Astat

We kind of skimmed over this when it first happened because we didn't want it to get lost in the flood of From Zero-related news, but back in September, while in town for the first show of the From Zero World Tour in Los Angeles, LPLive staff members Mark (Hahninator), Dylan (RogueSoul), and Anthony (Astat) had the chance to spend an afternoon hanging out and filming some content with Jeff Blue! There's more of this stuff in the works, so be sure to follow Jeff on his socials so you don't miss out on anything! You can find him at JeffBlueMusic on Instagram, X/Twitter, and YouTube, as well as at jeffbluemedia.com. You're probably already aware of who Jeff is if you're part of the LPLive community, but here's a short summary: In 1997, while working at Zomba Music Publishing, Jeff was also giving lectures on the music business at UCLA. In attendance at one of these lectures was a young Brad Delson, who met with Jeff a short time later and convinced him to hire him as an intern. Jeff subsequently attended the very first Xero show at the Whisky a Go-Go in Hollywood, and signed them to a publishing deal. Over the next three years, the band played showcases for every record label imaginable (many of them on multiple occasions), nearly split up following a particularly disasterous performance in December of 1998, saw Dave Farrell leave the band in early 1999 and spend the next year and a half recording and performing with numerous bassists (Kyle Christner, Ian Hornbeck, and Scott Koziol most notably), replaced vocalist Mark Wakefield with Chester Bennington, changed their name to Hybrid Theory, finally got signed to Warner Brothers after Jeff was hired to their A&R department, changed their name AGAIN to Plear...for about a week, before deciding Linkin Park was a better option, and finally, in October of 2000, released the album that would change all of their lives: Hybrid Theory. Jeff served as an executive producer on Hybrid Theory, and continued his A&R role with the band through the end of the Hybrid Theory touring cycle in 2002. Given that Jeff was basically the only person other than the band themselves who was involved with their entire pre-Hybrid Theory journey, he amassed a huge collection of material from the band during his time working with them, and having visited with him, we can tell you that the guy has held on to ALL of it, both for archival purposes and out of a genuine love for what the band was doing. Every demo tape or CD, set of lyrics, photo shoot, contract, piece of artwork, etc. that the band produced between 1997 and early 2002 is still in his possession, and a lot of it is stuff that the fans have never seen. In fact, Jeff may be the ONLY person who still has a copy of some of this stuff! Jeff utilized this archival material to write his book, One Step Closer - From Xero to #1: Becoming Linkin Park, which was published in 2020 and documents his time working with the band. It goes without saying that as archivists ourselves, we share a massive mutual interest with Jeff when it comes to this stuff, and it was an amazing experience to go through a bunch of it with him. After the 20th anniversary edition of Hybrid Theory was released in 2020 with previously-unheard tracks like "Dialate," "Could Have Been," "Pictureboard," the Xero version of "Esaul," and the Chester version of "Stick N Move," some of us thought that we may be getting pretty close to having all of the band's pre-Hybrid Theory material, but the information in Jeff's book and our visit with him confirmed that there's still a LOT of stuff in the vaults. Obviously, we can't release any music without the band's permission, and neither can Jeff for that matter, but here's hoping that the rest of the world will get to hear songs like "Ashes," "Deftest," "Turn to Grey," and the various unreleased demo versions of other songs someday! As far as the content we made together, Jeff has been uploading bits of it on social media recently. His first video features him meeting us for the first time, a brief summary of all the stuff he has, the story of how he met Brad and decided to sign the band, and some cool tidbits such as an early copy of the Xero demo tape (with "Dialate" as the second track instead of "Rhinestone," as well as artwork that differs from either the "baby" version we all know and love, or the more rare "shopping cart" version), Jeff's letters to Danny Hayes (the band's lawyer for many years) and Richard Blackstone (Jeff's boss at Zomba) regarding signing the band, and some details on other artists Jeff worked with during the same time period (check out that copy of Korn's "Neidermayer's Mind" demo tape!). Jeff's second video focuses on his massive binders full of lyrics and song notes. In addition to having copies of the lyrics themselves, Jeff would often have Mike write summaries of what his mindset was when he was writing them. Jeff wanted to be able to explain what kind of place the band's writing was coming from when pitching them to record labels. You can see some glimpses of demo lyrics (both typed and handwritten) in here, and just from the size of the binder and the equally-large one under it, it's clear that even in their primitive state, these were songs that had a lot to say to the world. Video #3 touches on the differences between his roles as a music publisher with Zomba, and an A&R executive with Warner. These typically aren't roles that are occupied by the same person, Jeff just happened to make signing the band part of his employment contract when he was hired by Warner (since the band kept getting rejected by record labels otherwise), so he naturally became their A&R guy as well. Again, we have more content planned from our visit with Jeff, so keep checking back! A HUGE thank you to Jeff for inviting us into his home to check this stuff out, we're hoping we get to visit with him again in the future!

A lot more pictures, mainly. IIRC there's some additional commentary on the recording process compared to what you get in the smaller CD/DVD edition too.

Stereo doubling trick they've been using on the single-guitar songs for as long as I can remember. You put a very short delay on the guitar, pan the dry signal to one side and the delayed signal to the other side with the phase flipped. With the Axe FX rigs they might be doing it with different cab sims on each side too. You can hear it on plenty of old stuff though, like the chorus/outro of this recording of APFMH from 2014:

Been watching Drumeo for a long time, and it's always a treat to see Brandon behind the kit for a change. Excellent drummer that doesn't show it off very often. Having the new LP record as the focus of an entire video is just *chef's kiss* Would love to see Colin featured on the channel at some point too!

Just edited my review into the first post, sorry mine was a tad late!

I can't even imagine how much work goes into shooting something this elaborate in one night. My band did a music video last year that was a combination of green screen and miniature models, and that took us two 12-hour days to film. Also, get you someone who looks at you the way Joe Hahn looks at his stick.

Alex has been playing WID (the entire song) on the neck pickup, for reasons I really don't understand.

Holy shit guys. I can't even put tonight into words. I'm also supposed to be up in like 5 hours lmao, send thoughts and prayers

There's a lot to consider about why Brad did this. He dealt with a lot of injuries, especially in the last few years prior to 2017. He hurt his back on the THP tour, and he spent a significant portion of the THP and OML tours wearing KT Tape on his right arm on stage because of chronic wrist problems. He also had the ever-present issue of ear sensitivity, which is why he always wore headphones, and it resulted in concerts being cancelled a few times when he developed ear infections. He's also always been heavily invested in the business side of the band. Remember, Brad's dad was the head of their original merch team (he founded Bandmerch), and Brad by extension had a lot to do with that, and many other business projects since. He's one of Mike's most valued partners when it comes to songwriting/arrangments/production, and apparently he also had a lot of input on the live show production for this run. He wears a LOT of hats, possibly even more than Mike does. I think when you couple 7 years of aging with a previous history of issues that affected his ability to play/tour, plus the numerous other things he does behind the scenes, it's not surprising that the grind of touring might not be the best thing for him. Also, he already set the precedent for this a little bit by missing a few shows here and there starting in 2014 and having Ben fill in for him.

Heyyyyyyy friend how you doing today LOL Still waiting on all that sweet label plant money though. Daddy Astat has concert tickets to buy.

Let me get this straight: Mike "hates us" over stuff we allegedly said/did when Chester was still alive, yet we were consulted for archive material for both HT20 and Meteora20 and thanked in their respective album liner notes? The math ain't mathing, lmao. Please show me the hurtful stuff we supposedly said about OML. I'll wait. Not all of us liked it, but I will happily dig up numerous examples of myself and other staff members coming to Chester/the band's defense in response to stuff other people said that was actually hurtful. Let me guess, your entire belief that Chester got "sick of us" is based on this? Congratulations on not understanding how Twitter works just like every other person who's brought this up lately. That was Chester replying to someone else under one of our Tweets, whose account was deleted sometime between then and when Twitter became X. That's how any reply to a pre-X deleted account looks these days, which you would have figured out in about five seconds by scrolling through Chester's Replies tab and seeing the numerous other Tweets that appear to be replying to nobody. Not to mention any other time he replied to us has the "replying to LPLive" tag on it when that Tweet doesn't. Yeah, Chester TOTALLY decided he hated us in May of 2017, then continued replying to, retweeting, and liking our posts throughout June and July. 🙄 The ambassadors program doesn't exist anymore, lmfao. Grey Daze used the ambassadors email list to try to rope people into doing promotion for them, but outside of that, the program has been completely nonexistent for years. Hard to feel guilt when there's nothing to feel guilty about. 🤷‍♂️ ...We didn't "leak" MIUAG. We released the live video for it. Because Mike literally CHOSE US TO BE THE ONES WHO RELEASED IT LMFAO. Yeah, sure sounds like a guy who's "unhappy" with us, huh? 😂 There isn't a day that goes by that people don't talk about Rob's absence. WTF are you even talking about? If by "spewing hate" on Mike during his COVID streams, you mean "provided ongoing coverage of them and promoted all three Dropped Frames releases that came from them," you'd be correct. Sorry some of us don't like NFTs. Some My Chemical Romance fans don't like comic books. Some Offspring fans don't give a shit about microbiology. Some 30 Seconds to Mars fans don't care about Jared's movies. To any reasonable person (a.k.a. not you), that's fine. You know nothing of our relationship with Mike and the LP team. That's generally how professionalism goes in the music business, everything's on a need-to-know basis. There's a lot of stuff we don't know because we don't need to know, and there's even more stuff that you don't know because you don't need to know (which is clearly for the best, as you've demonstrated about half a dozen times here that you can't behave rationally with the information you already DO have). With all due respect, please go embarrass yourself somewhere else.

Yeah, how dare musicians get paid for gigs? 🤡

It's not a different vocal take as far as I can tell, but there's absolutely a different treatment on Chester's vocal when it comes to pitch correction on the Papercuts version. He kind of slides up into the word "light" on the original album version, on the Papercuts version the pitch jumps to the "final" note he lands on a lot more quickly. We've got some kind of Shadow of the Day alternate mix crap going on with WFTE on this version, ladies and gentlemen. Bravo, Warner, bravo.

5 bucks says he got a call from the band's lawyers lol

Didn't have "LPLive community devolves to the point of complaining about getting official instrumentals/acapellas" on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are I guess.