Bubble-gum pop was selling huge.
And it was like 5 guys or 5 girls dancing.
You know, like these little dance moves.
And we were just like "Really?!"
Like I can't- I can't watch another one.
The first beats that I ever made were mashups.
We didn't sound like anybody else.
They don't know what they're getting into with me.
It's a very visual record, everything's about timing.
Linkin Park fans are Linkin Park fans because they get that.
Thanks for coming, you guys.
Our pleasure.
You're
A Thousand Suns
It was kind of a deep album, when you sample
Jay Robert Oppenheimer,
Doctor King,
and Mario Savio, the workers' rights activist.
And you're taking the title from Jay Robert Oppenheimer,
the man who created the nuclear bomb.
What are you trying to say?
It wasn't accidental
but it was very, just like almost like, uh,
drawing on a notepad when you're on the phone.
You know that's how we wrote a lot of the music on this record.
There's a lot of stuff in here that seems to
point at a fear of kind of like destroying ourselves.
We didn't set out to write an album about something.
We wanted to write something that was
more creatively and artistically presented
as a single album that's meant to be listened to
from beginning to end,
not necessarily an album that's about nuclear war.
It's hard to write an album that asks people
to listen from beginning to end, in the era of the iPod,
ya know the shuffle, so the sequencing matters
but are people getting it in that way?
Well that's a great observation and a great question.
When we were making the album in the very, very early stages,
management suggested to us, "Could you make something that
"we could release in smaller chunks?
"Because everyone is consuming music by the song,
couldn't you make EPs where it was, like, 3 songs
and then do that a few times every few months?"
And when you do that too,
you stay in the public's mind longer, right?
It kind of felt that that's what everybody else was up to
and that's just automatically for us, I don't know
if we have a problem with authority or what's our problem
but as soon as we figured out,
like, yeah people are going to be doing that.
We were like, "Yeah, that's not what we're gonna do."
People don't make albums anymore and we grew up on them.
I love albums, so let's make a case for it.
Help people who don't understand the difference between
an album and 12 or 15 songs that sit together on a CD.
There are records like
for example, that don't have connecting themes in songs
but as an album it's something that you put in
and you don't really skip to the next song;
you listen to it from beginning to end,
and we wanted to do the same thing
where there are records that are concept albums
like
there are themes throughout the album
that are specific to the story that they're trying to tell.
That was not what we wanted to accomplish with this.
And part of the way you created it is through automatic writing
because that's how you get to be artistic and,
"We have a goal but it's not a hard goal
"and we sort of just let things just happen."
And you get into your subconscious, right?
If you've never seen it done, or if you've never done it yourself
I feel like it's a little hard to imagine.
When you see an artist or a musician improvising,
they're just kind of noodling their way through this thing
and there's this natural thing that goes-
there's a naturalness about it,
and for us like if you listen to
it was intentionally very rigid and segmented.
The thing that was special at the time
was to make rock and sample bass music,
smashed together in a way
and in doing so we wanted to make the rock more sample-like.
So everything was very cut-up and-
and, uh, mechanical.
And in this record I feel like some of the music went super,
like, even further into the mechanical
but we wanted the lyrics and the human element
to be as human as possible,
so the automatic writing allowed for that.
Every part of our lives even conversations are automatic.
For some reason when you play a track,
you're supposed to think of a melody
and then think of words that go with that
and all of a sudden, all of that natural being vanishes
and it takes you out of being just normal and natural
and puts you in a very unnatural place.
Did you hear about how we actually came-
like, arrived at the automatic writing thing?
Was it from Rick Rubin?
Yeah.
Yeah, so tell me about that,
because Rick Rubin is one of the great producers of all time.
I agree. Definitely.
Every record that was important to me was one of his records.
A lot of times when we do a demo
we'll do a scat vocal performance, which is
exactly that kind of improvised type of thing like
[Scats]
so we have that on the track and we start writing words to it
and didn't like 'em, we scrapped 'em,
and so we asked Rick, "Do you have any, ya know, advice?"
And if you know Rick, one of the things
that makes him a great producer is that thing about
giving somebody fish versus teaching them how to fish.
He wants to teach you how to fish.
He wants to tell you in this case,
"Well you know what I did with Tom Petty and Johnny Cash"
and so on and so and right away I was like,
"You can stop right there! I am sold!"
It's fascinating to me you said that you were so attracted to
those early Rick Rubin records, LL, Public Enemy, Run DMC,
which were so revolutionary
for the way that they mixed rock n roll and hip hop
and then you become this band that mashes different sounds.
Well yeah, I feel like for us it's natural, ya know,
it's not- it's not just us, it's- I mean I think
Linkin Park fans are Linkin Park fans because they get that.
People seemed to make a really big deal
when we were making our first album, especially,
like "Oh, mixing rock and hip hop,"
and, "This has never been done before,"
and I was kind of like, "Wait a second, like I can name off
"like ten things right now that had mashed this stuff up."
And what became our challenge early in our career
was finding ways to stay organic,
and stay true to just that excitement we had
when we were first making music.
There were secret sit downs with me going,
"You know, you're gonna be the vocalist of the band
"and we want to go in the rock direction."
And I'm sitting there going "What are you talking about?"
"Like this is not even my band!"
There's not too many groups I can think of that have
two vocalists who come from very different aesthetics, right?
And just, do you make it work?
It was almost an accident, you know?
Planets aligned.
It's funny that we even met,
because the band when we first started,
another guy was our singer.
And when he and the rest of us went separate paths.
We were just with me and we always knew that
we didn't want to be a band with just me in the band,
you know, we wanted a singer.
When he first came in and started singing for the band,
we didn't even know each other.
So you start from a musical place, not a personal place.
We start from a musical place, that's exactly right.
It was very strange, um, because I grew up in Arizona.
a few guys were talking in Texas at South By Southwest,
one of them knew me.
He was partners with someone who knew them.
And it was at that time where, you know, they were like,
"We really need to find this singer.
"These guys have a lot of energy and excitement
"about them at that time."
Dude, if you think about it, it's almost like a matchmaker,
like somebody who's like, "Oh, like, well he's looking
"for somebody and they're looking for somebody,
"we should get them to talk like, it was like-"
It was a blind date.
And it was like the guy on our end was like,
"Yeah, I know you guys, like, need to find someone
"and we heard about this guy."
And so we got in touch with Chester.
Musically, I think the earliest stuff was really,
like really challenging and fun.
Going from like something that was a really, like,
rough sketch to something that sounded like the band.
We also ran into issues from the industry
because what we were doing was so-
it was so different from even bands that were like us.
We had conversations where they were just trying
to make Mike a keyboard player or not in the band at all.
And there was, you know, there were secret sit downs with me
going "You know, you're gonna be the vocalist of the band
"and we want to go in the rock direction."
This is where I go and I'm sitting there going
"What are you talking about?" Like this is not even my band!"
Like I just got here, like, nine months ago.
Hybrid Theory
Sells 5 million, first year. Biggest seller of the year.
Then it sells 5 million in the years after that.
How did you get your debut album,
when nobody really knew who you were, to 10 million?
Everything is about timing.
We happened to create something
that talks to a lot of different kinds of people.
You have a song like you know, "Points of Authority"
on the same record with "In the End."
If you play those two songs separately, it-
they wouldn't seem like they fit together on the same album
but we made them work.
But it's also about touring incessantly,
being smart about the business,
you know, mailing stuff out to people,
being your own street team.
At the time when
we were still doing real snail-mail mailing lists.
Email people. Email hadn't caught on yet so…
That's just funny to think about.
But we sent out our samplers.
Our album samplers with 2 songs on it, we sent those out.
Half of them were CD. Half were cassette.
And the fans got them and passed them around
and dubbed them and everybody made copies or whatever.
Like Chester said, there was a lot that has to do with timing.
Like, we can't ignore the fact that
that was a time when pop just, bubble-gum pop was selling huge.
And it was, and people like ourselves were sick of it.
We just- it's like all you'd ever hear
whenever you'd turn on the radio.
It's like 5 guys or 5 girls dancing.
You know, like these little dance moves.
And we were just like "Really?!"
Like I can't- I can't watch another one.
There's still a lot of smart things that you do
beyond just putting out great music.
The Underground Summit, where fans can come and talk to you
and touch you guys and play with the instruments
and that's a fantastic thing.
And I am like, why doesn't every band do that?
When we started the band, we chose the name Linkin Park.
We chose the spelling- there's a rumor
we chose it because we wanted to be next to other bands,
another band in particular, on the CD rack,
which is utterly ridiculous.
We wanted the domain, we wanted the dot com.
And it was really early on for that to be important to anybody
but we knew that if I tell you what the name of my band is
and this is how this word is and how it's spelled,
that you can go there and go to the dot com and find it easily.
You didn't. It takes the step of googling it
out of the picture. So we wanted that.
And then we started the LP Underground,
which is the fan club which you're alluding to
and the Summit thing is strictly for the Underground.
There's a lot of cool things they can do at the Summits.
They do things like, we've had soccer tournaments with the fans
the Habitat for Humanity house builds that we do.
They hang out with each other. They play our instruments.
They see where we hang out.
They have dinner with Chester.
No, I'm just kidding.
Practically, I mean it's-
But this is cool because when we were younger
it was all about rock stars being mysterious.
And being untouchable.
And you know, you're not going to run into Mick Jagger
and have dinner with him or whatever.
He's living on a whole other planet.
It's an effort on our part
to properly communicate our appreciation to our fans
for being there for us.
You're not guaranteed the success of the last record
on your next record, it's just not true.
For us we've taken some huge risks
and the fans have stuck by.
Take me inside the dynamic of this band
because it's six men, that's a lot of opinions,
how do decisions get made?
Back in first half our career, I think it was more, um,
like we were kind of babies going around trying to, ya know
playing hard and trying to just keep the ship afloat
and by the time we finished playing off the first record
we had played almost like 300 shows in a year.
A lot of it was just chaos, trying to keep up.
After the second record,
I think we took a big moment to just like, kind of regroup
and we began basically opening up the creative process
to every guy in the band and being really open
with each other about what that meant.
Is it a democracy?
Um, yeah.
Yeah. More or less, it is.
Is there a leader?
I am a big Lakers fan, so it's kind of like
we're the 5 we're the guys on the court
Is there a Kobe? Because the Lakers are not so equal.
It depends on what we're doing, I think.
When we're writing,
In the studio, this guy is Kobe.
I'm leading in the studio.
But when we do a video, it's not even a team effort.
Like, Joe is the guy.
Joe is Kobe.
When we play live, I'm Kobe.
Who's Ron Artest?
That's a great question.
I haven't taken the analogy that far yet.
No one is Ron Artest, there can only be one.
I sent them to Jay because I wanted to make sure
he was cool with it. And to see where we were at.
And his response back was, "Oh s---!"
He's like, "I love it. Let's do whatever. It's great.
One of your most special records was
How did you get Jay Z's flow and voice into what you do?
MTV calls Jay Z, "We want you to do a mash up song,
"pick someone to work with." "I wanna work with Linkin Park."
They call us. We were supposed to do one song.
Wait a second. Jay Z, out of everyone in the world,
says, "I want Linkin Park"?
Yeah.
How does that feel?
It's cool because we like Jay Z and that's pretty awesome.
And because of Mike and his creativity and his understanding,
I think, of hip hop so much of it really grew
from one song into nine songs mashed up,
nine or ten songs mashed up into six
and that got all the labels arguing over who could do what.
I mean honestly
would not have ended up being what it had become
if it wasn't for Mike.
There were two moments in that process that were really funny-
at least in my head.
The first one was when they gave us the call. Super flattered.
I was a big fan of what Jay does,
and I had been listening to him since his first record
so I was familiar with all his stuff.
And I thought in my head like,
"They don't know what they're getting into with me.
"Because they don't know that this is why
I grew up doing what they are asking me to do.
All I had to do was go back in the library,
pull out the folder, and go, "Okay, this is how I am gonna
"do this and yeah, you know this song of ours is about
this BPM. It sounds good with this one and this one."
and I put one over it, put the other one over it-
"Oh this one's better and I made the song.
"I'll send em to Jay because I wanted to make sure
he was cool with it. And to see where we were at.
And his response back was, "Oh s---!"
"I love it! Let's do whatever! Like it's great."
The second thing that occurred to me was
as we were finishing it and we were about to do the show
onstage for the first time I had a goal in my head.
I said to somebody-
"I want to make this thing so good
"that MTV will never be able to make another one."
[All laugh]
They will be hard pressed, to be able
to put any other two artists together
and actually have it work in comparison to this.
When you first went to Japan it was huge for you personally.
What happened to you?
I grew up as- I am half-Japanese
and we had a lot of family events where we would-
it would be very traditional, the food especially.
And when I first went to Japan and I got off the plane
I actually smelled it- it was the weirdest thing.
You can feel it everywhere.
It's not just your brain telling you, but you actually recognize
the feeling of wherever it is that you're from, you know?
It was really eerie and kind of cool; it was a great feeling.
What you give to us musically is so broad,
I just want to hear you list off
some of your personal musical gods
because I am sure it's just a really eclectic wide list.
I like music that had bands
that had singers that sounded so different from everybody else.
Like Jane's Addiction, Ministry, Led Zeppelin.
I loved hip hop. I actually saw hip hop as being
almost exactly the same as punk rock music.
Because it was so- it was people telling you stuff
you didn't want to hear and it was in your face
and I don't like authority.
Untraditional vocals.
And I am a very antisocial person.
You tell me I am supposed to do something,
I'll put my middle finger up and I'll go do the opposite
just because I know that's what you don't want me to do.
Who do you love?
I love Rick's older records.
Rick Rubin.
I've always been a big Hendrix fan.
I love The Who.
When I really came into rock music stuff
it was around the time of Alice In Chains, stuff like that.
Early Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead from the beginning, you know.
I could go on and on and on.
I've got days and days of music in my iTunes
and electronic music right now I think it's really innovative.
So you don't like being told what to do.
Right.
And you run away from authority.
Right.
So if I told you that we have to end now, what would you say?
I'd be ok with it, I'd be ok with it.
Thanks guys, I appreciate that
If you really want to end an interview,
you'd say we're going to be here for the next 3 hours,
and I'd instantly be like, "We need to get outa here."