System Of A Down‘s Daron Malakian had looked back on filling in for James Hetfield at Metallica‘s ‘Summer Sanitarium’ tour.
Back in 2000, SOAD were yet to make their breakthrough with ‘Toxicity’, and joined the likes of Korn, Kid Rock and Powerman 5000 as openers on Metallica’s tour. However, in July of that year, frontman Hetfield was injured in a jet ski accident, and, rather than cancel any gigs, Metallica decided to continue on with the shows.
Recalling the period on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast (via Louder), he said: “I met Metallica on stage playing with them. I never met them before. We’re the first band. Nobody knows us.
“Jason Newsted was singing, and then they brought the guys from Korn on and they kind of played like this Cheech & Chong cover song or something. They didn’t know what to do, because James wasn’t there.”
He recalled turning to his guitar tech and imploring him to tell Metallica’s tech he knew “a lot of their shit”.
“Next thing you know,” he continued, “my tech goes and talks to their guitar tech and then my tech comes back to me. He’s, like, ‘All right, come with me. So, next thing you know, I go on the other side of the stage. I get handed a Les Paul. I think it was one of Kirk Hammett’s Les Pauls. And they’re, like, ‘All right. Go.’
“You gotta understand,” he told Rubin. “Our band’s not big yet. I’m still a kid – I’m 22 years old. I can’t even believe that we’re even allowed to open up for Metallica. So this is all new to me at this point of my life.
“And they put me out there, and I turn and I’m, like, ‘Hey.’ It’s Lars, it’s Kirk, it’s Jason Newsted. They’re, like, ‘What do you know?’ I go, ‘I don’t know. ‘Master Of Puppets” Okay. Count it in.’
“I’m up there with Metallica playing Master Of Puppets in front of 60,000 people. And I’m, like, ‘Who’s gonna sing?’ I said, ‘Fuck it. I’ll go sing.’ And I sang. You would think we were rehearsed it, but we didn’t rehearse it. And I didn’t even know it was gonna happen. And it happened. I’m up there, and I’m playing Metallica with Metallica, in front of an audience where I would’ve been in the fucking cheap seats just three years ago.”
He added: “I got off stage. Next thing you know, they’re coming to me. They’re, like, ‘Hey, James isn’t gonna be able to play for a few nights. They want you to come and play with them.’
“And then next thing you know, they’re, like, ‘Hey, get your shit from your bus, because you’re flying on the private jet with us now.’ Oh, man. I’ll never forget it. Even though my band is where we’re at right now, it still brings goosebumps that I had a chance to experience that at that point of my career.”
Last summer, NME sat down with Malakian to discuss Scars On Broadway’s new album ‘Addicted To The Violence’, as well as the hitting the road with System of a Down.
“It feels like we’ve reconnected as friends,” he told us. “That’s where we started, we were friends and sometimes somewhere down the line, you get fame and money. You get politics in the band and differences of opinion on which way the band should go, where you kind of get divided.
“When we started, we all used to travel in one little RV together. And then we made enough money to where each of us had our own bus. So along the way, what happened was we ended up with our own lives, doing our own things, and we only came together on stage.
“In a very natural way, you start getting separated from one another – not because of bad blood but because of how things turn out as you get more successful and I can see that’s what happened with us.”
The band ae set to hit the road again this year with a mammoth arena run across the UK and Europe in summer with support from Queens Of The Stone Age. They’ll play two nights at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in July, marking SOAD’s first dates in the UK and Europe since 2017, when they headlined that year’s Download Festival.
Find any remaining tickets here.
