He looks down at the voice recorder in my hand. “You’re not recording this,” he says, shooting me that piercing, tight-lipped stare that’s become his trademark look. Point taken. I hold it up to show him it’s off.

He takes the turns fast, but relaxed, the Jag responding smoothly. “My record is nine tickets in one year,” he boasts. That was back before System got signed. Before the sobering effects of helping to launch one of the biggest acts in rock, of selling a combined 18 million albums and realizing there was nothing left he needed to prove. Or maybe speeding tickets were just something new to collect, besides the cars, concert tickets, comic books, toys, action figures, arcade games, and so on. He suspects this obsession with collecting says something profound about his psychology, but he leaves it at that. He doesn’t like to over-analyze, not himself nor his music. “It keeps you from taking chances,” he says.

It’s in that spirit that Dolmayan has found success as a businessman, with real estate, investing, marketing his band, and his newest baby, Torpedo Comics, an online distributing company he launched in November out of a 30,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Las Vegas. The warehouse is home to 15 million comic books, including a Young Allies #1 from 1941 worth an estimated $80,000. Once, Dolmayan says, he sold a Detective #27 – the first Batman – for a quarter of a million. “Ultimately, what I really want to happen – this is my dream – is that I make enough money from Torpedo Comics to not need to play music for money.”

Dolmayan got his first comic book at eight years old, right after his family emigrated to L.A. from Canada. “Illegally, I might add. But we paid our taxes. We worked. We were never a burden on society.” They were coming from Montreal. Him, his father, and his mother – nine months pregnant with his baby sister – landed there four years earlier after fleeing the war-torn streets of Lebanon, where Dolmayan lived until he was three. “It was pretty normal to hear bombs going off, gunfights in the streets, that type of stuff,” he remembers. They’d have left earlier, when Dolmayan’s father, a professional sax player, got a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, but his grandfather persuaded them to stay in Lebanon.

Then, one night, in an oft-told story, just after Dolmayan’s parents had taken him crying from his bed to comfort him, a stray bullet pierced the wall of the boy’s bedroom and entered his pillow. “My grandfather gave my dad $2000 and said, 'Go.”

Dolmayan’s grandparents, like many Armenians of their generation, had narrowly escaped the ethnic cleansing of their homeland that followed the First World War. As a result, he says, Armenians are extremely close to their families, so much so that he lived with his until he was 32. When he finally left home to move to Vegas about six years ago, his parents followed him out. He bought them a condo a mile down the road from his, and they see each other almost daily. He calls them his “closest advisors.” For Armenians, he explains, this is normal. “When you’re the victim of a genocide, you hold onto what you have with both hands.”

Such a background is the stuff from which legends are born – irresistible fodder for the comic book mind. Dolmayan the action figure. Forged in the heat of conflict. Narrowly escaping death at a young age. Conquering the world, one stage at a time.

“When people don’t signal it bothers me,” he says, bounding out of the canyon into L.A. traffic. We make a hard right onto Sunset Strip. “But when people signal, I don’t care what’s happening; I’ll let them in. It’s called courtesy, and courtesy’s lost to a lot of people.” Dolmayan’s is a world governed by rules, order, justice. You get the impression that if you stay in bounds, give respect where respect is due, you’ll be accepted, get to experience his ample wit and dry, biting sarcasm. But cross him and, well…

A vague threat of violence bubbles just below the surface. It’s a key element of the Dolmayan mystique, breeding a healthy mix of fear and respect in those within his orbit. He feeds this image, nurtures it. It’s why that hard look of his is the only one he’ll let the camera see.

Sometimes it feeds him back. “I don’t try to get angry,” he says. “But I play very well when I’m pissed off.” He gives an example of a radio show System was playing in New York around the time Toxicity came out. System was closing the show, but the band before them (as a rule, he won’t name names) – the night’s “secret act” – came on an hour and a half late, forcing System to cut their set. “When I went up on that stage,” Dolmayan says, in that hard-edged, economical way of his, hinting at a Brooklyn accent, even though he’s never lived east of Vegas, “the only intention I had was to devastate the set that they did before us. And that’s precisely what we did. We annihilated that stage.”

We make an illegal U-turn, bust a few rights, and pull up outside of the Sunset Marquis Hotel. An enormous, signed portrait of Billy Bob Thornton in the lobby announces what kind of place we’re in, and Dolmayan, after we’re up in his retro-70’s suite, confirms it. “This hotel understands the rock-star lifestyle,” he says with a grin, opening the entertainment cabinet to reveal a mean-looking stereo system.

Sound, it seems, is the one area where Dolmayan is willing, even eager, to relinquish control. “When it comes to the sonics of the album, I leave that to Daron,” Dolmayan explains. “Personally, it makes no difference to me where I record, because I don’t listen to it in that way. Daron does much more of the producing for the band, so he’s listening how the room sounds and all that stuff. I can’t tell the difference. I know that when I sit at the drum set, it’s up to me to make those drums sound good. The room isn’t going to make me a good drummer. That’s up to me to trust in the abilities that I have, and put in the effort to hone those abilities, and rip it up as much as possible.

“At this point I’m so comfortable in the studio it’s really not a big deal. Generally speaking, I go in there with a mission and get out as quickly as possible.” Where the first System of a Down album (self-titled, 1998) took Dolmayan two weeks to complete, Scars on Broadway, recorded at L.A.’s famed Sunset Sound studios, was finished in six days. “Just about everything on the Scars on Broadway album is a one-take run-through,” he says. And none of it recorded to a click. Dolmayan is insistent on this point. “If the music’s playing with me, there’s no necessity for a click,” he says. “Even though there’s tempo changes and variance, I’d rather just play it, and have the feel be expressed.”

It didn’t help that his only time being forced to play to a click came while recording with Killing Joke on their 2003 self-titled album – one of only two side projects he’s ever done outside of the System of a Down family. It was a bad experience all around, though mainly because he felt they were using him for his name rather than his drumming. Still, why so little experimentation? “To be honest with you, I haven’t gotten a whole lot of phone calls saying, 'Come, play on our album,” he admits. “I don’t know if it’s because my style is not something that suits a lot of people, or maybe they think I wouldn’t do it, or whatever, but I just haven’t gotten that many requests.”

And so, Dolmayan keeps it in the family. “System of a Down is always going to be the mothership for us,” he says. “But the bottom line is we’ve had some artistic differences. And I’ll tell you exactly why. It’s very simple: Daron was writing the majority of the songs on the album on a consistent basis, and Serj (Tankian, lead vocals) really had a lot of songs that he wanted to get out to the fans of System. But we looked at it in a very democratic way: The best songs for the album got on the album. It just so happened that a lot of Daron’s vibe fit a lot better. And that wasn’t necessarily fair to Serj.”

Dolmayan recorded a couple of tracks on Tankian’s solo release, 2008’s Elect the Dead. And when Malakian needed a drummer he could trust for Scars (after eight months spent fishing for others), Dolmayan was happy to accommodate him too. “We have the perfect relationship,” he says. “And we had that same relationship in System also. I handle a lot of the band’s business. I handle a lot of the merchandising. I handle a lot of the radio interviews. I handle a lot of the press…I’m the band psychologist,” he says, giving a wry look. “I always have been.”

“I try to make it as carefree as possible for Daron to concentrate on what he does best, which is write songs, produce the band, and think of only the artistic elements of the music. That’s all I want him to be thinking about. And I try to do the best I can to facilitate that for him. And the benefit that I get is that he comes up with these songs, and they’re amazing songs. I can’t write songs. Well, I could, but you’re not going to want to hear ‘em.”

Dolmayan and Malakian’s relationship wasn’t always this pleasant. “We’re both kind of alpha males; born three days apart; so we have a lot of similarities,” Dolmayan says. “And when you’re younger, those similarities can be a burden. When you’re older, you make more sense out of things. So now we get along unbelievably well. We’ve gotten into fistfights before.” One such fistfight sent them both to the hospital, battered and bleeding, sharing the same car. They wound up in the same hospital room, side-by-side in their beds, like a scene out of some sitcom. “It was great,” Dolmayan says. “It’s a fond memory for us, and we laugh about it. But those fistfights created the best songs, I think. “Toxicity’, ‘Chop-Suey!’, and ‘Aerials’ came out two weeks after a fistfight we had. It’s like, the Earth was created through cataclysm, but order came out of that. And that’s what happens sometimes."

But it was no massive fallout that prompted System to split. The band had talked about taking a hiatus as early as seven years ago. “Every band that has sustained the test of time has done that,” Dolmayan says. “If you look at the Chili Peppers, U2, Metallica, they’ve all taken time off. Maybe they haven’t done other projects, but they’ve taken time off to become self-aware again. Because at a certain point, you’re no longer John Dolmayan, you’re John from System of a Down. And that gets irritating after a while. Because I was a person before System existed, and I don’t want to lose track of that.”

We’re sitting on the couch in Dolmayan’s Sunset Marquis suite, quietly engrossed in The Karate Kid, when there’s a knock at the door. Dolmayan opens it to let in three burly dudes – Armenian friends from way back. They swarm the place, instantly slapping a deck of cards on the table and dealing out. Twenty-dollar hands of Pusoy Dos ensue, one following the next. A cigar is lit. Hundred-dollar hands of Screw Your Neighbor. A constant stream of smack-talk in English/Armenian hybrid. Dolmayan orchestrates the table, expertly tracking the lightning-fast rounds. He’s a notoriously deft hand at cards. A money discussion turns into a mock brawl around the room. Dolmayan extorting payment by force in a corner. Smiles all around. This is an old routine among old friends.

Then, suddenly, at some unseen cue, everyone bails on the room, the TV left on. We pile into the elevator, then into another car, and take off back down the Strip. Soon we’re standing in a small parking lot next to a red brick building. Not knowing L.A., I don’t anticipate what happens next.

We’re rounding the corner when Dolmayan turns to me and says, “By the way, we’re playing here tonight.” I look up as we pass under a towering, grungy marquis that reads Whisky-A-Go-Go. No Scars on Broadway listed. Ahh, the surprise revealed – a secret show, sprung on the unsuspecting black-clad youth already lined up outside ready to slam dance to a string of fresh-faced no-name openers.

Hushed gasps herald Dolmayan’s arrival. A mythical figure in their midst. One boy, about 16, all piercings and tats, steps forward as the door is being unlocked. “Are you gonna throw your drum sticks into the audience?” he asks with unselfconscious gee-wizzery.

Dolmayan stops and looks directly at him. “Absolutely,” he says. “And if you’re up front I’ll look for you.” The kid’s beaming like a teenage girl in the presence of Elvis.

Inside the Whisky. Dolmayan’s first time on stage in two years. At sound check he had seemed fussy, arguing with the sound guy up in the booth about the placement of a mike over his ride cymbal, wondering aloud if he should come in through the side door instead of down the stairs where the rest of the band will make their entrance.

Malakian also admits to being wracked by nerves. These guys are used to filling stadiums, with fans singing along to every song. And now they’re starting back at square one. They’re about to introduce their baby to the world. Anything could happen.

The cramped, frill-less floor of the Whisky is packed to capacity by the time Scars finally takes the stage. In the skin of this crowd resides enough ink to fill a bathtub. Clothes in every shade of black.

Dolmayan’s working away, gripping his sticks like hammers and pounding with focused, almost mechanical intensity. “I hit very hard,” he says. “I’m aggressive in my playing style. There’s a lot of anxiety in my playing. It’s anxious to get to the next part, next beat, whatever. I’m in pretty good physical shape. But it is taxing.”

Eyes straight ahead, Dolmayan reaches back. Behind him, Sako Karaian, his faithful tech since the beginning, crouching dutifully behind his master’s throne, responds by handing him towel, or massaging his forearm, or sometimes, holding a water bottle to Dolmayan’s lips while he’s in the middle of a beat. It’s fascinating – like watching a medieval king and his attendant.

Off to Dolmayan’s right, also hidden away, is Danny Shamoun, aiding the drummer in another way by pumping up the rhythm section with – wait a minute - are those actually congas? In a hard rock band? They are, but their contribution is almost subliminal, and few in the crowd will even notice the added texture over the wall of guitar noise, Malakian’s attention-stealing facial contortions, and Dolmayan’s vicious assault on the kit. Maybe it’s just the nature of the venue, but it’s only when Shamoun begins layering keyboard effects that his true value to Scars is revealed, laying down the ambient canvas over which Dolmayan, Malakian, guitarist Franky Perez, and bassist Dominick Cifarelli can paint.

Dolmayan plays with his usual lack of hesitation and endlessly creative patterns, even throwing one of his patented blastbeats into “Cute Machines.” His technique, lacking the trappings of classical instruction, has the brutality and brilliance of something born out of sheer will. “I could never sit down and do rudimentary exercises,” Dolmayan says. “It was just too boring. So my practice was always putting on albums. If I couldn’t play what they were doing, I would play it until I could.” This might explain why, despite the confidence of his strokes, Dolmayan is extremely uncomfortable with the prospect of an unaccompanied solo. “I think I’d be nervous as f**k if that happened,” he admits. “I love the fact that I’m behind my drum kit and I have that place to hide, and I can just be myself back there and do my thing. I don’t know if solos are so boring to me that I don’t want to do it. Yeah, the drummers out there will be amped. But what about the other people that are sitting there. That’s when people go to get beers.”

No one seems to be leaving to get beers tonight. But as the band rips through song after song that everyone’s hearing for the first time, the crowd stares back – uncommitted. Half of them have already exhausted themselves in the circle pits that accompanied the sparsely watched preceding acts. But now, with no room to slam dance, and with music not angry enough anyhow, they seem lost in limbo. “Mesmerized,” Dolmayan would later call them. “Just wait till we’ve played 20 shows.”

They’ll come around all right. Scars is well worth the effort – not to mention all the drum bums who would follow Dolmayan anywhere. He’s not worried. As secure in himself as anyone has any right to be, Dolmayan will forever charge ahead, fighting the good fight. “I don’t think you should create art for the masses,” he says. “You should create art for yourself, and if the masses accept it, great. And if they don’t, that’s okay too. I have just as much respect for someone who hates my music as for someone who loves it, because at least it’s a strong reaction either way. Both opinions are equally meaningless for me, though, in the scope of things, because nothing’s going to prevent me from doing what I have to do.”

 

by Dave Constantin for DRUM Magazine - September 2008 issue
 

photographs by Robert Downs

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