From what I understand, A Thousand Suns was not particularly more stressful than most other albums to make. Meeting of A Thousand Suns just had the balls to show the rough moments. By comparison, Making of MTM was what, 30 mins long? an hour? That album took a year to make. If anyone thinks that entire year was spent playing a bunch of basketball and Chester walking around in his underwear, I dunno what to say. The Making Of's are essentially album advertisement. The band and their label wouldn't want a bunch of negative press being put out. The fact that they let MoATS go there is really cool, and probably the reason why Mike called it the band's "best making-of ever." I remember when ATS first came out, people were drawing reallyyyyy ridiculous and dramatic conclusions from the documentary, like ATS almost broke up the band or some silly shit like that. It's not like that at all. And yeah, 2005 must have been the darkest time. Any day the rest of the band could have gotten a phone call saying they found Chester dead. He's really lucky and very strong for overcoming that.
Thank you! I tried making this point a while back in a thread, too. Fiore and the team that make these Making Of's can display any type of message / feeling they want. For MOATS, they decided to show the grit and frustration that goes into every album, not just A Thousand Suns. Honestly, I think MOATS is part of the reason people rank ATS so high on their top LP albums list. I think it's safe to assume that LP had similar difficulties writing each of the albums, it's just the difficulties are documented for A Thousand Suns.
The quote was actually from an interview with Revolver Magazine in 2009, I have the magazine. It said this. ''We went by the name Snow White Tan for a while, because I never saw the sun,'' Bennington says. ''I wasn't injecting myself with heroin or anything, but I was sitting in my closet drinking a whole lot of Jack Daniels.'' There was also another interview from Revolver Magazine in 2009, but later in the year. He mentioned his closet again. He said this. ''When I tried to stop or slow down, I would go into these massive tremors. When my nickname became Twitch, I was like, this is a problem. Then I would start not leaving my house. Then I would confine myself to my closet and turn off the lights because it was calm in there. I figured if I died nobody would find me, or have to see me do it in front of them.'' He also mentioned working with Linkin Park during this time. ''The guys in the band started noticing things were going wrong when I'd show up to listen to music and I'd be laying on the ground, passed out. Spending more time outside smoking weed than inside. Waiting 'til they left to work on music, then I'd get a bunch of beer and hang out in the studio and drink.'' ''At its worst, I had basically stopped making the Dead by Sunrise record. It was in the early phases of making [Linkin Park's Third Album] Minutes To Midnight. I wasn't coming to sessions as often as I could have been. I'd wake up in the morning and have about 10 shots and that would keep me from shaking in the morning. When my body started turning on me, that got even crazier.'' So yes, I would definitely agree that 2005 was the darkest time for Linkin Park. Their lead singer was going through a major depression and they could have easily lost Chester, not to mention Chester's family losing him as well. While he wasn't actually doing Heroin, Alcohol can be a very bad drug if you make it that way, and he obviously was making it that way. Mike also said last year at the MusiCares event that Chester getting sober was the best thing that happened for the longevity of Linkin Park. I also remember some form of an interview from 2011 where Chester that the band didn't want to be around him in 2005 and 2006 because he was irate and easy to anger, etc. Sorry for posting all this, I just thought this was an interesting topic and it did actually effect LP, not just Chester.