November 14, 2015 - Los Angeles, CA: Relief Live

The final show of this album cycle has sadly reached us at last!


I think this is the only show I've written a post for that has an actual TRAILER​

After touring the world for The Hunting Party, playing 91 shows (mostly with the same setlist, boo) we have at last reached the end of the cycle. We've had cancelled shows due to injuries and weather. This is the cycle where a band member had to sit out a whole leg of the tour and be replaced by his tech (Brad being replaced by Benjamin thanks to sickness and missing the Brazil shows). It's also the cycle where the band for the first time played a full Fort Minor song in their set.

If you've read any of our tour posts lately, this will be a bit different of what you're used to seeing. Instead of just doing the normal "talk about history in town/state, video, previous show talk, video, speculation about current show" formula, this will instead be a retrospective of all the Music For Relief concerts that Linkin Park have played. But to just quickly sum up their previous show at BlizzCon. They played the normal setlist, but Papercut had a new intro specifically for this show, mashed up with the World of Warcraft theme. They also dropped Numb, Waiting for the End and What I've Done due to time limitations. You can watch the whole show here below.

Chester was reportedly sick, which makes the quality of the screams so much more awesome!​

This is not the first concert being hosted by Music For Relief, that was back in 2005 and was one of the only two shows that year. If you read the previous tour post, this will be a bit of a rehash, but hey, it's not my fault that there is such a limited experience to talk about. Linkin Park played seven songs to "warm up the crowd", one of which was "Frgt/10" with Chali 2na. That was the only time that song has performed live. After the first seven songs, the band brought out Jay-Z and performed the entirety of their 2004 collaborative EP Collision Course. The only recording we had of the show for YEARS was the clips that were used by Artistan News, all proshot and everything. That recording is still unsurfaced, and we'll leave it to the pros to find it. We do have a recording of the full show though, being shot from the audience, and was finally unearthed on Christmas (here in Sweden anyway, screw you with your December 25th crap) by LPLive. The full show was embedded last time, so let's just go selective and look at the only performance EVER of Frgt/10.

The whole song is great, but I just love that little piano piece Mike plays at the end​

2007 brought on the second MFR show, playing a regular setlist... mostly. For the start of the Minutes to Midnight cycle the band pretty much ALWAYS played Given Up, What I've Done and No More Sorrow, but this show lacked Given Up in the setlist. As for the show itself, there isn't that much to say.. there were some gear problems and Mike talked about the XERO days. Moving on...

MFR was supposed to host a whole tour of performances for Linkin Park back in 2008, that was supposed a whole five date Asia tour, but due to Chester injuring his back, the whole tour had to be cancelled. Well damn. 2011 finally saw a return for the Music For Relief benefit shows. Much like with the 2007 show though, it didn't really have anything noteworthy happen. They dropped Empty Spaces and When They Come for Me. And while that is generally unacceptable... I mean why would you drop one of the best songs?! Anyway...

Hey! Here we have something... like a lot of something! For the 2012 show, we have some first timers and some returns from this show. This was the return for With You, Runaway, Points of Authority and Somewhere I Belong to the live shows. With You was the song that had been missing the longest, ever since 2006! As for debuts, we had the now famous Wall of Noise outro on Waiting for the End, the shortened Tinfoil version that plays as the show intro as the band walks on stage, Bleed It Out had the awesome Sabotage bridge for the first time and finally the big one.. this was the the first time that The Ballad Medley was played. Funny thing about that is when the setlist from the show was leaked a few hours early, there was talk that The Ballad Medley was fake and would never be played. Well, people were wrong... as now two touring cycles can prove. Thankfully the whole show was recorded and available for your viewing pleasure here below.

I don't know if this is the iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S source, it's just in 360p! Still awesome though.​

For the 2014 version of the seemingly now annual MFR show (well, there was none in 2013, but almost annual), the band brought it back to the beginning and had other bands perform at the show as well. The Offspring and Heart are some of the bands that joined Linkin Park for the show. As for the band itself, they were joined on stage by Ann and Nancy from Heart on Castle of Glass, Mike Eizenger from Incubus joined on In The End and What I've Done, The Filharmonic jumped in on The Ballad Medley, and then Travis Barker joined them on Bleed It Out, he even had a dueling drum solo with Rob. Rob won, BTW, and that's a fact, not an opinion. But, insanely enough, even though the show was streamed online there is no FULL recording of it. There is a more complete recording out there somewhere, but since that wasn't on the first page of my YouTube search, you can watch the Music For Relief version, featuring other bands and just a few of the Linkin Park songs here below.

If the embed doesn't work correctly, the Linkin Park portion starts at 32:40​

This show has been marketed and named "Relief Live" so strangely enough... there's no livestream! WHAT?! Anyway... The show has also been noted to especially honor Steve Aoki and the charitable effort he has made. So with Aoki there, the question on everyone's mind is "are they gonna play A Light That Never Comes and Darker Than Blood?!!1!" While that is a fairly good question, I think we all would be EXTREMELY surprised if they didn't play those songs in some form. As for the rest of the set, that's all up to speculation. The band didn't change the setlist THAT much during this whole cycle, so if they brought out some rare and special songs for this one show.. life would truly be unfair. That is a joke, don't take that seriously. There is more to life than what Linkin Park plays at their shows.

So even after this whole retrospective thing, enough can't be said about the work that Music For Relief is doing, and they have a presence at most live shows. See over at MusicForRelief.org if you can help out and volunteer at a show when that becomes topical or in general to help them out. Also consider donating to help them. You don't have to have a reason to donate, it's for charity and the wellbeing of people in need.

After this... there's nothing! No Linkin Park shows, no Fort Minor shows, no Stone Temple Pilots shows... well Chester isn't with them anymore so who cares. It has been fun to write these things for close to two years and thank you for reading. For what comes next... did you know that we announced LPA5? That will come sometime in 2016, hopefully in the first quarter of the year.

Did you enjoy this Music For Relief live retrospective? What will we now write unnecessarily long posts about for a while? Any suggestions? Come and discuss in our forums.

SETLIST:
01. From the Inside (Extended Intro)
02. Runaway [Shortened] (Wastelands Transition)
03. Wastelands
04. CASTLE OF GLASS (Experience Version; Martin Luther King Jr Speech, Piano Transition Outro; w/ Oppenheimer Speech)
05. Leave Out All The Rest / Shadow Of The Day / Iridescent (Ballad Medley)
06. Waiting for the End (Apaches Intro w/ 'Until It Breaks' Verse 2; Wall Of Noise Outro)
07. What I've Done (Ext. Guitar Solo Bridge)
08. Bleed It Out (Ext. Intro; Ext. Bridge w/ Sing-along; Ext. Ending)
09. BURN IT DOWN
10. Numb
11. In the End
12. Faint (Extended Outro)

 

Don't believe the rumours.

 

Yeah that was wrong, changed it to the correct word now.

 

Page Hamilton, Mark Hoppus and Adrian Young appeared on-stage with LP. Before that, during Aoki's set, Shinoda and Chester came out to do "Darker Than Blood".

 

Linkin Park right now:

 

There's footage of them doing "Iridescent" so it's extremely likely that the medley was played, yes.

 

Don't think that Linkin Park don't know exactly what they're doing. They're pushing all your buttons just right