Rockers Linkin Park went back to basics to promote their headlining slot at this weekend's (02&03Aug13) Sunset Strip Music Festival in Los Angeles, by printing out their own posters and handing them out in the street.

The group will return to the area where they played their first shows when they headline the annual festival on Saturday night (03Aug13), and Mike Shinoda and his bandmates recalled their days as struggling musicians to get the word out about the open-air street gig.

He tells Rolling Stone magazine, "More than three-quarters of our early shows were on Sunset at (venues) the Roxy and Whisky (A Go Go). I have such vivid memories of playing those shows, promoting those shows, walking around the street handing out flyers or posters or, at that point, giving people cassettes.

"I hand-drew four flyers and went down to (printing store) Kinko's myself with (guitarist) Brad (Delson) and (bassist) Dave (Farrell) and we photocopied them ourselves, cut them up, walked around Hollywood... and handed them out to people.

"We tweeted about it and got some funny reactions - people who thought we were some baby band trying to promote the show... (and) there were people who literally drove up from Anaheim and tracked us down just to say hello and grab a couple of flyers. They're handmade and hand-copied, and we only made a couple of hundred of them."

The project brought back happy memories of when the band first played the fabled Whisky A Go Go: "Our very first show there we opened up for Sx-10, with Sen Dog from Cypress Hill, and System of a Down. It was the era where Incubus played there all the time, System played there quite a bit. And we played our set, which was probably 30 minutes at the time, and it was all friends. Nobody had even heard our music - they were there just to support friends."