Linkin Park is one of the most successful and inlfuencial acts to emerge from the nu-metal era of the late ’90s/earl ’00s. As founder and co-vocalist Mike Shinda tells it, however, around the time the band’s debut album, Hybrid Theory, was released, their record label’s A&R department thought they need a gimmick… like on-stage choreography.
“On the funny side, there was the one time a Warner Bros. A&R guy, because we were still getting comfortable onstage and working out that part of things, had us meet with this guy who choreographed and helped stage stuff on rap and R&B shows,” Shinoda recalled in a new interview.
“This dude comes in and he’s basically like a choreographer,” Shinoda continued, “and he literally suggested, ‘You need to have a thing onstage, like a gimmick. For example, you could come up to the microphone, step out to the side and step out of your shoes. Or kick a shoe off.”
“We were like, ‘What the fuck?’ That was a literal suggestion,” Shinoda went on to say. “I don’t want to make it seem like he was a crazy person. He was shooting from the hip and it was something that just popped into his head.”
The meddling didn’t stop there, it seems, as Shinoda also remembered the band having to battle that same A&R guy over having Andy Wallace mix their first album.
“A real thing that happened as we finished Hybrid Theory, we were like the only person who is going to mix it is Andy Wallace,” Shinoda recalled. “Andy Wallace mixed these records that blend samples of rock music and industrial sounds in a way that feels very modern to us.”
“It’s full, it’s expert-level mixing. We love this,” Shinoda said of the band’s excitement to work with Wallace. “And he also, by the way, mixed Nirvana’s Nevermind. He’s an icon. He does huge records too. He’s the only one who can mix Hybrid Theory.”
The whole thing was nearly ruined by their label, however. “The next thing we knew, our A&R guy had done a test mix with somebody else,” Shinoda said. “It was because of politics and stuff going on on his side. We were scared to death that this guy was just going to take our record and do his own thing with it and they were going to put it out that way.”
Ultimately, Wallace did mix Hybrid Theory, as well as Linkin Park’s sophomore album, Meteora (2003) as well as the band’s sixth album, The Hunting Party (2014).
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