In this situation, many bands would not want to do anything to take the focus away from their CD. While live records generally don’t approach the popularity of studio albums, it seemed plausible that Live In Texas could deflect some attention from Meteora and perhaps even interrupt the CD’s current momentum.

But Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington predicted that Live In Texas would do nothing to hurt Meteora.

“I really don’t know if we can steal Meteora’s’ thunder,” he said. “I think it’s had a pretty big bang so far.”

Seven months later, Bennington’s opinion has proven true. The band’s momentum has rolled on unabated. A recent single, “Lying From You,” topped the modern rock chart and went to number two on mainstream rock and remains in the top 20 of both charts. A new single, meanwhile, “Breaking The Habit,” has climbed to number eight at modern rock and 11 at mainstream rock.

Linkin Park, meanwhile, are returning to the road for another major round of concerts, headlining the “Projekt Revolution,” with Snoop Dogg, Korn, Less Than Jake and the Used as support acts.

For those who want a taste of what Linkin Park will offer on these shows, Live In Texas is a good place to start.

The DVD features a 70-minute live performance by Linkin Park culled from shows this past summer in Houston and Dallas when the band was featured on the Summer Sanitarium tour headlined by Metallica. A CD included in the package features 12 of the songs from those concerts.

The number one selling CD of 2001, Hybrid Theory sold 14 million copies worldwide (eight million in the United States), making the Los Angeles-based band one of the most successful debut acts in history. The CD spawned three number one singles, including “Crawling” (a song that won a 2002 Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance) and earned a pile of strong reviews for the way the group seamlessly blended their rock, hip-hop and electronica influences within the CD’s catchy, hard-hitting songs.

It’s a sound that ironically didn’t immediately capture the attention of the record industry. Formed in 1996 under the original name of Xero by drummer Rob Bourdon, guitarist Brad Delson and MC/vocalist Mike Shinoda, the group later added sampler/scratcher Joe Hahn and bassist Phoenix (David Farrell) before completing the lineup in 1999 with Bennington.

Before Warner Bros. signed Linkin Park in 1999, the group had played more than 40 showcases for labels and got turned down every time. Even Warner Bros. passed on the band twice before taking a chance on Linkin Park.

“We definitely struggled a lot to get our deal and a lot of people just had their reason,” said Bourdon in a separate interview. “They would say like ‘Oh yeah, we think you’re good, but your style of music is already happening. It’s (going to be) already over with by the time you get an album out and it’s not going to be the in thing anymore.’”

Warner Bros. clearly is having the last laugh over their decision to finally take a chance on Linkin Park. Rather than failing to deliver on the promise of Hybrid Theory, Meteora not only solidifies the band’s rap-rock sound, it finds Linkin Park branching out on several tracks.

On the song “Break The Habit,” for instance, a 10-piece orchestra was brought in to sweeten this brisk electronica-tinged track.

“Lying From You” gets a twist from a sample of what sounds like a fractured string part that is laced within the song’s driving rock sound.

Other songs, such as “Nobody’s Listening” and “Somewhere I Belong” (the hard-rocking lead single which debuted at number two on Billboard magazine’s modern rock chart), also feature some nifty sonic treats.

“(“Nobody’s Listening”) has like a Japanese pan flute that we kind of cut up and moved around,” Bourdon said. “One of the sounds from ‘Somewhere I Belong,’ the first single, is actually an acoustic guitar that Chester was playing, and Mike cut it up into a bunch of different pieces and flipped it around and effected it (to create) the sweeping sound you hear in the beginning.”

With the success of Meteora, Linkin Park no longer have to worry about any talk of a sophomore slump. More importantly, Bennington said, the second CD has proven that Linkin Park has what it takes to remain a force on the music scene for some time to come.

“I think the record itself has proven to the world that we can continue writing good records,” Bennington said of Meteora. “I think our advantage was we didn’t spend our entire lives together as one band writing that first record. Literally our group kind of came together very fast and the record came together very fast in the sense that these songs, the oldest song that we have is probably six years old, where a lot of bands, they spend their entire lives writing the first record. We have the ability to keep writing consistently good songs. That’s what we want to do. We don’t want to be in a bandwagon of any sort. We want to write songs that will stand the test of time, that have meaning, that have melody, that have structure and that make sense to people.”