Rolling Stone detailed late Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington’s struggles with alcoholism in his final year.
Some of Bennington’s friends now feel they overlooked signs that the singer’s dark side – which he called his “dark passenger,” a reference to the force that motivated the serial-killer protagonist on TV’s Dexter – had been creeping back into his life. Bennington had gone to rehab around 2006 and appeared to be sober in the years after. But friends say he suffered a three-day relapse last August, during which he blacked out from alcohol, and had been drinking as recently as October.
A month before his death, Bennington told longtime friend Ryan Shuck, who played guitar in Bennington’s side project Dead by Sunrise, that he was six months sober. But Bennington also sent Shuck, who had his own struggles with alcoholism, some text messages that seemed portentous in hindsight: “He was describing an hour-by-hour battle with addiction. When I look at it now, it’s horrifying. He was telling me, down to the detail, what he would do in the first hour he wanted to drink: ‘I basically just take it hour-by-hour every day.’ ”
Shuck believes Bennington “had a couple of drinks” just before his death. “We don’t know how much, but it doesn’t take much when you’re that advanced an alcoholic and an addict and you’re battling to the extent he described to me. You don’t need much to lose your mind for a minute.”
