Grey Daze, the band fronted by the late Chester Bennington before he joined Linkin Park, has released the third segment of an eight-chapter video documentary about the making of the band's new album, Amends.
In “Revival,” the latest segment shared from the Making Amends documentary, bassist Mace Beyers and drummer Sean Dowdell recall how they found out that Bennington had killed himself in July 2017.
Beyers recounted, “I got a call from my old publicist, who just said, ‘Go online.' He told me Chester had committed suicide and I said, ‘Get the f**k out of here.’ I went online and sure enough it was everywhere.”
Dowdell continued, “I just rang Talinda (Bennington, Chester's widow) and said, ‘Hey, I don’t want details or anything like that, I just wanna know what you guys need. How can I help you?’ She just said, ‘Come out to L.A. and get here.'”
The drummer added, “(Chester) was on top of the world two days before it happened. So I didn’t see it coming. At all. In any way, shape or form when it happened. I just didn’t.”
Amends features newly recorded music with remastered vocals from the two long out-of-print LPs Grey Daze released independently. Dowdell told us what makes the release bittersweet: “The only bitter part is that I just don't get to share it with my friend. You know, Chester and I have a very special friendship and it was a dream of his to try to make sure that we got to put this music out the right way, and that's the bitter part — that he's not here to share it with us. The sweet part is that we took nearly three years to finish it and I think he would be very proud of what we accomplished.”
Amends is due out on April 10th and features guest musicians like Chester's 23-year-old son Jaime Bennington, Korn's Brian “Head” Welch and James “Munky” Shaffer and Bush's Chris Traynor.