In the mid-1980s, Daron Malakian was a shy youngster living in an
apartment near the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street, and
his parents spent much of their time trying to shield his eyes from the seedy
parade of Hollywood's sidewalks.
"From the playground of my school," Malakian recalled, "we would see prostitutes
and transvestites, guys holding hands, the homeless people, all these things my
parents really didn't want me to see."
That playground was at the Rose and Alex Philibos Armenian School, the same
campus where two other future members of the metal band System of a Down went to
class. There, all of the boys were immersed in the traditions of their shared
Armenian heritage, but when they rode their bikes home they passed through that
chaotic asphalt theater of Hollywood. "It was only as I got older that I
realized that not everybody grows up like that," Malakian said.
His home life, meanwhile, was a study in artistic expression; he is the only
child of Vartan Malakian, a highly regarded painter who was also a key
choreographer in the 1970s dance community of his native Iraq, and Zepur
Malakian, a sculptor born in Iran. By 2005, Hollywood was less scruffy, but
those old memories lingered in the mind of Malakian's mind. By then, he had
become famous to metal fans as the guitarist and songwriter in System, the
deeply eccentric L.A. band whose sound veers from fever-dream mutter to wailing
thunder, often in the same song. "I wanted to write a song," he said, "about the
way Hollywood was." The result was the moody "Lost in Hollywood," which he calls
"the System song I'm most proud of."
I'll wait here, you're crazy Those vicious streets are filled with strays You
should have never gone to Hollywood They find you, two-time you Say you're the
best they've ever seen You should have never trusted Hollywood.
The lyrics are "about the broken dreams, all the people that come here and don't
make it," he said, and it's a collage of images regarding the music industry,
the vapid people who come to L.A. to exploit others and the beautiful dreamers
who are promised fame but end up "out on a street corner, alone, smoking
cigarettes."
As a kids, Malakian and his friends would scale a cement wall that took them to
a low rooftop with wood planks and a view looking south on a corner of Santa
Monica Boulevard. Years later, the shy boy wrote with jagged emotions about that
view from the past.
I was standing on the wall Feeling ten feet tall All you maggots smoking fags on
Santa Monica Boulevard This is my front page This is my new age
by Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer - Dec 14, 2007
|
