Veterans Stadium 2003

Veterans Stadium 2003 is a live DVD release by Linkin Park in March 2023, included in the Meteora (20th Anniversary Edition).

Background

After headlining a Linkin Park Underground Tour in clubs and their second arena tour ever, Projekt Revolution 2003, Linkin Park set off on their first and only stadium tour in North America - Summer Sanitarium 2003 opening for Metallica. Joining Metallica would be Limp Bizit, Linkin Park, Deftones, and Mudvayne. Summer Sanitarium took the band across the country in about five weeks, kicking off in Pontiac, Michigan on July 4th and wrapping up in Metallica's hometown of San Francisco, California on August 10th. The show in Philadelphia was the sixth show of the tour and took place three weeks before the band's filming of their famous Live In Texas DVD in Houston and Irving, Texas.

Along the way, Linkin Park took the opportunity to make up three of their canceled Projekt Revolution 2003 shows from April - Rochester, New York which was supposed to kick off the tour was canceled due to a snow storm, and both Council Bluffs, Iowa and Valley Center, Kansas were canceled due to the band needing to shoot their music video for "Faint" in Los Angeles that day.

Composition

Tour set from the Live In Texas DVD, likely a scanned copy of the band's setlist before editing was done

Linkin Park debuted a brand new setlist for Summer Sanitarium 2003. To kick off the show, they mashed up "Dead Skin Mask" by Slayer and a speech from the 1970 film Cromwell, featuring Chester Bennington screaming in very high pitched vocals over it. This went into a shortened version of "Foreword" before the famous run of "Don't Stay", "Somewhere I Belong", and "Lying From You" kicked off the show just like the tracklisting on Meteora. Following "Papercut", "Points Of Authority", "Runaway", "Faint", and "From The Inside", Linkin Park made some changes to the set.

"Hit The Floor" was dropped and ended up never being played again despite being in the setlists for every show the first two tours. In its place, Linkin Park debuted "Figure.09" for the first time, which stuck around for most of the rest of 2003 - but not every show, it didn't make it into the fall and holiday 2003 setlists after Asia and it didn't get played at the first two tours of 2004 either. It made its final appearance in a setlist as a live song for Projekt Revolution 2004 the next summer. After the "Reanimated" "With You", LP added a new buildup intro to "By Myself" which featured Mike rapping the bridge lyrics slowly over the intro of the song. "P5hng Me A*wy" came next, which was a highlight in 2003 and 2004 as it only stayed in the show for less than one year total. And then instead of playing "Nobody's Listening", which was dropped until Tokyo in October, the band debuted "Numb" for the first time. Ironically, "Numb" didn't get much of a reaction on this tour from fans as it was one of the slower songs in the set for the time period and also had Mike on a keyboard on stage while the band was opening for Metallica.

"Crawling", "In The End", "A Place For My Head", and "One Step Closer" closed out the show, meaning "Easier To Run" which came after "In The End" was dropped from the show like "Hit The Floor" and was also never played live again. The band went on years later to say "Easier To Run" was collectively their least favorite song as a group.

As they did with the first two tours for Meteora, Linkin Park kept their nods to Reanimation in the setlist - "With You" featured the Reanimation-style instrumental in the verses and was commonly shouted out by the band before the song, "P5hng Me A*wy" was played in full which makes it the only song from the album played in full more than once ("Frgt/10" was played for just one show in 2005 with Chali 2na guesting), "Crawling" featured a short "Krwlng" intro, and "One Step Closer" had the fan-favorite bridge from "1stp Klosr" that Jonathan Davis originally sang.

This setlist was liked so much by Linkin Park that they kept it when they went to Europe, Australia and Asia after this tour as they headlined arenas, stadiums, and festivals across much of the rest of the world.

Release

The Meteora 20 release was announced on January 27, 2023 for a release date of March 24, 2003. Veterans Stadium 2003 was included on the second DVD alongside Live In Seoul 2003.

Veterans Stadium 2003 becomes the first live DVD by Linkin Park to be released as a second show from a tour they already released a live DVD from.

Track Listing

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1	Intro	Hanneman Jeffrey John, Díaz Tomás Enrique Araya
2	Don't Stay	Linkin Park
3	Somewhere I Belong	Linkin Park
4	Lying From You	Linkin Park
5	Papercut	Bennington Chester Charles, Bourdon Robert G, Delson Brad, Hahn Joseph, Shinoda Mike
6	Points of Authority	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda
7	Runaway	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda, Wakefield Mark
8	Faint	Linkin Park
9	From The Inside	Linkin Park
10	Figure.09	Linkin Park
11	With You	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, King John Robert, Shinoda, Simpson Michae
12	By Myself	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda
13	P5hng Me A*wy	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda, Stephen Richards
14	Numb	Linkin Park
15	Crawling	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda
16	In The End	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda
17	A Place For My Head	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda, Wakefield
18	One Step Closer	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Hahn, Shinoda

Personnel

Linkin Park

• Chester Bennington: Vocals, Rhythm Guitar
• Mike Shinoda: Vocals, Rhythm Guitar
• Brad Delson: Lead Guitar, Backing Vocals
• Dave "Phoenix" Farrell: Bass Guitar
• Joseph Hahn: Turntables, Sampling, Programming
• Rob Bourdon: Drums