Eerie rap-metal sextet Linkin Park will join Stone Temple Pilots and angst-ridden hitmakers Staind on the third edition of Family Values this fall.
“As it stands right now, it’ll be Stone Temple Pilots, with us playing before them and Linkin Park playing before us, and then two unknown bands that I’m sure will rock also,” Staind frontman Aaron Lewis said.
A source close to Linkin Park confirmed the Southern California group is on the trek. Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland said in April that STP would top the bill.
Family Values producer John Scher said Monday (June 25) that organizers are not ready to officially announce this year’s lineup, but he said that the tour will storm the nation in October and November.
Staind recently spent three weeks ruling the Billboard 200 albums chart with their second major-label record, Break the Cycle. Stone Temple Pilots just released their fifth album, Shangri-La Dee Da, last week, while Linkin Park are still working their breakthrough debut, last year’s Hybrid Theory.
The three bands all appeared at the KROQ Weenie Roast festival in Irvine, California, on Saturday, with STP making a surprise appearance. Staind’s set was disrupted when basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal buzzed down over the crowd in a private helicopter while the group was playing the ballad “Outside.”
“Couldn’t it have been during a big, slamming part where it would have gotten all mixed in with the wash?” Lewis said. “It was right during… the softest part of the whole set.”
“If he was here,” guitarist Mike Mushok said, “I’d punch him right in his waist, ’cause that’s about where I’d come up to on him…. Just kidding, Shaq.”
The Los Angeles Lakers center had flown in to join 311 on a rendition of “Psycho,” which he recently recorded with 311 singer/guitarist Nick Hexum and drummer Chad Sexton and Korn bassist Fieldy.
The Korn-founded Family Values tour made two successful runs in the autumns of 1998 and 1999 but sat out the 2000 season.
Korn headlined the inaugural run, with Limp Bizkit, Rammstein, Orgy and Ice Cube in tow. Limp Bizkit returned to top the 1999 trek, which featured a varying lineup that included Filter, Staind, the Crystal Method, Run-D.M.C., Mobb Deep, and Method Man and Redman.
Each edition of the outing was among the most successful tours of the year.