July 30, 2007
Seattle PI

AUBURN -- Call it Ozzfest lite, if you want.

But, truth be told, Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution probably had better, more energetic bands than Ozzy's "Freefest" this year. But that's what you get what you charge a few bucks for fans to get into a venue, rather than have your diehard fans spend countless hours at a computer only to be rejected.

Bands rocking the nu metal's summer tour 2007 debut, here at the White River Amphitheatre, included My Chemical Romance, HIM, Taking Back Sunday, Placebo and Julien-K and The Bled, among others.

Not that the Linkin Park crew is entirely without their own generosity. Not at all.

As Linkin Park rapper Mike Shinoda pointed out to the thousands of fans in attendance, a buck from each ticket goes to the American Forest for the Global Relief Event. (There was also a global warming awareness booth prominently on display during the festival).

"I love this (Bleeping) planet," lead singer Chester Bennington succinctly put it. "We also converted most of our fleet of trucks and buses into biodieisel for this event," Shinoda said. " … And those two things alone are worth about 350 tons of carbon dioxide that we didn't waste."

"That's like if we had one car and didn't drive 400,000 miles or 14 times around the earth," Bennington said. "And that's just the biodiesel part," Shinoda added.

Here's a photographer's notebook of the event, as I saw things while snapping dozens upon dozens of photos, with a select few posted with this review and its accompanying photo gallery (the rest at my Flickr page, courtesy of www.stevenfriederich.com ).

LINKIN PARK
Busting out with "One Step Closer" and continuing on from there with "Somewhere I Belong" and "Papercut" kept the audience ramped up. At first, it seemed like half the amphitheatre was empty --especially during all of the other acts -- but as soon as the rap-rockers showed up, so did the fans. In droves.

About the only down time was toward the middle of the set, which combined a lot of slow songs. But ending on "Bleed It Out," along with the encores "What I've Done" and "Faint" more than made up for the choke point mid-way through.

Observation: A good chunk of the audience were emo-laced guys wearing girl's jeans. That's a far different crowd than when Linkin Park was kicking it with the likes of Korn and the evils of Limp Bizkit.