Artykuł - Nola.com ( Zespół )

The 1992 Monsters of Rock tour featuring Metallica and Guns 'n Roses ranks among the watershed cultural moments of Linkin Park bassist David "Phoenix" Farrell's adolescence. Come July, Linkin Park will join Metallica for the "Summer Sanitarium" stadium tour, a fact with which an awestruck Farrell is still coming to grips.

"For me and (Linkin Park guitarist) Brad (Delson) particularly, it's huge," Farrell said during a recent phone interview. "It doesn't make sense to be able to be playing with Metallica. But somehow it happened."

It happened because Linkin Park sold 7.7 million copies of its debut, "Hybrid Theory," the best-selling CD of 2001. Metallica shrewdly decided to shore up the roster of its upcoming "Sanitarium" tour with the most successful of the latter-day rap-rock hybrids, one whose fans appreciate both Metallica's riffs and Snoop Dogg's spliffs.

On March 25, Warner Bros. released Linkin Park's second album of original material, "Meteora." It entered Billboard's album chart at No. 1, moving 810,000 copies in its first week, nearly twice as many as the week's runner-up from Celine Dion. The only CD with a higher one-week sales total this year is rapper 50 Cent's "Get Rich or Die Trying."

While crafting "Meteora," the musicians were less concerned with sales than with producing material they wouldn't regret.

"As weird as it may sound, that actually creates more pressure," Farrell said. "Because if you work on something for hundreds and hundreds of hours over an 18 month process at the end of which you're not happy with how it turned out, it doesn't end there. You have to tour with it for two years, you're going to hear these songs constantly, and they're going to be affiliated with you. So there's a lot of pressure to create something that you're happy with."

In a cover story in the current Spin magazine and elsewhere, the six members of Linkin Park come across as diligent technocrats dedicated to their craft and careers, serious-minded young men who do not equate success with excess. While on the road with the Family Values and OzzFest tours in 2001 and '02, Farrell and his bandmates generally bypassed such time-honored tour bus pastimes as porn-watching and sleeping off the previous night's hangover. Instead, they holed in their portable studio, hatching ideas for "Meteora."

From its inception in Los Angeles several years ago, Linkin Park has always been more studio band than live act. Rather than gig, the musicians spent longs hours with recorders and samplers, revising and building upon previous work.

"That's how we've gravitated toward doing things," Farrell said. "We started writing songs using a four-track, not necessarily sitting down and jamming together. The roots of it were sitting down with recording equipment and recording as we were writing, constantly revisiting it and constantly critiquing it and trying to push ourselves to come up with new ideas."

That meticulous process continues. The band and co-producer Don Gilmore tinkered with the densely layered arrangements on "Meteora" for 18 months. Industrial strength guitars, relentless rhythm tracks and turntable scratching serve as catharsis for lyrics dealing with alienation, anger and frustration.

Notes in the "Meteora" CD booklet detail the painstaking process behind each track; 30 different choruses, for example, were tried out on the first single, "Somewhere I Belong." The finished "Meteora" clocks in at a compact 38 minutes, slightly more than half of the time available on a standard CD.

"Believe me, we could give you a 74 minute CD, but you wouldn't want to hear the other half of it," Farrell said. "We had 80 different song ideas coming into this record, from completed songs to rudimentary sketches. Over that 18-month period, with six guys in the band that write, you have a lot of stuff that you don't end up using, a lot of filler. We don't want to have CDs where people buy them and skip through three songs."

As an additional incentive to buy, rather than just download, "Meteora," its packaging boasts an arty 40-page booklet and an enhanced CD.

"We realize you can get the music on the Internet, and that's great," Farrell said. "With the packaging, we wanted to find new ways to create value, so if you buy the record, you get some other things."

On last year's "Reanimation," hip-hop artists remixed the tracks from "Hybrid Theory."

That Linkin Park integrates elements of rap and metal more successfully than other bands in the nu metal genre is testament to its members' pedigrees.

"Everyone in the band has appreciated rap at some stage in their life, but for Mike (Shinoda, the band's emcee) and Joe (Hahn, the band's turntablist), that's what they're all about," Farrell said. "If you play bass and you have garage bands growing up, then that's what the stuff you write is going to sound like. But when Mike was 14 years old and got a four-track recorder, a keyboard and a sampler for Christmas, he was making beats and writing joke rap songs. Same thing with Joe."

Linkin Park's success is not dependent on a cult of personality. Farrell and company may be the most anonymous multiplatinum band since Matchbox Twenty.

"We get blasted about that sometimes, but for us, the fun thing about music is the music," Farrell said. "It's great to be able to do something you love and make a living at it. All that other crap can sit on the sidelines, as far as I'm concerned. We don't want to be personalities, we don't want to have our faces everywhere. That's not what it's about. We don't want to sell you Coke."

Just many millions of CDs.

Linkin Park's "Projekt Revolution" tour stops at the UNO Lakefront Arena on Sunday with special guests Xzibit, Mudvayne and Blindside.

Autor : Keith Spera