A funny thing happened to guitarist BRAD DELSON on the way to law school: HIS BAND BECAME A HIT. What happens when faced with choosing between graduate school and life as a professional musician? HMMM. WHAT WOULD YOU DECIDE?

By Tom Lanham

Roughly a year ago, Brad Delson thought his future was set. After years of arduous book- cracking-he plowed through so many texts he still owes his alma mater, UCLA, some long- overdue library fines-he graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Communications, and made plans to attend law school the next semester. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal-eagle forum: The band he'd formed for fun four years earlier, Hybrid Theory (soon to be rechristened Linkin Park), started attracting attention, serious publishing-deal/ major-label attention.

It wasn't a difficult decision. Delson chose the high road, ditched enrollment, and began showcasing for contract-waving execs around Los Angeles.

Sure enough, the guitarist, now only 22, was rewarded for his efforts. Warner Bros. snapped the group up in a millisecond. "We just put all of our eggs in one basket and went for it," Delson recalls. "And it's really paid off. Even my parents were totally supportive. I mean, giving up law for music? I don't think a lot of parents would encourage their children to pursue music, because it's not the most financially stable thing to do."

True enough. But 'Hybrid Theory,' Linkin Park's major-label debut, could rocket Delson and company to the Limp Bizkit big time. Unlike the albums of other rap-rock notables of late, Linkin Park's disc melds metal and hip-hop in a unique, hook-oriented fashion, a la English pioneers Black Grape, even tracing it back a few years to the softer schematics aggro anthems like 'Papercut,' 'Crawling,' and the lead-off radio hit 'One Step Closer' smartly blend Delson's alternately jagged and fluid guitar riffs with the surly scratching of DJ Joseph Hahn, punched aloft by Rob Bourdon's dinosaur drumbeat. And for most of the choruses, the cocktail-smooth crooning of co-frontman Chester Bennington succumbs to the insistent snap-snarl of MC/Toastmaster Mike Shinoda. No wonder Linkin Park wound up wowing the bigwigs-"Hybrid Theory" is a heady entry in a rap-rock race populated by dolts. We're talking one helluva smart rock record here.

Along the creative path, Delson recalls, many naysayers cajoled him, told him he got it wrong. The group should sound more like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, it should follow that well-outlined map to rap-rock riches. "But we've been very conscious of preserving our artistic vision in the face of such criticism," Delson says. "And we didn't really think about it. This is just how we started writing songs. Mike (whom Delson knew since junior high) had exclusively been producing hip-hop beats for MCs and had done band stuff, so it was our brainchild to pool our creative energies and start writing songs. Now," he adds proudly, "our sound is so cohesive, it's really difficult to separate the hip-hop from the rock."

And part of the reason for that is Bennington, an Arizona native who impressed a then- singerless group by tracking his vocal parts over the band's rough-hewn demo tape in a professional recording studio-he wanted the job that bad. Another reason is Delson himself, a self-confessed disciple of MTV (he knows every character and every episode of the network's 'Real World' series) who has one mission in six-string life: "I'm a song structure nut, and I want to write songs that really capture the listener's attention and take them on a journey each time. So we really worked on our songwriting for a long time, because we wanted each of the 12 cuts on 'Hybrid Theory' to be as strong as the others.

"And our music is definately emotional," Delson continues. Instrumentally, how did he capture those emotions? "On the record, I played a Paul Reed Smith, which I love. And the reason I love that guitar is that it's so versatile, in terms of its distorted sound and its clean sound. That's why I also like to play it live, because I don't lose anything when I go back and forth from the cleans to the heavy parts. But I also used an Ibanez on the record, which I love for its heavier sound. And I doubled almost every guitar part, first with the PRS, which we split-panned, left and right. And for the really heavy parts, I'd do two more tracks with the Ibanez. So there were often four tracks, and each of those tracks is my guitar going through a mixture of heads and amps that created one tone. so the guitar you're hearing on the record is pretty much just a wall of guitar; it came from a lot of layering."

And, believe it or not, Delson says he's still in touch with a lot of his old college chums. Several of them called to congratulate him when LA radio station KROQ put "One Step Closer" in heavy rotation. "They were almost as excited as we were about the sudden attention the band's been getting!"