At about 9 a.m. on Thursday, police responded to a call of a dead body in a Palos Verdes Estates (a suburb south of Los Angeles) home, the location of Bennington’s private residence, law enforcement said in a statement. He appeared to have died by suicide from hanging, TMZ reports.
He began performing in his teens and in the late 1990s was introduced to several members of the band that would become Linkin Park by Zombie Music Publishing executive Jeff Blue. The union was successful although the group struggled to find a record deal. Blue signed them after he joined Warner Bros. Records as an A&R executive, and they released their debut album, “Hybrid Theory,” in 2000, and the group went on to become one of the most successful rock bands of the decade.
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| Chester Bennington |
The group’s combination of heavy riffs, Bennington’s alternately melodic and gutteral vocals, and Mike Shinoda’s rapping led them to be lumped in with the “nu-metal” of bands like Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, but the group railed against the term and branched out musically via solo efforts, remix albums and more experimental work on albums like the Rick Rubin-produced “A Thousand Suns.” The group continued to defy expectations in the coming years, getting arguably heavier than ever with “The Hunting Party” in 2014 and following it with a pop-oriented album, “One More Light,” earlier this year. Fan and media reaction to the group’s most recent change of direction was often hostile.
During a Linkin Park acoustic performance at Spotify’s New York offices in May, just days before Cornell’s death, Bennington was animated and very funny, at one point responding to a question about how the group’s music has changed over the years by saying, “When people ask me ‘How come you don’t write about teen angst anymore?,’ I say ‘I’m 41 years old!'”
Readmore http://variety.com/2017/music/news/chester-bennington-dead-linkin-park-suicide-1202501458/