![]() ![]() ![]() “One Step Closer,” the band’s first single, was, on first glimpse, pure goofiness. You might have thought the whole thing was a joke. ![]() If you first encountered Linkin Park in the early days of the Hybrid Theory album cycle, then you might not have seen the plan at work. It’s America’s best-selling rock album of this century, and it probably still will be when the century ends. Linkin Park’s debut album Hybrid Theory, which turns 20 tomorrow, has sold 12 million copies in the US alone - more than any debut album from any rock band not named Guns N’ Roses. They attacked their soul-wracking self-exorcisms with a businesslike precision. Their music only barely scanned as metal, and they took more, both lyrically and aesthetically, from Depeche Mode and Echo And The Bunnymen than from Helmet or Pantera. They wrote lyrics so broad and relatable that they could fit just about any dark-night-of-the-soul context. In a nu-metal world full of party-hard jokers and outsized personalities, Linkin Park were practically monks. They were always businessmen, never hedonists. Linkin Park were, and are, professionals. If you were a young man looking for stability, then you could see why joining Linkin Park was a pretty good bet. But then Jeff Blue, a music exec who knew Bennington a little bit, told him about a Los Angeles rap-rock band who needed a singer. He married young, and he got a job at a digital services firm. Grey Daze had self-released two albums, and they had a local following, but they never went anywhere outside the Phoenix area. Bennington had spent five years in Grey Daze, an Arizona grunge band. At the time, Bennington was just past 20, but he was already done with the music business. That plan is what attracted Bennington to the band. “They had a plan.” That was the late Chester Bennington, just before his 2017 death, reflecting on the first time he met his Linkin Park bandmates. ![]()
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