A photo of Linkin Park’s first rehearsal (first photo of the full band rehearsing, some photos of members have surfaced in recent weeks) without Chester Bennington has been released. Circa Survive’s Anthony Green also spoke about Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington’s deaths in a new Forbes article.
“Chris Cornell I was an enormous fan of and Linkin Park was a band Circa played with a number of times. Chris and Chester embodied that idea of speaking to the alienated. That was something that spoke to me and it continues to speak to me. In order to do that you have to have gone through some sort of pain I think. We see people all the time that are expressing themselves and are artists who seemingly have it all. But the way that they’re tortured and the way they deal with that is what people devour and eat up.
It’s something that’s been there forever. You see people like Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison, they were nurtured as much as they could to keep going, to keep the moneymaking machine going, to keep the band going. And when it came time to really sink your teeth into who cares about who they were surrounded by a lot of yes men. “Yeah, as long as we keep getting paid, as long as we keep it all moving.” I don’t have the answers for what we do, but I know that in Circa Survive and with my situation, the forefront with everything in the band is each other. That stuff comes before making money.
From the beginning of the band we wanted it to be a family that cared about each other. So when I needed to go to rehab and I needed to have my mental health issues addressed, the band got put on hiatus and pause. I think that a lot of these guys are in situations where they’re afraid to stop the train from rolling because a lot of people depend on them financially. I think putting the idea of your mental health in front of making money is one thing you can do. And the other thing you can do is just have a support system of people around you that you’re not afraid to talk to and say, ‘I’m scared, I’m feeling overwhelmed.’ Or, “This sucked for me and this is why.”
