The band was found in 1996 by three high school buddies, Mike Shinoda, Rob Bourdon and Brad Delson. Later on, after graduating from high school, these three young men began taking more interesting to the band. They recruited Joseph Hahn, Dave Farrel and Mark Makefield to the band, called Xero. The new band was producing and recording songs in Shinoda's makeshift bedroom studio, including songs like Fuse, Rhinestone, Stick N' Move and Reading My Eyes. Tension and frustration grew among the members, leading them to fail to land a record deal, the reason for the vocalist (Wakefield) to leave the band in search for success in other projects. Farrel (Phoenix) left too, to tour with Tasty Snax and other bands. Only the guitarist (Brad), the DJ (Joseph), the emcee/vocalist (Michael), and the drummer (Rob) stayed at Xero.
After years of searching for Makefield's replacement, the band recruited Chester Beninngton. Born in Arizona, he was a vocalist who was recommended by Jeff Blue, the vice president of Zomba Music in March 1999. Chester amazed the other band's member, because of the dynamics of his singing style, delivering the lyrics at a gentle yet aggressive pace. The band decided to change its name to Hybrid Theory.
Rob, drummer
Mike, emcee/vocalist
Joe, DJ
Chester, vocalist
Brad, guitarist
After three unsuccessful attempts to sign a deal with Warner Bros. Records, Jeff Blue helped to sign a deal with the company. That's when they agreed to change the name again, from Hybrid Theory to Linkin Park, to avoid legal hassles with another band with the same name. Chester told the idea to the other band members, because he used to drive by a park in Santa Monica with homeless people, named Lincoln Park. They liked the idea, but changed the spelling in order to buy the domain; lincolnpark.com was already taken, and also too expensive to buy.
Then Phoenix came back to the band as a permanent band member. He wasn't the bassist in Hybrid Theory, Kyle Christner was. Once the tour with Snax was over, he came back to Linkin Park. Kyle is now member of the band NoseDive.
Linking Park released their first album Hybrid Theory in October 24th 2000. It represented half a decade of their work, and it was mainly edited by Don Gilmore. It was a clearly success, with more than 4.8 million copies during the first year. Hits like In The End, One Step Closer and Crawling became a new sensation of music. Some of the album's singles were featured in movies like Dracula 2000, Valentine and Little Nicky.
They received several nominations: the album won a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance for the song Crawling. Linkin Park was nominated for two other Grammy Awards; Best New Artist and Best Rock Album. The video clip of the song In The End drew some attention. MTV awarded the band with the Best Rock Video and Best Direction for this song. Hybrid Theory is also in the RIAA's Top 100 albums.
Within a year, Linkin Park performed in more than 320 concerts. Their performances were recorded in their first DVD, “Frat Party at the Pancake Festival” out in November 2001. And with Phoenix's return, the band begun working on a remix album of Hybrid Theory, called Reanimation. It debuted on July 30th 2002. Reanimation claimed the second place in Billboard 200, and sold nearly 270,000 copies in their debut week.
Dave "Phoenix" Farrell, bassist
After their success with Hybrid Theory and Reanimation, the band started working in new material. They announced a new album in December 2002. They called the album Meteora, inspired the rocky region of Meteora in Greece. It took the band one and a half years to compose their second album and written in four places: in the band's tour bus, at Shinoda's house, at NRG Studios, CA, and at Soundtrack Studios, NY. The process was frustrating for most of the band crew, problems causing delay, for instance Chester getting sick for 2 weeks or so. Eventually the album was released on March 25th 2003, with 800,000 sold copies in the first week.It was ranked as the best selling album by the Billboard charts of the time. By October, Meteora sold over 3 million copies.
Right after their success with Meteora, Linkin Park began making tours. The band released an album and DVD called Live in Texas, which includes some of the band's songs, as the title says, during their tour in Texas.
The band took a couple of years to release the next album. Within this period of time, the band went on tours, and did some side projects. For instance Michael Shinoda formed another “band” (without leaving Linkin Park) named Fort Minor. The hip hop side-project members were Shinoda, Ryan Patrick (Ryu) and Takbir Bashir (Tak). Fort Minor wasn't entirely a band, it was just what Mike called himself when he sang with the other two guys. Ryu and Tak were in another official band, called Styles of Beyond. This project is not out of business yet, but Mike recently said that he “doesn't have any plans right now”. He also said that generally all rapping that he had done recently was all within Linkin Park.
Fort Minor-left to right: Ryu, Mike and Tak
Anyways the band came together once again in 2006 to begin composing a new piece of work. The band believes that this new album is nothing they worked on before. It took them fourteen months to finish, while the other usually took just six. They commented that lyrics used to take about a month to write, well... this time it took around six, and that they usually write an average of 40 song ideas and that this one they were well over 100. It debuted on May 15th, 2007 with the name Minutes to Midnight, as a reference to the Doomsday Clock. It has 12 songs, and about 43 minutes long.i
Being a great success, as usual, the album reached 625,000 sold copies in its first week. The single “What I've Done” was featured in the movie Transformers. Later that year the band won the “Favorite Alternative Artist” in a ceremony in the American Music Awards.
In 2009, the band announced another album will be ready for sale in 2010. Michael warned that this new work will be 'genre-bursting'. More experimental. Later the same year, news were that the album was going to be entitled A Thousand Suns. Chester announced that Ricky Rubin was producing it.
While they were still making the album, they compose another single for the movie of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Linkin Park worked with Hans Zimmer to create the video clip of the song, showing some clips of the movie. They also composed another single for a good cause, the Haiti earthquake, entitled “Not Alone”. The campaign was called Download to Donate for Haiti.
Haiti-Download to Donate
Eventually the album was released on September 14, 2010. It had 4 singles, The Catalyst, Waiting for the End, Burning in the Skies and Iridescent. A DVD was made, kind of a “making of”, called Meet of A Thousand Suns. This new album reached No.8 in Billboard Social 50.
On January of the next year, an updated of the past campaign of Haiti launched, named Download to Donate for Haiti V.2.0. The new version features new songs to download, including Keaton Hashimoto's remix of The Catalyst from the “Linkin Park featuring YOU” contest. Then another official single was released, Burning in the Skies. On April 2011, Iridescent was released as the fourth and last single. Michael announced that there will be a shorter version of this last single in the soundtrack of the latest Transformers movie: Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
News on June 2011 were about the next studio album, Living Things. The reason of giving this name is because, as Mike explained, the brand new album is more about people, far more personal than previous Linkin Park albums. Bennington told the magazine Rolling Stone (not to be mistaken with the 80's band) that Linkin Park plans to make a new album every eighteen months. So we could expect next album to be released at the end of 2014 or beginning of 2015. On March 28th Chester announced that the band was filming the music video for Burn it Down, one of the album's single(the other one is Lost in the Echo).
On June 26th of 2012, Living Things was officially released. Today, 12 days after release date, Linkin Park's Living Things is in first place of the Billboard 200! Selling 223,000 copies, beating Maroon 5's Overexposed by 1,000! Critics are clear, “[...]these 12 songs don't have enough cumulative impact.” said About.com and giving 2,5 out of 5 stars.
Like every album before, some of the songs are featured in movies. This time is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter's turn, with Powerless, the album's last song, in the closing credits.