Linkin Park returns to Arizona to play the Monster Mash Music Festival tonight, November 1st! The band are no strangers to Arizona, having played there 18 times through their career. It's also the home state of our very own Chester. However, this performance will be the bands first in Tempe, at least under the Linkin Park name. They played two shows under the "Hybrid Theory" name in Tempe in 1999 and 2000, with the latter being the last show the band did under that name. Tonight, they will be headlining the Monster Mash Music Festival, which is taking major advantage of their "schedule subject to change without notice" warning these days. Firstly, the three night festival was reduced to two days, and all performances scheduled for Friday, October 30 were cancelled. Attendees should also known Halestorm, which was supposed to play on the same day as Linkin Park, has canceled and has since been replaced by Puscifer. Next, the festival was supposed to have two stages, with Linkin Park headlining the east stage, playing their full headlining set. Due to the fact there will only be one stage, which all acts will be playing, the band's set time was reduced to 90 minutes. The festival website also shows the curfew for Sunday is 10p.m., so if the band is late for some reason, their set time could be cut down even more. We hope that doesn't happen. With all that said, let's take a look at the bands previous performances in Arizona. I could write a book covering the band's 18 performances in Arizona, but since that probably wouldn't be interesting, we'll only cover the recent history. The band has played in Arizona in support of each of their studio albums, with the exception of Living Things. They made up for this in 2014 when they performed in Arizona three times. First of these shows happened on May 24, when the band performed at KFMA Day 2014. This was a very important show, as this was the debut of the setlist the band would continue playing for most of their 2014 shows and some of their 2015 performances. "Guilty All The Same", "Until It's Gone" and "Wastelands" all had their live debuts at this show, as well as "Robot Boy", "Mashup Intro #1" and the solo medleys from Mike and Joe respectively. It was an interesting night to say the least, as this was when the band was infamously accused of calling the police on Sublime with Rome regarding their use of weed. The second show of the year was on September 10, and the band performed virtually the same setlist as in May. The third show was a bit more interesting, as the band played an 10 song set on the "Stars Of The Season" Gala, an annual fundraiser which Chester has been involved in for the last few years. It's always cool to see the band play smaller, more intimate venues, and this show was no exception. You can watch the live premiere of "Mashup Intro #1" and "Guilty All The Same" from the May 24 show below. Props to the uploader for knowing the lyrics and hitting the right notes. Let's see what the band has been up to recently. In the summer, they played a five date China tour in July and a ten date European tour in August and September. During this European tour, Mike played four Fort Minor shows, which received an unbelievably good reception from both fans and critics. The band played a set slightly different from their 2014 one, opening with "Papercut", and mainly consisting of The Hunting Party singles and fan favorites from the band's career. Some of the tour's highlights included the fan organised flashmobs at the Minsk, Moscow and Rome shows. In Minsk, fans in the first few rows wore masks during "Final Masquerade", while in Moscow fans held up thousands of signs saying "You are Welcome" during Mike's performance of "Welcome", and in Rome the audience held up balloons during the performance of "Final Masquerade". The Rome show was also very special as it was dedicated to an LPU member named Alessandro, who unfortunately passed away in a car crash before the show. The crowd cheered for the band to perform "A Place For My Head", Alessandro's favorite song. The band obeyed, which is not something they do often, to say the least. All in all, it was a touching moment and a very nice gesture from the band, in my opinion. You can watch a video of this below. So, what can we expect from tonight's show? Like I said before, the bands set time was reduced to 90 minutes. The last time the band played a 90 minute set was back in June in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The band dropped "Final Masquerade" and "Points of Authority" from the set that night, and we imagine something similar will be happening this time around. My bet was the band would drop the Fort Minor portion of the set, but literally as I was typing the sentence up, I got a notification on my phone that the band was live streaming their rehearsal of "Welcome". Thanks to the awesomeness of Facebook's new streaming option, you can watch the video right here, right now. So, no idea what exactly the band is going to do, but you can count on one hell of a show. That is, of course, unless Monster Mash Festival completely erases every trace of itself off the Earth by then. After this the band waits until November 7 to play another show, this time closing out BlizzCon. After that, they wait for another seven days before playing the last date of the year, November 14 at the Music for Relief hosted Relief Live! event. Will you be attending the show? Are you excited to see Deftones? Will you even stick around for Linkin Park? Tell us in the forums! Remaining tour dates: November 07 - Anaheim, CA - Blizzcon 2015 November 14 - Los Angeles, CA - Relief Live!
I could have gone to this but decided it wasn't worth the money. I ended up making the right decision because A) I'm super sick right now and B) everyone on Facebook is complaining about how poorly the festival was run. It still would have been cool to see LP again though. Also, great job on the article. Anyone happen to know the setlist? Also, is 90 minutes not normal for an LP set? I guess they normally play 100 minutes? I always just assumed it was 90 minutes.