Stone Temple Pilots’ surviving members Robert DeLeo, Dean DeLeo, and Eric Kretz honored their late bandmate Chester Bennington in a new Yahoo interview. Robert discussed why a quote he heard about the ‘battle inside’ really fit Chester.
“With Chester it wasn’t all about his talent. It was the energy that he brought into it that we so desperately needed at the time. He came into that going, ‘I can do this. I’m going to do this.’ He didn’t need to do that, he was in a huge band, he had plenty going on, but he wanted to do this, and he was excited about doing this. He memorized all of the lyrics, and he went out there and he gave everything that he had.
Being a- I hate to use the word fan, but growing up with our music, and growing up with Scott, and growing up with STP. He gave everything he had, and that was such a great thing for the three of us. I mean I just look back at the touring that we did and the time we spent together, and it was just laughing and having a good time. It was such a positive thing, and going out there, feeling really energetic and great. He made us look back at our legacy, and go yeah, this is what it could be.
Now that he’s gone I hear from people that he was so excited about doing this. I forget who it was that said it, it was someone who quoted this in the 1800’s of saying: ‘Everyone you meet has a battle inside that you know nothing about.’ It stuck with me. It was like wow, it couldn’t have been any more pointed than with Chester. It was a huge huge surprise.”
“We live in the same community, so we took our kids to school, to baseball games, I saw him all the time. It hit really hard being from the same community. For all of us it did, and very surprising. We still get together weeks later here, and we’re scratching our heads, and wondering what made sense to him at that moment.”
Eric Kretz added, “We’re still trying to figure that out.”
Robert said, “Yeah we are. It’s definitely left some things.”
