Photo credit: Raymond Flotat

Serj Tankian, the frontman of System of a Down, has opened up about an incident when attendees of a concert during their 1998 tour with Slayer were “raising Nazi salutes” and pelted them with coins. 

Tankain said later that year during their time headlining for Slayer, “we were onstage in Poland being pelted with coins by fans who were also raising Nazi salutes in our direction. At one point, I was hit in the face with a bagel and lost my shit” … “I told our lighting guy to point the lights into the audience and target the bagel-thrower. Then I launched into an angry tirade and threatened to start kicking people’s asses. When I finished, the venue went dead silent. You could literally hear a pin drop in that place. Then we walked off.”

NME reported that the opportunity to be the opening act for Slayer was a big deal for System Of a Down as they hadn’t released their debut LP. However, Tankain wrote in his memoir, Down With the System, that some fans viewed their opening performance as something standing in the way of seeing Slayer. 

“Slayer fans famously love Slayer and hate just about everything and everyone else. As their opening act, the crowd saw us as the one thing standing between them and Slayer,” said Tankain. 

He continued, “This was a group of fans for whom ‘homemade’ knife-carved tattoos were not unusual … they were not necessarily predisposed to welcome us with open arms. In fact, when we’d take the stage, we’d often be facing a wall of crossed arms and extended middle fingers.”

However, the band will be dipping their toes back into performing with their first tour in South America in a decade alongside a North American tour. The South American portion of the tour is set to begin on April 24th in Colombia and finish on May 10th in Brazil while North America is set to begin August 27th in the United States and end September 5th in Canada.