Good day everyone! Hope you had a great weekend. Mine was in a cold, damp, moldy basement. Thank GOD for Simple Green!
Cleaning out the old cardboard boxes and I discovered tons of shows from 1996, the first year hardDrive started on the radio! Those were the days. We had the luxury of state of the art gear over at Sony Studios on West 54th Street (where they once recorded all of the MTV Unplugged shows, Sony artists like Michael Jackson, Barbara Streisand, Tony Bennett, and more recorded albums there, and it’s now a freakin’ condo building) where we would create comedy show opens for hardDrive that were second to none! Much love to my first engineer, Chris Gibbons, who has gone on to great things (he is the sound engineer for every live performance you hear on satellite radio, especially all the great performances on the Howard Stern show.) Anyhow, it was fun listening down memory lane! You’ll be hearing some of these nuggets in July when we celebrate hardDrive‘s 20 years on the radio!
In the news today:
The Pulse of Radio reports Linkin Park has made its 2000 debut album, Hybrid Theory, available as a free download via Google Play. The offer is available to U.S. customers only and ends on Mar 18th. The band said in a statement, “Our first album, Hybrid Theory, was made with all the love, passion, and naïveté that an artist can give to their first recordings. We are humbled and grateful that it has been embraced so widely, and we still find it hard to believe it became the biggest-selling rock album of the century. As a thank you to our fans, we’ve partnered with Google Play to give you Hybrid Theory for free.”
Hybrid Theory — the band’s original name before it was changed for legal reasons — was issued in October 2000 and was a breakout success for the group, which had formed in 1996 and had played the Los Angeles club scene for several years. (Note: the ORIGINAL Hybrid Theory frontman was not Chester Bennington. It was a fellow who is now at the management company that works with System Of A Down, Deftones and Alice In Chains.) Chester was performing with another band in the Phoenix area at the time. The roots of Linkin Park went back to the high school & college friendship of vocalist and hip-hop fan Mike Shinoda and guitarist and heavy rock devotee Brad Delson. The pair formed a band named Xero with drummer Rob Bourdon, turntablist Joe Hahn, bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell and vocalist Mark Wakefield. But the group threatened to crumble when it parted ways with Wakefield and Farrell got a temporary gig with a touring act. Jeff Blue, vice president of A&R at Zomba Music, was interested in the band and helped introduce them to a Phoenix-based vocalist named Chester Bennington. Bennington recorded vocal tracks for two demos and became co-lead singer after a successful audition just days later. Xero initially renamed themselves Hybrid Theory, but legal issues with another act using the name Hybrid led them to adopt Linkin Park as their new name, keeping Hybrid Theory for the title of their debut disc.
Hybrid Theory yielded four massive hit singles — “One Step Closer”, “Crawling”, “Papercut” and “In The End” — while going on to become the highest selling debut of the 2000s, moving more than 10 million copies in the U.S. alone.
The band toured relentlessly for two years behind the disc. Singer Chester Bennington told us Linkin Park was always willing to work hard: “Any success story that you’ve ever heard about is the willingness to just put everything you have into it. And that’s something that, I think, this band has been blessed with. There’s six people in this band and to find that many guys that can get along creatively and write songs together and tour together and play and accomplish the things we’ve done without any problems, you know, is something pretty special.”
Linkin Park is currently writing its seventh studio album, which is likely to arrive later this year and will follow up 2014’s The Hunting Party. That disc found the band returning to its rock roots after experimenting with electronic sounds on its two previous efforts.
I don’t know if you are following the race to the 2016 Presidential Elections, but if you ask me, they’ve been NOTHING CLOSE to being Presidential! And of course, people are reacting. One of those people is Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor, who has launched a new tirade against Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, telling Rolling Stone he’s had enough of the GOP candidate riling up “base, ugly bigotry and racism.” Taylor explained, “The thing that bothered me was that people were taking Trump seriously. I’m not going to let that (racism) stand . . . That cannot be what our legacy is. Too many people died during the Civil War, during the Civil Rights Movement. We should not be asking, ‘Jesus Christ, what decade is this? How is this OK?’“
Taylor added that he’s found the treatment of reporters at Trump rallies disturbing, saying, “Did you see the video of a Secret Service agent choke-slamming the reporter? What country is this exactly? And the fact that (Trump) absolutely bulldozes his way through questions instead of answering them, it brings such a horrific reaction to people. It’s shocking that nothing is sticking to him.” Taylor said he’s “damn sure not going to shut up about (Trump),” adding, “This is not what people fought and died and sacrificed everything for, and I’ll be damned if I let my country go down that road again.”
The singer’s preferred candidate is Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, with Taylor remarking, “Everything about Hillary (Clinton) seems prepackaged and planned.” Disturbed‘s David Draiman and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have also come out in support of Bernie Sanders, while Kid Rock and Five Finger Death Punch‘s Zoltan Bathory have voiced their support for Trump.
Taylor has been outspoken about politics, pop culture and other subjects in his three books as well as the speaking tours he’s done to promote them. Taylor and Slipknot will head out on a massive North American tour with Marilyn Manson and Of Mice And Men this summer, starting on Jun 9th in Salt Lake City.
In other news:
The PRP says Chicago-based trio Chevelle have begun recording their eighth album. Frontman Pete Loeffler posted a photo online of producer Joe Barresi in the studio. The new disc will follow the group’s seventh studio album, La Gargola, which debuted at Number Three on the Billboard album chart in April 2014. I understand the album will be released on Epic Records. Chevelle will perform on several radio festivals in April and May and July 15th at Chicago Open Air Festival.
Asking Alexandria has released a new song and video titled “Let It Sleep,” which is taken from the band’s upcoming studio album, The Black. The disc is due out on March 25 and marks the debut of new frontman Denis Stoff. (Alternative Press)
Ex-Flyleaf vocalist Lacey Sturm has released a new video for her latest solo single, “Impossible.” The clip, which was filmed on Feb 4th at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in West Hollywood, CA, is a mixture of commentary and live performance. “Impossible” is taken from Sturm’s debut solo album, Life Screams, which came out on Feb 12th.
See Road Rage for new tour dates for Chris Cornell‘s “Higher Truth” Tour!