System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian insists he never punched ex-Mastodon member Brent Hinds.
In 2007, it was reported that Hinds had been knocked out after attending the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas, and that the guitarist/vocalist suffered a broken nose, two black eyes and a brain haemorrhage.
Some sources named Odadjian as the culprit but, in an exclusive interview with Metal Hammer, the bassist denies punching Hinds and sets the record straight.
“I never knocked out Brent Hinds,” Odadjian tells us. “That’s something that Brent was told by I-don’t-know-who.”
He continues: “What happened was, we were in Las Vegas, outside Mandalay Bay after the MTV Music Awards, and I was with my friend, [rapper] Reverend William Burk. Brent Hinds comes out of a taxi and he’s like, ‘Bro, I love you!’ He was inebriated and swinging his shirt. He kept coming up to hug me. He was very in-my-face.”
After the intense but good-natured interaction, Odadjian got into a taxi of his own. When he looked back, he saw Hinds throw a punch at Burk and miss. Burk retaliated with a swing of his own, which Odadjian says was in “self-defence”.
“Brent fell and hit his head and got knocked out,” the bassist remembers. “I was five, six feet away.”
Despite his distance from the event, Odadjian says security outside Mandalay Bay “attacked” his taxi. “They put me in cuffs and took me to jail, but I didn’t do anything!” he claims, adding that the security guards’ roughness while putting his hands behind his back gave him a shoulder injury.
Odadjian continues: “I said, ‘Check the fucking cameras [at the front of Mandalay Bay]! I did nothing!’ Once they did, the police came and let me go. I was there for, like, four hours.”
The bassist, who’s Armenian-American, adds that he used to wonder whether him getting swamped by security was an act of racial profiling. “It was a time where there was a lot of tension with the Middle East,” he explains. “There was stuff going on so I thought I might have gotten profiled or something. I don’t know.”
The attack put Hinds in a short coma and was followed by months of rehabilitation. In a 2012 interview with Hysteria Magazine, the musician’s then-bandmate Troy Sanders spoke about the effect that that time had on Hinds and Mastodon as a whole.
“It was a life-changing event,” he said (via Loudwire). “It was a near-death experience, so it was very horrible. It was a very uncertain time – this is 2007, so that’s been five years. There were a lot of question marks at that time and thankfully we prevailed from that whole period and created the music from [2009 album] Crack The Skye. We felt like that was a triumphant way to round out that two-year period of creating music and working together.”
Sanders added that there was no bad blood between System Of A Down and Mastodon: “System Of A Down was there, but they’re our friends. It was a different individual that this altercation went down with, so to set the record straight, to this day all of the System Of A Down guys and Mastodon – we’re all friends.”
Hinds shockingly split with Mastodon earlier this year, ending his 25 years of service. The band described it as a mutual decision in a statement. Hinds is yet to issue a statement of his own.
System Of A Down went on hiatus in 2006 but returned in 2011. The band are about to play a run of show in South America, marking their first fully-fledged tour in seven years.
Odadjian also performs with alt-metal project Seven Hours After Violet. The band will tour Europe in the summer and play a slot at Download festival in the UK.
