I
almost wanted to go to the annual KROQ Weenie Roast Concert in Irvine, mostly because there was Vampire Weekend in the line-up, but it was sold out, and I thought that, with such a long list of bands (The Black Keys, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Vampire Weekend, of Monsters and Men, Jimmy Eat World, Silversun Pickups, Imagine Dragons, Awolnation, Atlas Genius, Fitz & the Tantrums, The Neighborhood, C2C, Capital Cities, New Politics, Twenty One Pilots) each band wouldn’t play a very long set.
And it was even worst than I expected, Vampire Weekend shortened their set because of the surprise guest: Stone Temple Pilots and Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, who joined them on stage for a few songs, ‘Big Bang Baby’, ‘Interstate Love Song’ and ‘Wicked Garden’. According to many reports, the band even premiered a new song, a pure hard-rocking and furious ‘Out of Time’, that you can download for free here.
Now I am certainly no fan of these bands, but apparently, it was a real surprise beside the already established fact that Scott Weiland has really been fired from the band. Guitarist Dean DeLeo had this to say: ‘Chester has a one-of-a-kind voice that we’ve admired for a long time. We know Linkin Park will always be his priority, but we thought it would be cool to try something together. We managed to find the time to record a song and we’re all really happy with the result.’ To what Bennington answered: ‘I’ve loved STP since I was 13 years old and they’ve had a huge influence on me. When the opportunity came up to do something creative with them, I jumped at the chance. The guys in Linkin Park have been incredibly supportive of me undertaking this project while I’ve continued to work on new music with LP.’
I don’t care if he was good, if they were at the top of their game, I would have been pissed off to have had less of Vampire Weekend!