Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)

by Serj Tankian

The answer was unequivocal: No. Way. In fact, I was told that if we so much as went onstage, we’d all be arrested. At this point, I huddled with my bandmates to consider our options. There were no good ones, so I proposed a fairly radical one: Let’s call the LAPD’s bluff. Let’s just go up there and play anyway. Were they really going to arrest us in front of ten thousand rabid fans?

The band’s lawyer was nearby at the bar and overheard my proposal. He called me over to a window that looked out on the parking lot where the fans were gathered and opened it. “You see everyone over there?” he said, pointing out of the window. “They’re all going to sue you. If you guys get up onstage, regardless of whether you get arrested or not, if shit gets out of hand, if people get hurt, everyone here is going to sue you. And you’ll be screwed because you’ll have violated the fire marshal’s orders.” It was a sobering moment. Just the mention of a lawsuit stirred enough bad memories for me to drop the idea entirely.

The LAPD responded with the kind of restraint the LAPD had long been known for at the time: they showed up in riot gear and on horseback, shot tear gas and water cannons at the fans, and then beat the shit out of as many of them as they could seem to get their hands on. The riot raged through the streets of Hollywood for six hours before everyone was dispersed. In the end, six people were arrested, many more were injured, and the damage ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Even though this person who’d written the letter was a stranger, he was also a fan, which maybe put me in a unique position to actually have a positive impact on him. So, I did something I’d never done before and have never done since: I called him. Needless to say, he was surprised to hear from me. When he got over the initial shock, we actually had a really good conversation. I was trying to get him to see that things weren’t as hopeless and grim as he thought they were, and by the end of the call, I felt like he was coming around. I went to sleep that night feeling pretty good. That was September 10.

The two events were unrelated but indicative of a troubling truth: free speech is always the first casualty of war.

In places like Nazi Germany, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, the media stoked anger and resentment toward minority groups, marginalized criticism of the government, and ultimately shaped the way conflicts were perceived.

In spite of this, we still found moments of lightness, fortunately. One of the other bands on that tour was Rammstein, this German metal band with a wicked sense of humor and a taste for over-the-top stage antics. We ended up hiring one of their friends to work security for us, an ex-wrestler known as Herman the German. Herman was a sweet guy with an almost impenetrably thick German accent. One day, Daron couldn’t find the black leather pants that he liked to wear onstage, so Herman was running around the backstage area in a frenzy, going room to room, yelling “Whegh argh Daron’s lazer pants?!” Watching this large German man scurrying around shouting about “lazer pants” sent the rest of us into fits of unstoppable laughter. The mere mention of the phrase “lazer pants” became a surefire way to lighten the mood throughout the rest of the tour.

The whole idea of treating art like it was a competitive sport, with winners and losers, was just so counter to my ethos. You really can’t rank art. One song or one album is not objectively better than another. Different people respond to different music differently. That’s the whole point. Grading art is like grading emotions.

Tom had been to Ozzfest and other heavy music festivals and was disturbed by what he’d occasionally experienced: young fans sporting tattoos and t-shirts with racist and fascist slogans. He wanted to see someone or something pushing back against this far-right messaging. He imagined a sort of traveling “freedom school” offering a counter-narrative and promoting progressive causes. Tom initially figured Rage could champion this initiative at their shows. There was just one problem: before he could get this idea off the ground, Rage broke up.

When it came to the new album, Daron had the amazing idea to design the cover art to look like a pirated CD-R, which I thought was brilliant. And in keeping with the theme, we decided to title it Steal This Album!—a nod to Abbie Hoffman’s counterculture classic, Steal This Book.

I still don’t totally understand what that phone call was really about. Daron is a smart guy, but I think emotions were clouding out logic. His family’s roots are in Iraq—they’re Iraqi-Armenians—so he had complicated feelings about the war there. On one hand, I think he liked the idea of the Baathists being forced out of power; on the other, he may have realized that things were likely to get worse without them, as they eventually did.

In the moment, everyone seemed to understand. They knew I’d really been struggling since the breakup with my ex and hadn’t been happy working on the new music. I don’t think anyone was surprised by my announcement, but I’m sure they all assumed that once I had some time and breathing room, I’d change my mind. Maybe, deep down, I thought the same thing. In the short term, I hoped that by making it clear how unhappy I was in the band, Daron might be more willing to cede some creative control, to allow a more egalitarian ethos to take hold. I thought he might reflect on what was making me so miserable and try to alleviate it. In fact, the opposite was true. It seemed to me that Daron felt the band falling apart, so he gripped the reins even more tightly to bring it under control. As I sensed that happening, I totally disengaged. I was physically present at those sessions, but not spiritually.

Early in System’s existence, Daron had convinced me that it wouldn’t be fair to divide our publishing royalties into four equal shares since he and I were doing the vast majority of the songwriting. That seemed reasonable back then, and it was in my financial best interest to agree with him anyway. Instead, I devised a formula for figuring out the publishing shares on each song, which, according to my business manager, was a nice, scientific way of breaking it down. If you contributed the music to a verse, chorus, or bridge, you got a certain percentage. Ditto for the lyrics. It was all worked out on a spreadsheet. Although all big band decisions were decided by a vote of all four members, in the case of the publishing splits, since Daron and I were the primary writers, normally the two of us would simply hash it out and decide what was equitable. On “Question!” in particular, I’d written both the music and the lyrics, and Daron had just contributed a little guitar tagline, which—if I’m being charitable—was worth about 5 to 10 percent of the publishing. But when it came time to divvy it up, he received 20 percent. It seemed far-reaching, especially since I was only getting 5 to 10 percent on most songs on that album. It’s not as if Daron forced this on me, but again, I got Zen about it and decided this was not a fight worth fighting. I let him have it. This was a pattern that repeated itself on several of the songs from these sessions. Whatever the creative conflict was, m...

Looking back, that release scheme looks like a marketing masterstroke. We became one of very few artists to ever hit #1 on the Billboard charts with two different albums in the same year. It was a huge commercial triumph for the band, albeit one that I had a hard time getting very excited about. In many ways, despite having some great music on them, those albums felt like a personal nadir for me. When I listen to them, even now, I’m reminded of all the heartache I had when we began making them, all the concessions I made along the way, and the spiritual confusion that let it all happen.

Nunes introduced me to another Republican congressman and told me that this particular congressman was a huge music fan. I can’t recall this guy’s name, but he was an interesting study in contrasts. Unlike a lot of the other congressmen I met, this guy was whip-smart and politically astute. But his conservative political views didn’t seem to match up at all with his musical taste. He had a poster of John Lennon on his office wall and told me he was a big fan of the radical left-wing proto-punk band MC5. I knew MC5 founder Wayne Kramer through his work with Axis of Justice and arranged for Wayne to send him some cool merch. On the issue of Genocide recognition, this congressman knew the issue inside and out. “I will lay out for you exactly why the United States doesn’t recognize the Genocide,” he told me. “We sell Apache helicopters to Turkey, a NATO member. Turkey allows us to use the Incirlik and Izmir air bases which are absolutely vital to support our forces in Iraq. I know it’s wrong, but that’s why the government won’t allow this resolution to pass. It’s just geopolitical priorities.”

This argument was simmering within the band as we rehearsed for a couple of one-off shows we’d agreed to do at the end of 2005: one for MTV in New York, and the other, KROQ’s Acoustic Christmas concert in LA. On a break from what were definitely tense rehearsal sessions, Daron was riding in the passenger seat of my car as I drove, when he revealed that Shavo was thinking about suing me if I didn’t agree to do Ozzfest the next summer.

As Daron explained it, Shavo’s view was that when I responded to management’s initial inquiry about next year’s shows, “Sounds good. Let’s talk about it later,” that was a binding contract. Daron didn’t come out and say that he was going to join this lawsuit, but he also didn’t say he wasn’t going to, instead muttering something along the lines of “We’ll do what we’ve got to do.” (John, for his part, made it clear he’d never sue me.)

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have ever taken the lawsuit that seriously, but having seen what kind of damage can be done by one, I hired lawyers to help evaluate whether this threat was real. I spent several thousand dollars on legal fees and was advised to find an amicable solution. In the end, I signed an agreement promising to do the Ozzfest dates in return for collective liability dissolution, a.k.a. nobody suing me. It was both ridiculous and tragic. It felt like something in the band broke that day, perhaps irretrievably.

“Wait, I’m a little confused,” he confessed. “Why are you confused?” “Well, if you’re interested in this kind of work, why did you say no to The Passion of the Christ?” The controversial Mel Gibson–directed film had come out two years earlier and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score. I think Marq could tell by the look on my face that now I was the one who was confused. “I was helping put that together and wanted you to do some music for it,” he continued. “The answer I got back was that you weren’t interested.” “Huh?” I stammered. “I said what?” “I was told that you passed on it,” he said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” I told him. “Who did you talk to?” “Your agent,” he replied. After Marq left, I tried to trace what had happened. I called my film agent at CAA, and he knew nothing about it. Then I tried my booking agent at William Morris, a guy named Don Muller. “Don, I was just meeting with Marq Roswell about some film music,” I said. “Did you tell him I couldn’t do Passion of the Christ?” The phone line got quiet. “Yeah,” he admitted, barely above a whisper. “Why?” I asked. “Why on earth would you tell him that?” Again, silence. Then he just spoke a single word: “Beno.”

I want to give Beno the benefit of the doubt. He’s a good manager who did a lot of things right to help a not obviously commercial band achieve great commercial success. But it seemed to me that there were some conflicts of interest with him managing me as a solo artist. In the case of this Passion of the Christ opportunity, if I had worked on it back around 2003 or 2004, that might’ve further distanced me from System at a time when I was already floating out of the band’s orbit.

With this in mind, I decided I needed a new team to work with. I already had a new record label, Warner Bros., and now, I got a new management team—Coldplay’s manager Dave Holmes, along with my friend George Tonikian to handle the day-to-day stuff—and a new lawyer, too.

In 2011, we were performing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on a night when one of his other guests was Robin Williams. I met Robin backstage; he was pretty subdued—particularly in comparison to his frenetic stage presence—until I told him the name of my band. Once I did, it was as if I freed the genie out of the bottle. He went running down the hallway of the studio, shouting, “Jay! Jay! The Flying Cunts of Chaos are here!” I considered that as much of a ringing endorsement for the name as there could possibly be.

Finally, I sent it to Tom Holkenborg, the Dutch DJ/producer/composer who records under the name Junkie XL.

Even with all those things working against us, the show might’ve been salvageable if not for the one element you can never totally control: the audience. The venue was filled with people who were diehard fans of both System and my solo album, but I’m pretty sure none of them had ever been in the presence of a violin or a cello. So, while a coterie of aging, formally clad classical musicians were struggling to follow along with the arrangements, long-haired yahoos in black concert t-shirts pressed themselves forward toward the front row, double-fisting beers, pounding on the stage, and shouting for us to play “Sugar” and “Chop Suey!” It was like one group came thinking they’d be playing Wagner to retirees, and the other came expecting the mosh pit at Ozzfest. After the show, my piano player came off, shaking his head in disbelief, muttering “They’re just uncivilized!”

The challenges were unlike any I’d faced before. I remember being in rehearsals at the Oberon Theater in Boston, and the scene we were working on needed to be extended, so our director Diane just turned to me and said, “We need more music. Can you add something here and end with that same little piece we had before?” It took me a second to realize that she meant she needed me to write more music on the spot. Like, right now. They were going to run the scene again in two minutes. In less time than it normally takes for a band to tune up their instruments, I had to compose new music and teach it to the musicians, despite the fact I don’t read music and certainly can’t notate it. Fortunately, the musicians were total pros and could decipher what I was trying to tell them. Once they did, the scene worked better, the director was happy, and we moved on. Shit like that happened all the time. It made me work faster on my feet and trust my intuition.

Unfortunately, Prometheus Bound never got to go to Broadway, but the process itself was genuinely inspiring. I’m not sure I’ve ever worked so hard to make so little money in my life, but it was worth every ounce of sweat.

It all comes back to an idea that could be called compassionate confrontation, something that I struggled with for a long time. As I’ve mentioned before, when I first started meditating, I mistook passivity for nonaggression.

I needed to learn how to advocate for myself without doing it at the expense of others. I wish instead of swallowing all that negativity, I could’ve just pulled Daron aside and said, “I love you, brother, but this is not right. I care about you, but I don’t like the way we’re operating.” I walked away from the band rather than trying to deal with the problems I had in it head-on. My artistic vulnerability played me. That’s on me.

Almost immediately after we’d decided to tour, talk turned to making new music. It didn’t feel like the band’s creative dynamic had changed enough for it to be an appreciably different experience than the last time we’d recorded together. So every time they talked about going into the studio, I’d balk. In this way, I suppose the System reunion represented a culmination of both a courage to say “yes” to challenging enterprises and the value of saying “no” with empathy. I managed to decline their entreaties to record new material without ditching the band as a performing entity or severing my relationships with Daron, Shavo, and John.

Other issues lingered beneath the surface. There had long been a feeling that I used the band when it suited my activism, when I wanted it to give me a bigger megaphone than I’d have on my own. If I’m being honest, this is a fair criticism—albeit not one I’d apologize for. I don’t want my bandmates to feel used, but I genuinely believe that some things are more important than music, or the band, and this was one of them.

“The thing is, though,” I continued, “I don’t want to hold you guys back. This is your dream. This is what you’ve worked for your whole life. You deserve to have this.” I looked at Daron, Shavo, and John, knowing what I said next would hit hard. “I think you guys should find a new singer.”

For the longest time, System Of A Down was about the four of us. We’d built it up from nothing, we’d been through all the battles together along the way, and if any one of us left, it simply wouldn’t be the same thing anymore. A couple of years earlier, I’d even tried to codify this with a legal document that stated that if someone left the band for any reason—other than, God forbid, dying—that the remaining members couldn’t use the band name without him. Everyone else resisted that idea, probably because they sensed I was looking for a way out of the band at the time, and they weren’t ready to kiss it goodbye. I’d initially been upset that they didn’t see System the same way I did, but after a while, I stopped being so precious about it, and just thought of these three guys not as my bandmates but as my close friends.

“Think about it,” I said. “We can be the unique band that’s able to make this transition amicably, where the member of the band who’s leaving is 100 percent on-board with the new direction. I’ll do press and talk about it positively. I’ll make it clear that I support you guys.” I don’t think the guys were totally shocked by my announcement. In fact, I almost sensed they’d expected it, or at least something like it. They didn’t dismiss the idea outright, but their collective response at the time was for me to essentially pump the brakes. They asked me not to announce that I was leaving the band. They promised not to pressure me into touring anymore. Management would merely present show offers as they came up. If I said yes, we’d do them. If I said no, we wouldn’t. End of story.

I sort of thought they’d forgotten about the whole idea of hiring a new singer, but a year or so later, John, Shavo, and I were at a fundraiser in Glendale, and this singer I knew got up and sang this beautiful Armenian song. Shavo was sitting next to me at the table. He leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder. “By the way,” he nodded toward the singer, “we tried this guy out as a singer. The only problem was that he couldn’t scream and growl.” I was taken aback. Not that they had been auditioning replacements, but that they’d kept it a secret. “Why didn’t you guys ever tell me?” I whispered. Shavo shrugged. “I dunno.” I turned toward Shavo, now looking directly at him. “Listen, he’s a good singer,” I said. “I can literally take him in the parking lot right now and teach him how to growl. You should really consider him.” In more recent years, I pitched another friend to them as a potential replacement that they ought to seriously consider. But I don’t think they ever did.

Again, I’d been the one who’d been reluctant to start making music together. The year before we played in Yerevan, though, I tried to test the waters.

We worked on both songs, and if I’m being honest, some of the changes Daron made to the arrangement on the one I’d written didn’t thrill me. This felt like déjà vu all over again, since this sort of thing had happened a fair bit during previous System sessions. I’d bring in a song, and by the time the band was finished with it, I didn’t even like it anymore.

When I was done, what I had looked like a bullet-pointed manifesto, mapping out a creative future for System Of A Down:

Equal creative input: Daron and I will both contribute equal numbers of songs. If Shavo has riffs to contribute, we’ll work them into songs too. Everyone in the band has veto power over any song. If anyone doesn’t like a song, we’ll set it aside.

Equal publishing splits: Regardless of who wrote the song, the publishing should be split e...

Director’s Cut: Whoever wrote the song makes the final decision on it.

Develop new concepts for releasing music: Instead of simply putting out albums and touring, let’s find other visual and creative formats to launch our music into the world.

This discussion went round and round, getting more and more heated. Finally, John stood up and slammed his meaty hand against the table in his typical Tarzan fashion. “Enough of this bullshit!” he thundered. “You write the music,” he yelled, pointing at Daron, then turned to me. “You write the lyrics! I play the drums! He plays the bass! That’s the way the band works. That’s the way it has always worked! Why do you have to make this more complicated than it is?”

I sent them some of my songs to work on alongside Daron’s. I asked them to send me whatever they came up with together in the rehearsal space, then I’d offer feedback or add my own parts. I felt that Daron, like most artists, often had an insecurity when bringing in the songs he wrote, at least initially, and got weird about sending the stuff they were working on to me. He and John weren’t on great terms at the time anyway—they had their own personal squabbles—and when John and Beno finally sent me the music anyway, John and Daron ended up having a major falling out.

The demos they sent weren’t thrilling anyway, to be honest. I wasn’t crazy about the changes they’d made to my music, and a lot of those songs I loved that Daron had played for me months earlier were not the ones they were actively working on. Daron liked the band to work on all his songs—the good ones and the not-so-good ones—and then at the end of all that, we’d pick which ones sounded best. His contention was that the songs sometimes got better with time, effort, and lots of discussion. He may have been right about that, but to me, it just felt inefficient and unfocused, which was what I’d been hoping to avoid when I wrote the manifesto.

Even with all we’d been through as a band, I didn’t hesitate. I was totally in. At the time, I was in New Zealand, but I’d be back in LA in a week or so and we could record it then. As excited messages zipped around the band’s group text, I suggested that we write something specifically about what was going on in Artsakh. The next text in the long chain came from Daron: “Fuck this. I’m out. I don’t want to do this.”

I really liked what Daron had written, a Sabbath-y rock song called “Protect the Land.” Management thought we should put out two songs, though, and Daron volunteered that he had a second one, “Genocidal Humanoidz,” ready to go as well. I didn’t love that one as much, but realized I had to put those feelings on the shelf.

When we got in the studio to record, Daron micromanaged every aspect of the recording—even more than before. He’d written the music and lyrics to both songs and had already recorded demos himself. He wanted John to play the drums exactly as he heard them in his head and wanted me to sing my vocal parts exactly as he’d sung them on the demo. This was the kind of stuff I’d sworn I wasn’t going to stand for anymore, but again, I decided to suck it up. After all, people were dying. Azerbaijan was shelling homes in Artsakh with cluster bombs. There were videos of the Azeri military decapitating Armenian soldiers and civilians. They were doing all this with impunity. I was looking at these songs as weapons of soft power that needed to be deployed as soon as possible. If I had to swallow my pride to make that happen, that was a pretty minor sacrifice to make in the scheme of things.

In the fall of 2017, I took Anthony Bourdain to Armenia for his CNN food and travel show, Parts Unknown. Earlier that year, while Ange and I were watching the show, she’d remarked that it would be amazing to have Bourdain visit Armenia.

I told the guys that we could announce in the press that it was my last show and make a big deal of it. As had been the case in the past, they didn’t want to.

Then when I showed up for rehearsals, something happened that I didn’t totally expect: I enjoyed it.