A funny thing happened to guitarist Brad Delson on the
way to law school: HIS BAND BECAME A HIT. What happens when
faced with choosing between graduate school and life as
a professional musician? Hmmm. What would you decide?
Roughly a year ago, Brad Delson thought his future was
set. After years of arduous book- cracking-he plowed through
so many texts he still owes his alma mater, UCLA, some long-
overdue library fines-he graduated with a Bachelor's Degree
in Communications, and made plans to attend law school the
next semester. But a funny thing happened on the way to
the legal-eagle forum: The band he'd formed for fun four
years earlier, Hybrid Theory (soon to be rechristened Linkin
Park), started attracting attention, serious publishing-deal/
major-label attention.
It wasn't a difficult decision. Delson chose the high road,
ditched enrollment, and began showcasing for contract-waving
execs around Los Angeles.
Sure enough, the guitarist, now only 22, was rewarded for
his efforts. Warner Bros. snapped the group up in a millisecond.
"We just put all of our eggs in one basket and went
for it," Delson recalls. "And it's really paid
off. Even my parents were totally supportive. I mean, giving
up law for music? I don't think a lot of parents would encourage
their children to pursue music, because it's not the most
financially stable thing to do."
True enough. But 'Hybrid
Theory', Linkin Park's major-label debut, could rocket
Delson and company to the Limp Bizkit big time. Unlike the
albums of other rap-rock notables of late, Linkin Park's
disc melds metal and hip-hop in a unique, hook-oriented
fashion, a la English pioneers Black Grape, even tracing
it back a few years to the softer schematics aggro anthems
like 'Papercut,' 'Crawling,' and the lead-off radio hit
'One Step Closer' smartly blend Delson's alternately jagged
and fluid guitar riffs with the surly scratching of DJ Joseph
Hahn, punched aloft by Rob Bourdon's dinosaur drumbeat.
And for most of the choruses, the cocktail-smooth crooning
of co-frontman Chester Bennington succumbs to the insistent
snap-snarl of MC/Toastmaster Mike Shinoda. No wonder Linkin
Park wound up wowing the bigwigs-"Hybrid Theory"
is a heady entry in a rap-rock race populated by dolts.
We're talking one helluva smart rock record here.
Along the creative path, Delson recalls, many naysayers
cajoled him, told him he got it wrong. The group should
sound more like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, it should follow
that well-outlined map to rap-rock riches. "But we've
been very conscious of preserving our artistic vision in
the face of such criticism," Delson says. "And
we didn't really think about it. This is just how we started
writing songs. Mike (whom Delson knew since junior high)
had exclusively been producing hip-hop beats for MCs and
had done band stuff, so it was our brainchild to pool our
creative energies and start writing songs. Now," he
adds proudly, "our sound is so cohesive, it's really
difficult to separate the hip-hop from the rock."
And part of the reason for that is Bennington, an Arizona
native who impressed a then- singerless group by tracking
his vocal parts over the band's rough-hewn demo tape in
a professional recording studio-he wanted the job that bad.
Another reason is Delson himself, a self-confessed disciple
of MTV (he knows every character and every episode of the
network's 'Real World' series) who has one mission in six-string
life: "I'm a song structure nut, and I want to write
songs that really capture the listener's attention and take
them on a journey each time. So we really worked on our
songwriting for a long time, because we wanted each of the
12 cuts on 'Hybrid Theory' to be as strong as the others.
"And our music is definately emotional," Delson
continues. Instrumentally, how did he capture those emotions?
"On the record, I played a Paul Reed Smith, which I
love. And the reason I love that guitar is that it's so
versatile, in terms of its distorted sound and its clean
sound. That's why I also like to play it live, because I
don't lose anything when I go back and forth from the cleans
to the heavy parts. But I also used an Ibanez on the record,
which I love for its heavier sound. And I doubled almost
every guitar part, first with the PRS, which we split-panned,
left and right. And for the really heavy parts, I'd do two
more tracks with the Ibanez. So there were often four tracks,
and each of those tracks is my guitar going through a mixture
of heads and amps that created one tone. so the guitar you're
hearing on the record is pretty much just a wall of guitar;
it came from a lot of layering."
And, believe it or not, Delson says he's still in touch
with a lot of his old college chums. Several of them called
to congratulate him when LA radio station KROQ put "One
Step Closer" in heavy rotation. "They were almost
as excited as we were about the sudden attention the band's
been getting!"
- by Tom Lanham, Guitar One, December 2000
