It was the mid-1990s and Chester Bennington was in a math class at Arizona State University. He wasn’t a college student — quite the opposite in fact. By that time he had dropped out of high school to focus on his band Gray Daze, and with no job to keep him busy, he accompanied his roommate and bandmate, drummer Sean Dowdell, to classes day in and day out. Hell, he would even take the exams for fun.
“My math class was so big, there were 400 to 500 people in it,” Sean recalls. “They handed out tests to everyone in the line and it wasn’t like he could say, ‘I’m not enrolled in this course,’ so he took the test and bombed badly.”
This is just one of many heartwarming stories of a man who was a “playful ball of energy” and never took life too seriously…except when it came to making the music he loved. Sure, Chester thought it was funny screwing up his bandmate’s college classes, but the truth was, following Sean to college made it easier to get taken to band practice at night. “He always wanted to make great music,” says Sean. “If we were at a party and there was a guitar in the room, he would sort of find it and start playing. He was always a showman and always wanted to perform.”
It would be years before Chester got the call that would change his life: In 1999, he was asked to audition for an LA-based band called Xero, which would eventually become Linkin Park. But his journey to becoming one of the world’s most recognized singers began in the early ’90s when a 15-year-old Chester enrolled at Greenway High in Phoenix. He’d been bullied mercilessly at his old school, but life was better in Greenway. Chester joined an audience who shared his love of Jane’s Addiction and Stone Temple Pilots, and discovered the dark allure of bands like The Cure and Depeche Mode. Attracted to the limelight, he excelled on the track team, joined the drama club, and began making a name for himself as a kid with a big voice.
Meanwhile, Sean was looking for a singer for his band SD And His Friends. Back then, grunge was still a global juggernaut, everyone had long hair and wore flannel shirts, and Sean, having caught wind of this high school kid who apparently “sounded just like Eddie Vedder,” was hoping the scene’s next big hope was about to leave would through his door. “He didn’t look like a lead singer or a rock star to me,” he says today of the moment Chester showed up for the audition. “He was a young, nerdy kid. He had glasses, he had really short hair. Then he went up and sang… and I shut my mouth. We were all down.”
With Chester in the ranks, the band had morphed into Gray Daze by 1994 and recorded their debut album. Wake me up. another album, no sun todayfollowed in 1997, and it’s these lost records that Chester’s surviving bandmates have revisited, revamped and reissued with 2020’s for the past two years changes and this year the phoenix. Retaining Chester’s original vocals while giving the music a modern makeover, the haunting recordings allow us to hear what Sean heard all those years ago – the sound of a young man still testing the limits of his voice despite his power and even then his talent was unmistakable.
“Most people recognized Chester as a star,” says Scott Harrington, the LA entertainment attorney who represented both Gray Daze and Xero and witnessed Gray Daze’s early gigs in Phoenix. “He’s among the best of the best, not just rock singer, singer time.”
It wasn’t long before Gray Daze was selling out even mid-sized venues in Phoenix, supporting bands like No Doubt, Bush and Suicidal Tendencies, and garnering regional airplay. At the heart of their growing success, however, was Sean and Chester’s close “protective” friendship, which Sean describes as an “older brother/younger brother” relationship. Bonding over music, basketball, partying and drug use, the pair would often make the three-and-a-half-hour drive from Phoenix to Mexico, where they would light a campfire, share beers on the beach and imagine the days they’d bring their kids.
To an outsider, Chester was a happy, confident teenager, but behind it all his life was in turmoil. The youngest of four children, his parents had divorced when he was 11, dividing the family and eclipsing an already volatile home life. Separated from his mother, a nurse, and his father, a police officer who worked late shifts, Chester struggled with feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Years later, he revealed he was molested by an older male friend when he was “seven or eight years old,” and told Tom Bryant about it Kerrang! that he was “beaten up and forced to do things I didn’t want to do. That destroyed my confidence.”
“Music was definitely not just a creative outlet for him. I think it was an emotional hole,” says Sean. “He was able to squeeze out through his music some of the toxic poison that he had in his stomach for most of his adult life.”
By the time he was 16, Chester blocked the emotional trauma with alcohol and dangerous levels of drugs. “I would drink so much I would shit my pants,” he said Kerrang! “It was not nice.”
Sean admits that without his knowledge, Chester’s drug use had taken a worrying turn. “He had a few friends and so did I. So there were times when we didn’t see each other when we weren’t having a show, and he would go with these other friends and do some of this darker stuff.
Gray Daze’s run would end in an implosion of egos, resentments and power struggles after a volatile performance in 1998. At the time, Chester was 22, had married his first wife, Samantha, with Sean as his best man, and cleaned up his act. It would be a few years before he and Sean spoke again, but as Scott Harrington recalls, Chester was single-mindedly focused on music – he’d immediately started working on new “cool and electronic” music in his basement. Little did he know, the wheels of fortune began to turn while he was working in restaurants and coffee shops to pay his mortgage 375 miles away in Los Angeles.
In December 1998, after a disastrous performance at Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip, a fledgling band called Xero found themselves looking for a new singer. Led by rapper/producer Mike Shinoda, the band had years earlier wowed Zomba Records CEO Jeff Blue with their gritty and lustrous blend of knife-edge rap metal, cutting-edge electronics and monstrous pop choruses. But although Jeff was convinced of their potential, he was unable to land a record deal. “The band was like an acorn that could become the proverbial tree,” says Jeff. “I knew there was something missing that would top it all off.”
It was during the SXSW Festival in Texas in 1999 that Scott Harrington, upon hearing about the vacancy as a singer, suggested that Chester might be perfect for the job. “I know how to save the band,” he told Jeff. “But you have to be ready for a two-frontman band because that’s not just a backing vocalist, that’s a superstar.”
Jeff called Chester right then and there, interrupting the singer’s 23rd birthday party. “Chester, hey man, I have a band in LA that’s going to be huge,” he said, introducing Xero as a mix of Depeche Mode, hip hop and Stone Temple Pilots and agreeing to send him their demo tape. “I went into a studio and the very next day I cut my vocals over their demo,” Chester later said Kerrang! “It was a Saturday and on Sunday I called Jeff Blue back and said, ‘I’m done, when do you want me to come out?’ He laughed and said, ‘No, you need to record some vocals before you send them to us.’ “I was really in high spirits, so I put the cassette in my stereo, put the phone on the speaker, played him 15 seconds of the song and said, ‘Is that good enough for you?’ He said: ‘When can you be here?’ The next day I was on the steps of Zomba Music at 9am waiting for the doors to open.”
It came as no surprise to Jeff Blue that Chester gave up his life to move to LA. “Chester came out because stars do,” he says. “It’s not just the talent, it’s that drive and willingness to do whatever it takes.”
But the chemistry took time to build. While the band, which changed their name to Hybrid Theory before eventually settling for Linkin Park, rehearsed with Chester for four weeks, they continued to audition singers. “It was tough,” Chester later said. “I was damn unhappy. The only thing that kept me going was knowing we were up to something special.” But even as the bands’ relationships worked and Chester electrified the band’s stage presence, record labels passed them on. In total, they would be rejected 44 times. “People just didn’t get it and it broke my heart,” Jeff recalls. “There was a showcase where Chester was so close to a guy. You could see the sweat on the guy’s face and the spit. It was a moment.”
Linkin Park would eventually sign with Warner and release their debut, hybrid theoryin October 2000. The album was released at the perfect time as nu metal became a global commercial force. It sold 47,000 copies in its first week and became the best-selling album in the US of 2001. And while every member of the band pulls in the same direction to create the perfect harmony of fear and melody, there’s no doubt that the sustained punch to the gut comes from Chester’s incendiary screams, powerful cleans and haunted lyrics, all trademarks that the he made his own way back in the Gray Daze era.
“A lot of the things you hear come out with him hybrid theory, it was already developing on our records,” says Sean. “I’ve heard people say he didn’t do this or that until he came to Linkin Park and that’s just not true. People were rooting for him back then.”
Up until his death in 2017, Chester and Sean maintained a close relationship and pursued several business ventures together, including tattoo and piercing business Club Tattoo. In 2016 they decided to revive Gray Daze. Chester died three days before rehearsals were due to begin. We’d never hear him revisit the music that helped him hone his craft en route to becoming the voice of a generation.
For Jeff, Chester’s true legacy was this ability to connect emotionally. “He was someone who made it clear to a whole world that someone was listening,” he says. “And that you are not alone.”
“So many people felt like they knew him because he accurately described a moment of pain that they could pinpoint in their lives,” agrees Sean. “When people ask me about Chester, I don’t think he was a singer in my band – he was my friend. I miss him much.”
Grey-Daze’s The Phoenix album is now available through Loma Vista. Samaritans in the UK can be reached free on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255