not gonna get Scott anymore with STP; whether I said yes or no, it’s not going to happen. For some fans of the band, it’ll take some time for them to get used to what’s going on. But overall, 99.99% of this experience has been fuckin’ awesome.”
Tickets to Linkin Park Living Things World Tour on August 13, 2013 at the Mall of Asia Arena are available at SM Tickets.
Francis "Brew" Reyes is a guitarist, producer, arranger, music journalist, photographer and host. He once played guitar for the Dawn and was a DJ for NU107. Like him on
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