~* (UN)FRESH FROM THE LINKIN PARK GIG*~

I can't believe I'm home already! I'm (un)fresh from the Linkin Park gig. I say unfresh coz I feel sticky from sweating it in the moshpit ;P

Mmmkay, lemme start. I bumped into Teena & Hogi at Greenbelt on my way to Glorietta to meet up with Omar who was coming with me to the LP gig. Twas sooo nice to see you Teena & Hogi! :) I miss u guys na! Hmm, which reminds me... Tere! You lucky gal you! How was it on the Silver section of the LP gig? ;)

Ok, back to LP stuff. As announced on the radio, the show promptly started at 8:30 pm. Twas coz they had a flight to catch right after the gig. Hong Kong gig up next, I think.

They pretty much sang every single. Twas probably a total of 18 songs. They didn't sing My December though :(. Hmm, lemme see if I am still sane enough to remember 'em now: Crawling, Papercut, Step Up (not in their album, twas in their EP sumthin from the early days of the band), It's Going Down (of course, sans the Executioners), With You, One Step Closer, In the End... Joe Hahn did some strains from the Reanimation album... that eerie violin intro/extro that they used in the Crawling Reanimated version... Somewhere I Belong, Numb, Faint... I can't remember now if it was Breaking The Habit or From the Inside wherein Mike Shinoda did the keyboards and then they intro'd it with a mellow/stripped down version of the song... Chester breaks into gentle vocals and then it built up to the original loud version of the song. Chester also sang a cover song... something that they don't usually do accdg. to him. Twas, hmmm, a Nine Inch Nails song or sumthin' I didn't catch what Chester said when he intro'd the song.

Chester Bennington was sooo skinny! I dunno what to call his hairstyle. It's somethin' of a mohawk but flattened such that he has bangs. It was also sorta like a mullet (?) sans the tail end of the hair. Anyway, he sooo rocked with all that trademark screaming of his. *Awww* Mike Shinoda was sooo adorably cute and still slightly pudgy. He still reminds me of Elmer Fudd :P. Joe Hahn sorta got slim. Still intense with the scratching, spinning and sampling thing. Phoenix is bald now. Brad looked like an Amish with his curly hair and beard. Rob was, hmm, still Rob. He didn't look any different to me.

The view from the moshpit as taken by my 6230...



'Twas absofreakinlutely fun to scream along with Chester and rap along with Mike Shinoda. LP rocks!!! Woohoo!!!

They didn't interact much with the audience except for the mandatory eliciting of lyrical/rapping screams from the left, right, all the way to the back. At one point, there was this lucky bastard who was invited by Chester up the stage and he had like 30-secs of fame bouncing around the stage... at some point, with Mike Shinoda's arms on his shoulders as they worked up the crowd as they were up on the little platform. Waaaah. Mike Shinoda's arm was on him! Huhuhu. I wish that was me! :(

They didn't adlib much in between songs. Twas pretty much like popping your Meteora and Hybrid Theory CDs -- but this time you are in the midst of a sweaty crowd, bouncing, headbanging, screaming, thrusting your fist every now and then up in the air. I settled on screaming my lungs out with Chester and rapping along with Mike as I headbanged, swayed and bounced a bit. It was way too tiring to keep bobbing up and down all throughout the gig.

Anyway, thank God it didn't rain!:) I was already envisioning myself jumping into the mud and getting soaked in the rain, with matching fear that my Nike Prestos would get totalled with all the mud in the moshpit. But it didn't rain! Yebbah.

The gig ended at 9:45pm. Bitin mehn!:( Good thing rin that I didn't shell out like almost 2K bucks for Gold seats. That would've been quite a rip off! Mike Shinoda did not even take off his shirt. Hayyy, sadness. (It's not like he has a nice bod... I don't think he's even got toned abs. I am just curious as to how he looks like shirtless. Hmmm. Ahh but he's got such a cute smiling chubby face. *Awww*)

Cutesy photos of Mike Shinoda (shame on me I'm stealing bandwidth! hehehe :p):