PROJEKT REVOLUTION
As they prepare to take their motley on tour on the road, members of Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, and HIM gather to explain the hypothesis behind this most ambitious experiment
By Mikael Wood
Photos by Travis Shinn
Any Linkin Park fan can tell you that Chester Bennington spent 2006 and much of 2007 writing and recording Minutes to Midnight, his megapopular band’s adventurous new album. Less known is the fact that over the last year, Bennington has also been tinkering with another labor of love: Projekt Revolution, the all-star summer tour that will roam North America from July 25 to September 3. As lineups go, this year’s couldn’t get much higher. In addition to Linkin Park, the main stage features My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, HIM, Placebo, and Julien-K, an electronic-music act featuring Amir Derakh and Ryan Shuck of Orgy. And the smaller stage, dubbed Revolution, is nothing to sneeze at, either, with wild-style disco-metallers Mindless Self Indulgence, SoCal emo dudes Saosin, post-hardcore band the Bled, underground hip-hop act Styles of Beyond, and Windy City rockers Madina Lake.
“I really wanted the Revolution stage to not be considered a second stage,” Bennington says. “So I picked bands that were gonna bring something so bad-ass that kids would want to get there the minute the doors open.”
To get an exclusive peek into the Projekt Rev experience, Revolver gathered the tour’s major players—Bennington and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way, Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday, and HIM’s Ville Valo—and had ’em spill the details on what Bennington says will be “the ticket of the summer.” The surest sign of that the show will be top-shelf? Each of these hardened road warriors actually seems excited about spending the summer watching one another’s bands perform. As Bennington notes, “You’re not gonna wanna miss it.”
REVOLVER Chester and Mike, talk about the impulse behind this year’s tour. What kind of goals did you guys have for this edition of Projekt Revolution?
MIKE SHINODA We started the tour back in 2002 with the idea that we would always be trying to bring together a revolutionary lineup of bands. It started off a little bit smaller, but we’ve always included bands that we feel are pushing the envelope in one way or another. That doesn’t mean that their sound is totally different from ours, although sometimes that’s been the case. This year’s tour is particularly special to our band because we’ve been gone for a little bit, and we wanted to come back out the right way and really get together with some bands that we think are really strong and doing important things in music.
CHESTER BENNINGTON This year, I wanted bands that I felt were the total package. And my first choice was My Chemical Romance. I was like, If we get them to do this tour, it doesn’t matter who else is on the bill. Because I personally would love to see My Chem and Linkin Park play. If I imagine myself as a kid buying tickets, I think I’d be pretty stoked about that. Placebo and Muse were also on the top of my list, but Muse couldn’t do the show because they had other commitments. But Placebo was available. I was like, This is ridiculous—now the show’s even 10 times better. And then I figured Taking Back Sunday was gonna do Warped Tour or go out and do their own thing. But we approached them, and they said yes.
SHINODA They jumped right in.
BENNINGTON They were like, We’ve been waiting for you to ask! And then HIM felt to me like a perfect transition from Placebo into Taking Back and My Chem. Their fan base is crazy, and they have their own thing going on.
VILLE VALO It’s nice for me to be able to shake my pelvis for people who haven’t seen it before, let’s put it that way.
REVOLVER This might be the most eclectic Projekt Rev lineup yet.
BENNINGTON Everyone’s gonna be bringing something so different, but for some reason, to me it feels congruent—it doesn’t feel disjointed or anything.
ADAM LAZZARA There’s a lot of fans that Linkin Park has that would never go to a Taking Back Sunday show and a lot of HIM fans that would never go to a Linkin Park show. So it’s really cool that it’s so many different subgenres of rock.
VALO It’s gonna be a fucking disaster, isn’t it?
REVOLVER Is it possible for someone to come to a show and dig every band that plays? We’re always hearing about the increasing fragmentation of rock and roll.
VALO That’s how it was back in the day, too. Were you a fan of Twisted Sister, or were you a fan of Mötley Crüe? You had to be one or the other—otherwise you were fucked.
LAZZARA That’s one of the reasons we took the tour: the hope that we can set an example that there doesn’t have to be those walls there. There’s an underlying message that every one of the bands on the tour has, which is this feeling of alienation or feeling like you don’t fit anywhere. And for all these bands to be in one place at one time, it’s kind of a way to say to people, “You need not be worried because you do fit some place, and this is it.”
VALO Just remember the condoms.
REVOLVER Gerard, considering the success you guys have had over the last year, was joining the tour an easy decision for My Chem? It’s no secret that you could’ve gone out on your own huge summer tour.
GERARD WAY It was an instant yes. We’re a band that never likes to repeat ourselves at all, and we’d never gotten an opportunity to be out with a band that’s different from us but that we have so much respect for in terms of how they operate. That was one of the big things: We’re really interested in bands that operate in unique ways, and I love the fact that each member of Linkin Park is involved so specifically in things like art direction and booking tours and everything. That’s always appealed to my band, because it’s how we work.
REVOLVER Is the rest of the lineup to your and your bandmates’ liking?
WAY They told us, “You guys can have some say in the other bands that play.” But Chester put such an amazing tour together that we didn’t have one bad thing to say about it. We kept hearing about bands, and we’d be like, Oh, really? I can honestly say that everybody in my band is a fan of every one of the bands on the tour. And that’s incredible.
REVOLVER One of the qualities that seem to unite all of your bands in spite of your musical differences is an embrace of the Big Rock Show as an exciting creative opportunity—not something you’re forced to do because a lot of kids wanna come to your concerts.
BENNINGTON See, I could see us going out and playing 1,000-seat or 500-seat venues and really not being like, Oh, this isn’t an amphitheater. We do that occasionally for our fan club: free show for 500 kids in this little place. One thing we notice is that I can’t go running 60 fucking yards that way and jump off something. But the show doesn’t change—the body of the show is the same. We’re there to perform our music, and kids are there to watch us do that.
REVOLVER But the type of space they’re watching from does affect their experience. What seems powerful in a club might not make much of an impact in an arena. Surely you take that into account when you’re designing a new show.
BENNINGTON One of the cool things about playing the larger places is that everything has to be a little bigger. You have to have something going on so that the people a quarter-mile away can enjoy the show. All of our bands have the same kind of attitude toward the show: Everyone that’s coming, it has to be worth their while to show up.
VALO What we’re doing is hopefully being like the Brothers Grimm, doing something extravagantly horrendous that will be a ticket to escapism for a second.
WAY My Chem is very representative of the kind of band that had some growing pains with that transformation. We just went through some growing pains during [2004’s] Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, where we were like, This stuff was actually written for basements. That’s where the mindset was: playing basements and sleeping on floors and stuff. It had that attitude and that aggression. And bringing that to the arenas was a little difficult. Now it’s a joy to play that stuff in the arenas. But it wasn’t at first.
SHINODA I was reading some of the reviews of My Chem’s shows, and a couple of the pieces talked about your connection to your fan base. It was like reading a fucking article about ourselves! The same article has been printed about us a million times, and that was one thing that made me think that this could potentially be a really fun tour. Because you guys give a shit about your fans the same way we really, really care about our fans. We’re not gonna go out there and charge them $5,000 a ticket; we wanna give them the best show we can at the most affordable price that we can. Take yourself back to that time when you were going to see shows and couldn’t afford a ticket out of a certain price range: Within that price range, you wanted to see the best show you could.
REVOLVER What constitutes a good show? How do you deliver bang for your fans’ bucks?
SHINODA You go to a show because you love the record, right? When you see the band play it, you wanna feel like the band is bringing it to life in a way that’s even better than the record—or it’s more special because it’s just you and them. That’s the kind of show that we hope to put on, and the kind of show that I’ve seen a lot of the other bands on the tour put on before. When Gerard sings onstage, it’s a little dirtier and a little angrier than it is on the record. And that’s fucking great; I love that. When we sing and we miss notes and shit because we’re all wrapped up in the heat of the moment, that’s the best thing to me.
VALO When you can see the bass player having a laugh while he’s performing, that’s what you wanna experience.
WAY That’s actually what you’re going to the show for.
REVOLVER You can listen to the CD in your car on the drive to the venue.
BENNINGTON That was me. I’ve seen Stone Temple Pilots probably 15,000 times, and I’d listen to the first record on the way in and then the new record on the way home.
REVOLVER Is preserving the onstage spontaneity Mike described difficult within the context of a big-budget production complete with lighting cues and visual effects and so forth?
SHINODA There’s a balance to it. There’s an element of “Let’s keep it real,” and there’s an element of “Let’s put on something that will entertain people.” You’ve gotta ride the line; you can’t completely ignore either side.
WAY It’s like you’ve gotta be real. It’s not choreographed, it’s not rehearsed—it is real. I had a conversation with Billie Joe [Armstrong] when we were out with Green Day. He was like, “Dude, you’re gonna become so obsessed with keeping it real that you’re gonna bum people out that come to see you play. They’re never gonna wanna see you again. You need to embrace this and have fun with it. They came for a show, you give ’em a show. Inspire them.” That made a lot of sense, because the keeping-it-real thing is a cop-out in a lot of ways. We finally got over it, and we’re really excited about that.
BENNINGTON You figure it out. There’s no manual to read. You hear things from other bands, and if you relate to that person, then you might pick something up. It’s something that every band either figures out or they don’t. We’ve had those growing pains too: You put too much energy into this aspect and it falls short somewhere else. And you roll with the punches, and you grow. Then, all of a sudden, you’re like, Okay, I get it now.
SHINODA There’s growing pains at every stage of every part of your game. My Chem felt growing pains coming into the arena shows from the basement shows, but the next show, the next tour, the next album—there’s growing pains again. For us, we’ve gone through three albums now, and rock has died every single time we’ve put out a record. It died in ’98, and then we put out Hybrid Theory in ’99. And it was dead around the time that Meteora came out [in 2003]. And then it died a couple years ago, and somehow Green Day and My Chem and a whole bunch of other bands came out, and rock radio was alive again.
REVOLVER Rock is having a mainstream impact right now that it hasn’t had in a while. Each of your bands has made a home in the world of Top 40 pop, and that’s a different world than the ones you formed the bands in. How’s that been?
WAY You start to think, You know what? This is just about right. And I would imagine that you all felt the same way at your first band practice. You know right away when something’s special, and when you finally enter that world where you’re rubbing shoulders with people you probably wouldn’t even hang out with, you start to go, This makes sense, because this band that I’m in is loud enough to be heard, and it says something to people that’s way more important than a lot of stuff on pop radio or on the pop charts. There’s lots of unconventional acts that end up rubbing shoulders with simple pop stars, and those are always the greatest bands—the ones that transcend genre and scene. I think our bands probably have always tried to transcend scene.
BENNINGTON I like listening to mindless pop songs sometimes. Everything can’t be the fucking end of the world and touching on such an emotional level.
WAY I guess that’s our job.
BENNINGTON Yeah, they’re there for that reason, and then bands like ours are here for the other reason.
