Photo: ANJELLA/SAKIPHOTOGRAPHY
Before Linkin Park, Chester Bennington sang in Grey Daze. The band played their last show in 1998 and planned to reunite before the vocalist's tragic death in 2017. In the years since, the band has honored their late bandmate with two new albums that feature remastered and previously unheard vocals from Bennington, but they haven't played live in nearly 23 years.
It looks like 2023 will be the year that all changes. Grey Daze took to Instagram on Monday (January 9) to announce their first show since initially parting ways all those years ago. They'll be playing a small festival in their home state of Arizona with Godsmack, Fozzy, I Prevail, NothingMore, The Warning, and The Black Moods on May 6 at the Ak-Chin Pavilion in Phoenix. The band also revealed how they plan to honor Bennington during the show.
"After many requests to perform live, we finally said yes!" they wrote on Instagram. "We will honor our original intention while still paying homage to Chester, by bringing in guest vocalist Chris Hodges @hodgesofficial to perform with us."
Though there's a lot in the vault that Grey Daze wants to release, drummer Sean Dowdell recently divulged that there's also material "that will never see the light of day."
"I have a lot of stuff with Chester and myself that will never see the light of day because it's not for commercial consumption — it was just he and I sharing a moment or being at a party or hanging out or laughing at each other or making fun of each other, just being buddies," he said. "That stuff doesn't need to be shown to the world. It's something I hold dear. I have a lot of magical moments with him that are now just mine."
As far as what they still plan to release, Dowdell said: "We can definitely do another acoustic EP with Chester's vocal tracks. There's a whole other album out there — if I can get my hands on that, we'll talk about maybe rewriting some of that stuff, too. Who knows? There are some songs that we wrote with Chester that we never got to record. I'm trying to figure out a way to maybe go and re-record those as Grey Daze songs, but they might not necessarily have Chester's voice on them."