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About Astat

  • Birthday 05/08/1988

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  • LP Shows Attended
    2004.08.05 - Cuyahoga Falls, OH - Blossom Music Center 2007.08.17 - Cuyahoga Falls, OH - Blossom Music Center 2008.08.19 - Cuyahoga Falls, OH - Blossom Music Center 2011.01.28 - St. Paul, MN - Xcel Energy Center 2014.08.26 - Falcon Heights, MN - Minnesota State Fair 2017.10.27 - Hollywood, CA - Hollywood Bowl

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    White Bear Lake, Minnesota

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  1. I think people tend to forget about this absolute gem: https://youtu.be/LyPsJNX6YT8
  2. "Linkin Park was always the band that never got that kind of respect, until they just took it." - Rob McDermott LPLive is excited to bring you an exclusive we teased a few months ago, with the launch of a multi-part interview series with former Linkin Park A&R director/author of the new book One Step Closer - From Xero to #1: Becoming Linkin Park, Jeff Blue, and former Linkin Park manager (2000-2010)/Mad Mac Entertainment CEO, Rob McDermott. LPLive staff member Anthony (Astat) conducted this interview back in January, and in an overwhelming display of generosity, Jeff and Rob hung out for over THREE HOURS, answering every question we could think of to throw at them. Special thanks to all the community members who submitted questions - we got a lot of good ones! Getting all this footage edited into a coherent interview took a while, but we think it was worth the wait. The first three parts are live now, with more installments coming soon! In Part 1, Jeff discusses why he decided to write a book about his experiences working behind the scenes on what became the best-selling debut album of the 21st century. As hard as it is to believe knowing their success today, Linkin Park was rejected a total of 44 times by just about every record label you can think of, including 3 times by the label that ultimately signed them, Warner Brothers! Everybody experiences rejection, up to and including some of the most successful artists in the world. Having been involved with a group that experienced it to an extreme degree and still overcame it, Jeff wants to tell the story as a way to inspire and motivate other people, regardless of their career path. Rob stresses the importance of staying true to yourself and building a good support system around you, both professionally and personally. In Part 2, Jeff talks about how a lecture he did at UCLA led to a young Brad Delson showing up in his office and talking his way into getting hired as an intern, which ultimately paved the way for Jeff to sign Brad's band (then known as Xero) to a development deal, and later a publishing deal. Rob and Jeff then take some time to describe their respective jobs in management and A&R, and the differences between them. In Part 3, Jeff and Rob talk about what draws them to artists they want to work with: Passion, authenticity, motivation, and the importance of an immediately identifiable sound. Rob mentions the importance of an artist's management not working harder than the artist, and Anthony and Jeff talk about the difference between being the most talented person at what you do and being "iconic." Jeff even brings up a name a lot of Linkin Park fans will know, grandson (who guested on "Running From My Shadow" on Mike Shinoda's album Post Traumatic)! We'll be updating this as more installments are posted. Follow LPLive on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram so you don't miss when the next video comes out. Or, better yet, subscribe to Jeff's YouTube channel and find out straight from the source! Go ahead and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram too while you're at it, and you can find Rob on Instagram and Twitter as well. One Step Closer - From Xero to #1: Becoming Linkin Park is available now in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook from all major retailers. HUGE thanks to Jeff Blue and Rob McDermott for taking the time to do this, and a big thank-you to Jenica Martinez for handling the majority of the video editing as well!
  3. Which includes MGK, Blackbear, and iann dior, who have six top 40 singles between them in the last five years. iann dior was just on a song that spent eight weeks at #1 and is still in the Billboard top 10 seven months after it was released. And that's assuming you exclusively mean mainstream pop culture relevance, without factoring in the success K.Flay and grandson have had in the indie/alt rock scene.
  4. Ditto. Call me pessimistic, but this seems like the kind of thing that ends up killing the concept of the album AND touring. If you're Mike, what's the point of investing a bunch of time and money into recording an album or going on tour when you can make one song at a time and sell it to people with massive amounts of disposable income for $10,000+? This is Mike going the route of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and considering the definitely near-zero, possibly actually-zero number of people in this community who can afford to drop $10k on something as insignificant as a song, we're clearly not the target market. Somebody call Martin Shkreli.
  5. So I was actually wrong about this, that sample isn't in Reading My Eyes OR Stick N Move, and I don't think it's used in any of the Xero tracks at all. The "101strg" samples are from Madama Butterfly, but I can't find anywhere that they were actually used. The Reading My Eyes intro sample I was thinking of is actually from "Why You Treat Me So Bad" by Club Nouveau, which is credited on WhoSampled. Somebody asked Mike about it in a chat once and he completely misinterpreted the question (in typical Mike style) and said that it wasn't a Xero track. Nobody asked if it was a Xero track, lol. I still think it sounds like Mark (a bit less so now that there's a lot more material with Mark on it around than there used to be), but every couple years since I first found that track like 16 years ago I go on a crazy search to try and find more information about it, and I've always come up empty. Every resource that references the song either thinks it's the band Wakefield, Mark Wakefield, or they erroneously match the lyrics to an unrelated song called Ground Zero by a different band. If it's not Mark, I have a feeling it's a track from some completely unknown band that uploaded it on Myspace or Purevolume back in the early 2000's and it just ended up on filesharing networks. Maybe it was another band that used the name Wakefield that's completely disappeared from the Internet.
  6. This is a mistake we need to fix - the song that samples that piece is Reading My Eyes, not Stick and Move. The intro to Reading My Eyes is one of the "101strg" samples from Mike's MPC library pitched up and sped up a bunch. Different guy.
  7. Hey all, just a little update: So this ended up resulting in slightly over 3 hours of footage (I can't thank Jeff and Rob enough for being willing to sit on a Zoom call with me for that long). It took a few days to edit, split into segments, and upload onto a cloud server for Jeff/Rob to take a look at. Even after edits it was still over 2 and a half hours, and taking the original unedited video file into account, I'm sitting on about 15 GB of footage, lol. Lots to sift through! Jeff's been keeping me updated, he's just been super busy for the last week or so. We're not operating on any specific deadline right now, so I'm not pushing him to hurry. It'll just be done when it's done. As far as what to expect, I'll just say that it was very informative, with a healthy dose of humor. We got through almost 30 questions, and even I learned a lot of stuff that I didn't know before.
  8. Guys, what? Mike did this for most of the Meteora touring cycle. He did it at all the LPU tour and PR03 shows, and was still doing it at the start of Summer Sanitarium (Pontiac 7/4, Toronto 7/5). He didn't do it from East Rutherford on 7/8 onwards, so either that show or Foxboro on 7/6 was when he stopped. He didn't do it anymore through the end of the year, then he started doing it again pretty early into the U.S. Meteora World Tour in 2004. The first recording of him doing it that year was at Rosemont on 1/29, and then at the next show in Madison (1/30) he started doing a mix of it where he'd hype the crowd up for the first half of the bridge and then sing the "blood is pouring" line the second half (so he only sang it 3 times instead of 6). He also did this version at Colorado Spring on 2/2, Sunrise on 3/4, and Inglewood on 3/15, while he did the full version at Long Beach on 2/5 and Portland on 2/14. There were also still some shows where he didn't do it at all (Nashville 2/29), so it seemed to be kind of hit and miss depending on what he felt like doing on a given night during that period. Then on the June Europe/Southeast Asia tour he seemed to start doing the "half" version regularly at every show. Then he did the full version again at Mountain View and Sao Paolo at the end of the tour in September. The only periods where he wasn't doing some variation of it were the second half of 2003, the first few shows of 2004 (then intermittently from late January through March), and Projekt Revolution 2004 when Jonathan Davis was doing it. It's on a bunch of proshot/SBD recordings (Nottingham, CD:UK, $2 Bill, the One Step Closer live track on the Faint single, Rock Am Ring).
  9. The phrase "panic attack" being in there led me to think part of this came from Petrified, as it's the only time Mike's used that phrase in a song. There are two problems with this though: 1. There isn't a Petrified acapella in circulation. 2. The rhythm of the phrase "panic attack" is different than it is on Petrified (the first syllable of "panic" is held longer on Petrified). This still doesn't sound like anything real to me, but I'm convinced that it's Mike's voice at least, and I'm honestly stumped as to where it would have come from.
  10. We're excited to announce that on Thursday (1/14), LPLive will be recording a video Q&A session with former Linkin Park A&R manager/executive producer of Hybrid Theory, Jeff Blue! Jeff is known for signing a little band called Xero to a publishing development deal after their very first show in 1997, shopping them for 3 years with 44 rejections, discovering a singer named Chester Bennington, eventually signing the band with him at Warner Records as Hybrid Theory, and finally being part of the team behind their genre-defining debut album as Linkin Park in 2000. Jeff recently published an autobiographical account of his experiences during the band's early years, One Step Closer: From Xero to #1: Becoming Linkin Park (Amazon link below!), which serves as a combination of a detailed historical document of the band's formative period, an insightful look into a side of the music industry not many people get to see, and a story of having to reconcile professional triumph with personal tragedy. BONUS: Big thanks to Jeff, as he's been kind enough to bring a special guest for this Q&A as well, none other than Mad Mac Entertainment CEO and former Linkin Park manager from 2000 to 2009, Rob McDermott! Rob was another key part of the team that brought Hybrid Theory to life, and shows up in a lot of the stories in Jeff's book. Got questions for Jeff and/or Rob? So do we! Let us know what you'd like to ask them in the replies (submit your questions by 4 PM ET/1 PM PT on January 14th), and make sure to follow Jeff's social accounts at the links below - the more interest he sees from the fans, the more questions he'll want to answer. Let him know LPLive sent you! One Step Closer: From Xero to #1: Becoming Linkin Park on Amazon Jeff Blue links: Website / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook
  11. Just checked and no problems with mine.
  12. That was just me mixing up Stick N Move with Fuse lol.
  13. Cure for the Itch was never "The Cure," and Pushing Me Away was never "The Cure for Mr. Hahn's Itch." That was just a misprint on the Studio Finals CD.
  14. Username checks out. 😂
  15. Platinum Lotus Foundation has been a known name they considered for many years, and was typically mentioned in the same breath as names like Ten P.M. Stocker (referring to the band practicing at Mike's old apartment at 10 PM), Probing Lagers, and "Clear," which was obviously just a case of someone mishearing "Plear." I dug around for a few minutes and found references to those names online going back at least as far as 2006.
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