2003 - Live in Texas

Information

Cities: Houston, Texas and Irving, Texas

Venues: Reliant Stadium (Houston) and Texas Stadium (Irving)

Dates: August 2nd and 3rd, 2003

Show

In August 2003, Linkin Park was nearing the end of a five week tour for Summer Sanitarium that featured Metallica, Limp Bizkit, Deftones and Mudvayne and took them to stadiums across the United States and Canada. This tour took the band to the largest venues they had ever played and was a fitting next step for the Meteora touring cycle after they had kicked it off with an intimate LP Underground Tour in small venues in February and March, followed by Projekt Revolution in arenas in April, and then the stadium tour that was Summer Sanitarium.

Linkin Park decided to film the two shows in Texas and mix them together for a DVD. Coming after a show in Denver, the shows in Houston and Irving would make it three shows in three days for the band during a very hot point during the summer.

In 2001, it was rumored that the London show at Docklands Arena would be released, but the project never came together. Live in Texas, as it was properly named, would become the band's first live CD/DVD release. Due to the two shows being mixed together, you can notice a few funny things during the show such as Brad having two different guitars during the same song, Mike wearing different shirts during the same song, etc. If you look hard enough, you can see the different colored seats in the venue too as well as Chester going from having a completely sweat-soaked shirt to a dry one minutes later. But once you get past these funny moments, you'll see that at the core, Linkin Park delivers an excellent, energy-packed performance for the release.

Setlist

At this show, Linkin Park performed a seventeen song setlist, which is the exact length of the set they were using to headline shows with for the Meteora World Tour in 2003 as well (Projekt Revolution had eighteen, but the tours after Summer Sanitarium had seventeen). It featured a mix of songs from Hybrid Theory and Meteora since all Hybrid Theory EP songs had been dropped at this point. However, it did feature a song off of Reanimation - P5hng Me A*wy. This is the only live release the song appears on due to it being in setlists for just under a year (April 2003 - March 2004) despite becoming one of the most respected live songs by the hardcore fanbase.

Other highlights from the show include the extended A Place For My Head, the Reanimated bridge of One Step Closer, and Lars from Metallica coming out dressed as a bunny with Hulk hands on From The Inside.

See the show pages here (Houston) and here (Irving) for the full setlists and show notes. In this release, the band released the full show on the DVD in the correct running order (unlike Road To Revolution, A Thousand Suns+, and Living Things+).

Live in Texas CD/DVD Setlist: (same as full show setlist)

01. Don't Stay ("Devil Worship Intro" omitted) (DVD only; not on CD)

02. Somewhere I Belong

03. Lying From You

04. Papercut

05. Points Of Authority

06. Runaway

07. Faint

08. From The Inside

09. Figure.09 (DVD only; not on CD)

10. With You (DVD only; not on CD)

11. By Myself (DVD only; not on CD)

12. P5hng Me A*wy

13. Numb

14. Crawling

15. In The End

16. A Place For My Head (DVD only; not on CD)

17. One Step Closer

Release

On November 18, 2003, Linkin Park released the CD/DVD entitled Live in Texas. LP Underground 3.0 was released the day prior, on November 17, so the band decided to release the five songs not on the CD version of Live in Texas as the LPU CD for that year (Don't Stay, Figure.09, With You, By Myself, and A Place For My Head). Slightly different editing was used on these songs, meaning that it's possible a few portions of those tracks are from a different performance than the one on the DVD.

There is one small thing that was cut from the release - the show intro before Don't Stay. Called the "Devil Worship Intro" by the band on the physical setlists, it sampled Slayer and featured a dark intro to the show and blended straight into the very last second of Foreword before Don't Stay. This is why when you watch the DVD, the show abruptly begins.

Due to Lying From You receiving so many requests for radio, the band was essentially forced to release the song as a single. Since they were busy preparing the Breaking The Habit music video, they had no opportunity to shoot a video for Lying From You. Instead, the performance from Live in Texas was used as the official music video for the song and was released on March 16, 2004.

Also an interesting note is that Brandon Belsky from Julien-K is credited as an engineer on the release. This would put him at twenty one years old at the time of the release. Josh Abraham, who produced Reanimation, returned to produce the release of Live in Texas. For years, it was discussed amongst the fanbase that due to the superior audio quality in the release that it was possible Linkin Park re-recorded some parts of the audio in studio. This was confirmed by Sean Paden, Brad's guitar tech, to be false in 2012.

Lastly, a movie was originally going to be released with Live in Texas under the name of Frat Party 2 (a sequel to Frat Party at the Pancake Festival). The footage for Frat Party 2 was later divided up into episodes to use for LPTV in 2007, when full-length episodes from the band's touring across the world were released.