‘Lost in Hollywood’ System of a Down | 2005

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 crazyThose vicious streets are filled with straysYou should have never gone to HollywoodThey find you, two-time youSay you’re the best they’ve ever seenYou 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 wallFeeling ten feet tallAll you maggots smoking fags on Santa Monica BoulevardThis is my front pageThis is my new age

geoff.boucher@latimes.com