Honda Civic Tour 2012

Introduction

The 2012 Honda Civic Tour featuring Linkin Park, Incubus, and Mutemath was a total of 17 shows across the United States and Canada and was the highest grossing tour in North America for Linkin Park in their career.

Before the tour

Five days before the tour kicked off, the band performed at Third Encore for SiriusXM's Town Hall, where they debuted Lost In The Echo for the first time. About twenty fans were invited to the eleven song performance and Q&A, which was aired on SiriusXM Octane (except for Waiting For The End and What I've Done).

Summary

At 17 shows, Honda Civic Tour was the shortest tour for Linkin Park in North America since Projekt Revolution 2003. The tour visited the usual amphitheatres in North America that Linkin Park usually performs at.

To start the tour, the band performed two shows without Incubus as they were technically makeup shows from 2011. Bristow, VA kicked off the tour as a makeup show for the arena show in Washington, D.C. and Uncasville, CT followed as the makeup show from the canceled show at the same venue. After these two shows, Incubus joined Linkin Park and Mutemath for the rest of the tour.

"Different" venues for the band on the east coast included Alpharetta, GA where the band played the 12,000~ capacity Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre for the first time instead of Lakewood Amphitheatre in Atlanta and The Palace of Auburn Hills in Auburn Hills, MI. On the west coast, Linkin Park played their first shows in Calgary and Edmonton, at X-FEST and SONiC BOOM respectively. Unfortunately, Incubus had to pull out of these two shows due to sickness. Next, two arena shows in Vancouver, BC and Tacoma, WA followed and were the band's first shows in those cities since 2004.

Three brand new setlists were debuted for Honda Civic Tour, continuing the band's trend of three setlists for each big tour, something that they started in 2007. Throughout the tour, these setlists went through slight changes with songs being swapped in-and-out for others and moved up-and-down in the setlist order. There is a full breakdown of all three setlists, which shows had what set, and more written by Astat that can be viewed here.

Set A opened with Tinfoil/Faint. The setlist was a modified version of the Headlining European Festival set. Runaway, Blackout, and Crawling were dropped while Lost In The Echo and Victimized (w/ QWERTY) were added. The main set closed with One Step Closer and the encore closed with Bleed It Out. Halfway through the tour, In My Remains replaced Lying From You in this setlist.

Set B opened with A Place For My Head. This setlist was big variation of what the Festival Set was like in Europe earlier in the year, but had the same opening song. When They Come For Me stayed in this setlist for part of the tour before being dropped for In My Remains. The big highlight of this setlist was its uncommonly heavy encore - Tinfoil/Faint, Lying From You/Papercut, and One Step Closer. Lying From You appeared in the encore for the first time since it was part of the Dirt Off Your Shoulders/Lying From You mashup at Holmdel 2004, all the way back on Projekt Revolution 2004. Bleed It Out closed the main set and One Step Closer closed the encore.

Set C opened with With You. This was the first time that the song opened a show since March 15, 2004 in Inglewood, CA. Empty Spaces/When They Come For Me reappeared for the first time in 2012, after not being played on the European Tour. However, it was replaced with In My Remains also partially through the tour. Lying From You and Papercut ended up being split up in the middle of the tour, with just Papercut remaining in the setlist and moving down to the encore. Bleed It Out closed the main set and One Step Closer closed the show.

Highlights of these setlists included the new mashup of Victimized with QWERTY and a medley of Lying From You and Papercut. QWERTY was a song that fans had been wanting to see since 2007, when it was played five times on Projekt Revolution, so the comeback of part of the song was a big welcome to the fanbase. Songs debuted on this tour included Victimized (w/ QWERTY) and In My Remains, with Lost In The Echo getting a debut a few days before the tour started (see above). Crawling was on the setlist for the first few shows of the tour, but was dropped at each one. The song ended up not being played at all on the tour. The band debuted pyrotechnics again for the first time since Projekt Revolution 2004, using them on Burn It Down, Bleed It Out, and One Step Closer.

On August 17th in Camden, NJ, Linkin Park held their 6th LPU Summit for fans across the world. LPU members were treated to a backstage tour, a Meet & Greet, a stripped down performance of In My Remains and The Messenger, and more. A Dell representative was present with the new Linkin Park Dell laptop so that fans could demo the product. Several fans took the time to look at the laptop and had the representative play a rumored song that was included with Music OS, entitled Bruiser. Described by the LPLive staff as "Wretches And Kings-esque", this confirmed that there was at least one full song available on the software, which was released later in 2012.

On September 8th, the tour played Carson, CA's Home Depot Center...the first hometown area stadium headlining show in Linkin Park's career. This show was also the highest grossing show in the band's career... $1,754,267 was the total gross by the sold out crowd of 24,936. Bringing in a lot of camera and production gear, the bands decided on broadcasting the show live on AXS TV.

Live Debuts

Memorable Moments

Starting on August 30th in Englewood, CO, Mike Einziger (guitarist from Incubus) started joining the band on Bleed It Out. He came out after the Sabotage portion of the bridge and jammed with the band on the song.

After the tour

Directly after the tour, Linkin Park went straight to Mexico to play their first headlining shows there in their career. This was the first appearance by LP in the country since they opened for Korn in Mexico City just after Projekt Revolution 2002 ended, over ten and a half years prior. The first show was for MTV World Stage in Monterrey and ended up being shown on MTV and released by the band with The Hunting Party in 2014. The stage for this show was a combination of what the band used on the Honda Civic Tour and a stage idea MTV had for the World Stage performance. After this show, a headlining show took place in Mexico City.

On September 22nd, Linkin Park played the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas, NV between deadmau5 and Taylor Swift. They performed ten songs in thirty minutes, shortening the songs to fit the allotted time. In The End opened the show for the first time ever and featured a unique piano intro. After Waiting For The End, Mike jokingly lead the crowd in chanting "Linkin Park sucks!" due to the show being full of mostly industry people and casual radio fans.

Rehearsals

Production rehearsal

The day before the tour kicked off in Bristow, the band invited fans to the production rehearsal at the venue. On 2012.08.10, LPU winners attended the first half of the Set C setlist for the tour. Fans were also treated to a Meet & Greet as a surprise.

Crew

Name	Job
Jim Digby	Production Manager
Megumi Kusano	Production Coordinator
Melissa "Missy" Allgood	Production Assistant
Erin Masuda	Backstage Coordinator
Cory O'Donnell	Press and Promotions
Ken "Pooch" Van Druten	FOH Engineer
Chris "Cookie" Hoff	Audio System Engineer
Kevin "Tater" McCarthy	Monitor Engineer
Paul White	Wireless Systems Engineer
Ethan Merfy	Stage Manager
Sean Paden	Brad Tech
Jeremy Nielson	Mike Tech
Ted Regier	Phoenix Tech
Warren Johnson	Joe Tech
Brad Stonner	Rob Tech
Dylan Ely	Pro Tools
David "Sammy" Herrington	Carpenter
Maurice Montalvo	Carpenter
Jason Berry	Carpenter
Kevin Hughes	Pyro
Daniel Ostroff	Audio/PA Tech
Mike Freitag	Audio/PA Tech
Todd Hartman	Audio/Stage Tech
Matt Mills	Lighting Director
Tim Solar	Lighting Crew Chief
Allyson Solar	Lighting
Mark Abra	Lighting Tech
Mike Wawro	LED Tech
Skip Twitchell	Video Director
Jordan Goodfellow	Video
Dane Mustola	Video
Tracy Calderon	Video
Chris Wilson	Rigger
Larry Adams	CAT Power
Laura Nordia	Accounting
Tywan McGilbray	Security
Carl Swartz	Security
Lonnie Southall	Security
James Booth	Security
Mark Fiore	Videographer
Adam Ruehmer	LP Underground
Gray Roland	Band Chef

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