"I always tell people this, and my band mates think I’m lying," said Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson, "but when I first started playing in 11th grade, all I wanted to do was play a show. Everything after that is just extra."

What a great big pile of extra it is, though. It’s one that would probably turn more ambitiously minded rockers 40 shades of green. Seemingly with little effort at all, Linkin Park has piled up achievements at a remarkable rate: after its first show, the band scored a publishing deal; soon a word-of-mouth buzz would spread the band’s name through rock circles faster than the heroin craze could burn itself out. It wouldn’t be too long before a major-label deal turned up.

Anyone who hasn’t had a chance to partake of the band’s live show, or pick up on one of the radio stations already broadcasting its debut, Hybrid Theory (2000, Warner Bros.), is probably left wondering if the hype is justified. Probably so, considering the band’s take on the quickly deteriorating rock/rap formula. The act mixes Delson’s six-string talents with those of drummer Rob Bourdon and DJ Joseph Hahn, along with a pair of vocalists—Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda—to create a style that one-ups most other rock-rap combos.

"I don’t want it to sound like ‘Here’s the rap part, now here comes the huge rock choruses,’" Delson explained. "I wanted it all to fit together, so there wasn’t one part that sounds like rap and another like rock. It all sounds like Linkin Park."

Such is the theory the band sticks to on its debut. With Delson’s heavy-handed guitar work that alludes to slick proto-industrial metal flying over a slick combination of beats and a slew of samples that give it a crisp, urban feel, Hybrid Theory flaunts a beefed-up sense of flash than the trailer-park offerings coming from the Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit camps.

More of an allusion back to the days when Pop Will Eat Itself and Big Audio Dynamite flustered the boundaries between urban sounds, guitar-driven post-punk and dance tracks than a romp through nookie-land, Linkin Park’s songs don’t smack of the contrived, genre-crossing rock/rap fusion of the late ‘90s. Where many rock-rappers thrive on the juxtaposition of metal riffs and hip-hop beats, Linkin Park favors a style that blends the two into an amalgam that’s more than the simple sum of its parts.

"It’s all one thing," Delson said, explaining the mix of styles in his band’s sound. "We have a lot of influences, like Aphex Twin and the Deftones and the Roots. I want to be so anyone who hears us can be into it. I want the Deftones fans to like us, and the kid who has only listened to hip hop to like it too."

While Linkin Park only traces its history back to mid-1997, it’s enough to predate the explosion of rock-rap bands that made it big following the success of Korn and Limp Bizkit’s radio rampage of ’98, and more importantly, the deluge of acts jumping on the bandwagon as the genre began to heat up. In fact, the association most between its members stretches much farther back, albeit on a non-musical level. Shindoa, Delson and Bourdon originally met up while in high school, and Shinoda quickly met Hahn after moving on to art college. With Bennington, imported from the deserts of Arizona, the band was set to take its sound to the masses.

"We were doing it way before it got popular," Delson said, citing his band’s history as one of the biggest differentiations between his act and the rest of the rock/rap bands. "They’re doing something different; we do our own thing. It’s cool, but just different."

In fact, the band always envisioned its style to be a different take on the usual attempts to fuse styles of music. With aims more unconventional than the hopes of grafting the Crue’s guitars to Dre’s beats, Linkin Park always planned to do more to blur the lines of the style. Originally naming themselves Hybrid Theory, showing its hope to make a style that didn’t just combine genres, but meshed them together seamlessly. While the young band makes its efforts look easy, its efforts to mix things up didn’t always run as seamlessly as things do now.

"It wasn’t easy at first," Delson admitted. "If you heard our first demos, it wasn’t as much as now. There’d be rock sections and rap sections."

Once Hybrid Theory is popped in, however, there’s no doubt the band finally made it to its lofty aims. From the gut-wrenching riffage of "One Step Closer," to the Armageddon groove of "Cure for the Itch," the band leaves little space for anything that isn’t going to further its cause. It’s such tight songwriting—the longest track on Hybrid Theory clocks in at a mere 3:36—that makes Linkin Park’s songs play out so well. It also, however, makes the process of songwriting a bit more complicated than the average jam session that underlies many bands’ songwriting process.

"It just comes from really working on the songs," Delson said. "We go over the songs and make sure everything fits. Everything has to work together."

Though the band scored a major-label contract, it isn’t about to let its successes go to its head. Riding the wave of an industry buzz, Delson knows it’s going to take a lot of work to make the industry hype and the street-level prerelease buzz pay off. Though Hybrid Theory will get the benefits of a major’s marketing push and distribution, the band plans to work it as if it were an indie release, choosing to put its efforts in grassroots touring and building up a fan base.

"Right now we’ve got an industry buzz," Delson said. "That doesn’t mean we’ve made it. We’re going to have to work even harder."

-Aversion.com

Labels: interviews