System Of A Down were still called Soil when you joined them, but we understand that you actually managed the band for a time before then.
"Yeah, it’s a really long story, but basically it started with me being introduced to Daron [Malakian], who I knew vaguely because he had gone to the same school as me, Alex Pilibos High School. At the time I was in a band called Roswell, and anytime that we weren’t physically practising I’d run over to gang out with the Soil guys, and I’d sometimes grab the bass and jam with them when their bassist left the room. At some point they asked me to manage, and I started to book them gigs. I remember Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against The Machine used to have these house parties, and he’d have bands play, and I remember watching Standford Prison Experiment play there one night and then asking Tom Morello if he thought that maybe Soil could play one day. But then, like, two rehearsals to them having the chance to play, that band kinda fell apart. The bass player was a friend of mine, and he told me that he’d left and they might want me to join. I didn’t want to know initially, I felt like it’d be like me trying to get with his girlfriend, but he totally gave me his blessing. Then a couple of days passed and I got a call from Daron, and he invited me over to Serj [Tankian]’s house, and that’s where it all started."
Did it feel exciting to be playing music with people who were as serious about it as you were?
"Definitely. It felt good from the start, it felt right. Daron and I would go out and get some weed and come back to the studio and talk about how great the band was going to be."
Jumping ahead to 1999, the debut System album is out, and you’re touring Europe for the first time with Slayer and Sepultura. That must have been one hell of an introduction to life on the road.
"Mind-blowing! That was actually our third proper tour: the first one was with Slayer and Clutch, across America, and then we did Ozzfest 1998, side stage, and then Slayer hit us up and were like, ‘Yo, we love you guys, want to come to Europe with us?’ And we were like, 'Fuck yeah, dudes!' It popped our touring cherries properly! We were out there in make-up, playing songs like Sugar, before two of the heaviest bands in the world, and we got booed a lot (laughs). It didn’t bother us, we were like, 'Fuck you! You’re going to love us one day!' That mentality kept us going. And Slayer had our backs. When kids saw Tom Araya standing side-stage watching us, that kinda earned us some respect."
Obviously things were building nicely for the band, but when Toxicity debuted at Number One in America, you’d very definitely arrived. When did you first realise that System were becoming a big deal?
"I actually know the exact date I knew that, because it was early September 2001, Labor Day, and the album was coming out the very next day, so we decided to do a free show in Hollywood. We expected to draw maybe 4,000 or 5,000 people, so we had security to deal with those numbers, and 15,000 people showed up, and were going crazy. The fire marshall took us aside and said, ‘Look, we can’t let this show happen, there’s too many people out there.’ I remember saying, 'Dude, at least let us go out there and explain what’s happening, because we can’t just not play, and say nothing, they’ll go crazier.' But they wouldn’t let us, and the next thing you know, there’s a full-on riot: shit went crazy. People were destroying our gear and fighting with our crew and we got driven away to a hotel. I was sitting in my room with my friends, and within two hours, every news station in LA was talking about the System Of A Down riot. We couldn’t have paid for that kind of marketing! And then one week later it was 9/11, and our record was banned because we had songs like Chop Suey!, singing about “self-righteous suicide” and Toxicity was the country’s Number One record. I found out on 9/11 itself. I remember my mom phoning me and telling me to turn on the TV, and right when I switched on, one of the Twin Towers fell down live. I didn’t know what was happening, or if it was real or not, and so I’m watching in horror and the phone bleeps, and it’s my manager, and he says, 'Congratulations, you’re Number One on Billboard,' at the same time my mom is saying that the world is going to end. Crazy. I just got chills talking about it."