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Stone Temple Pilots bassist Robert DeLeo remembered his former bandmate and friend Chester Bennington in a new Billboard interview, and how there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by where he hasn’t thought about why he died by suicide.
“It’s sad, really sad. I lost a great friend. We’re part of the same community here. We took our kids to school and took our kids to baseball, and he was a great human being. He was there for us when we needed it. It’s hard to talk about him in the past tense, still. He was a really great person, and I miss him every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him and think about why he did what he did. Obviously it made sense to him, but I’m baffled by that. And always will be.”
In a Rolling Stone article last month, it was revealed that a few days before his death, Chester Bennington had been texting with DeLeo, his former bandmate in Stone Temple Pilots and Kings of Chaos collaborator. His messages were “loving, positive, looking-forward-to-the-future, growing-old kinds of things,” DeLeo recalls. And the day before he died, Bennington e-mailed former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum, saying he’d like to perform again with their all-star covers band, Kings of Chaos.
Bennington would sometimes tell bands that opened for Linkin Park, “Next time we might be opening for you guys.” Sorum remembers how he’d asked the Kings of Chaos band members to do a gig shortly before Christmas. Bennington and DeLeo were laid over for 12 hours in Chicago, and the drummer felt horrible for keeping them from home during the holiday season. “I e-mailed those guys and said, ‘I apologize. I’m so sorry. Thank you so much for going the distance,’ ” Sorum says. “And typical Chester style, he e-mailed back: ‘Anytime, bro.’ There was no drama. Nothing.”
