Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington tragically passed away in 2017 and he spent months fighting his urge to drink.
Chester Bennington struggled with addiction
In It Starts With One: The Legend and Legacy of Linkin Park, out Oct. 1 from Hachette Books, author Jason Lipshutz offers an in-depth look at the 20-year career of the rock band, including the tragic death of their frontman.
Chester Bennington died on July 20, 2017 at age 41. The band held a tribute concert in October of that year and largely went on hiatus after that. Earlier this month, the band announced they added Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara as co-vocalist and Colin Brittain as drummer. The new members join the lineup of Mike Shinoda, Brad Delson, Phoenix and Joe Hahn. The band had performed in a live stream event.
Days after his death, the band shared a letter dedicated to the late singer on social media expressing their grief and heartbreak.
“Our hearts are broken. The shockwaves of grief and denial are still sweeping through our family as we come to grips with what has happened,” the letter began.
“We’re trying to remind ourselves that the demons who took you away from us were always part of the deal. After all, it was the way you sang about those demons that made everyone fall in love with you in the first place.”
In the book, the author describes what the months — and days — leading up to Bennington’s death were like with anecdotes from family and friends.
In the days before his death, Chester had been in Arizona with Talinda and the kids, taking a family vacation at their cabin inSedona ahead of what was to be Linkin Park’s sprawling NorthAmerican tour in support of One More Light later that month. Chester traveled back to Los Angeles by himself — he said that he needed to work, and the band had a photo shoot scheduled for the morning of the twentieth — but before he left, Talinda snapped a photo of Chester and their children gazing into the woods off their deck, grinning from ear to ear.
“He was happy,” she said in an early 2018 interview. “He gave me a kiss goodbye, he gave the kids a kiss goodbye and I never saw him again.”
Chester had been candid about his substance abuse issues during the making of One More Light, including an extended period of drinking in the second half of 2016. According to Talinda, Chester “had been sober for almost six months” prior to his death. In his final months, however, while publicly discussing his general difficulties with life during the One More Light press run, he was privately telling loved ones about a specific problem: the urge to drink had consumed his thoughts once again. “He was describing an hour-by-hour battle with addiction,” said Ryan Shuck, Chester’s close friend who had helped turn one of his bleakest periods during the 2000s into the lone Dead by Sunrise album and who had been texting with him about his alcoholism in the weeks leading up to his death.
When an autopsy and toxicology report later confirmed that Chester had a trace amount of alcohol in his system at the time of his death — he had been discovered with an empty bottle of Stella Artois in the room as well as a glass of Corona that was less than half full — Talinda was not surprised. She had immediately understood that those beer bottles represented are lapse. “I knew instantly that that drink triggered that shame,” she said, “triggered a lifetime of unhealthy neural pathways.”
The timing and nature of Chester’s death also led to widespread speculation that the recent passing of Chris Cornell, who had died by suicide two months earlier, was connected, as some sort of tragic catalyst. Both artists hanged themselves, and July 20 would have been Chris’s fifty-third birthday.
