It was the mid-90s, and Chester Bennington was sitting in an Arizona State University maths lecture. He wasn’t a college student – far from it. By that point, he had dropped out of high school to focus on his band, Grey Daze, and, without a job to keep him occupied, day after day he would accompany his housemate and bandmate, drummer Sean Dowdell, to classes. Hell, he’d even take the exams for a laugh. “My maths class was so big there was 400-500 people in it,” remembers Sean. “They were handing out tests to everyone in the row and it wasn’t like he could say, ‘I’m not enrolled in this class’, so he took the test and bombed badly.”
This is just one of many heartwarming stories of a man who was a “playful ball of energy” and who never took life too seriously… except when it came to making the music he loved. Sure, Chester found it funny to gatecrash his bandmate’s uni lectures, but the truth was, following Sean to college made it easier to get a lift to band practice in the evenings. “He was always wanting to create great music,” says Sean. “If we were at a party and there was a guitar in the room, he’d find it somehow and
