It seems almost unimaginable now that a metal band as massive and universally loved as System Of A Down - a band with numerous Billboard number one albums and a couple of songs in the Spotify billions club, no less - were once greeted with outright hostility as a relatively unknown opening act.
To have it all make more sense, we probably need to bear two key things in mind. Firstly, their sheer size makes it easy to forget just how fundamentally weird System Of A Down are. To metal crowds in the late 90s, fed on a scene dominated by Metallica, Korn, Pantera and Marilyn Manson, a bunch of Armenian-American misfits playing a politically-tinged mix of heavy metal, scrappy punk rock, Armenian folk music and Zappa-esque, avant-garde absurdity was like nothing they'd heard before. Oh, and secondly: fucking Slayer crowds.
In his thoroughly engaging 2024 memoir Down With The System, System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian recalls one of the defining tours of the band's early days, when they were invited to open for Slayer in 1998. While the four-piece were creating a buzz around Southern California after breaking out of LA, many national audiences weren't familiar with System's game, and Slayer's infamously stubborn audience weren't exactly delighted to see them.
"We were opening for Slayer, which was a massive opportunity for a band who hadn’t yet released their first album,". Serj explains "But that tour was like going to rock ’n’ roll boot camp. Slayer fans famously love Slayer and hate just about everything and everyone else. As their opening act, the crowd saw us as the one thing standing between them and Slayer. This was a group of fans for whom 'homemade' knife-carved tattoos were not unusual, so when we’d turn up - me in tribal makeup, Daron [Malakian, System guitarist] sporting pink hair and a glammy little outfit, they were not necessarily predisposed to welcome us with open arms. In fact, when we’d take the stage, we’d often be facing a wall of crossed arms and extended middle fingers."
Serj goes on to reveal that System were more than up to the challenge, claiming that the band's sheer "moxie eventually started winning fans over."
"Sometimes, though, shit just got out of hand," he admits. "At a show in Utah, when it started to rain, the concert was canceled, much to the dismay of the fans who’d turned up there. Trash started flying, fights broke out all over the place, and I jumped behind our merch table to help our merch person pack up all our stuff. After a few minutes, I realized it was a lost cause."
Sadly, there were also small but noticeable pockets of Slayer's fanbase that proved particularly problematic and seemed hell-bent on making themselves seen and heard. Eventually, one incident in particular led to Serj losing his temper and stunning a room full of Slayer fans in to complete silence.
"A small subset of Slayer fans had a disturbing practice of showing up to gigs in full Nazi regalia," he writes. "I distinctly recall watching a team of African-American bouncers at a club in Detroit called Harpos brawling with these Slayer fans outside the club after we’d finished our set.
"Later that year, while we were touring with Slayer through Europe, we were onstage in Poland being pelted with coins by fans who were also raising Nazi salutes in our direction. At one point, I was hit in the face with a bagel and lost my shit. I told our lighting guy to point the lights into the audience and target the bagel-thrower. Then I launched into an angry tirade and threatened to start kicking people’s asses. When I finished, the venue went dead silent. You could literally hear a pin drop in that place. Then we walked off."
Despite System Of A Down's now classic, self-titled debut album having seen release by the time Slayer's tour hit Europe, establishing them as one of the hottest new bands in metal, it seemed Slayer's fans still weren't any more welcoming. At least not at first; in 2014, Daron Malakian amusingly described one hardline tactic he and his bandmates adopted in Berlin to win them over.
“I said, ‘Look, if these guys don’t applaud for us after we play the first song, Know, we’re gonna play it again, over and over, until they react,’” he explained. “We played Know and the crowd was pretty silent. So John [Dolmayan, System Of A Down drummer] started Know again, and we all played it. Halfway through the song, they were actually cheering for us. My attitude was, ‘You’re gonna love us whether you like it or not, and if you don’t, you’re gonna hear this song over and over again.’”
Of course, people would grow to love System Of A Down; come their next album, 2001's Toxicity, they had officially become one of the biggest metal bands on the planet. Arguably, though, they never got any less weird.
