System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian has once again cleared the air regarding his involvement in a fateful physical altercation with now former Mastodon vocalist/guitarist Brent Hinds. While it’s long been said that Mastodon and Odadjian and have buried the hatchet over the 2007 incident, misconceptions on the extent of Odadjian‘s involvement still circulate to this day.
As the story goes, directly after attending the 2007 ‘MTV Video Music Awards‘, a physical altercation broke out between Hinds and Rev. William Burk, who was attending the event with Odadjian.
A police report filed on the incident identified Hinds as the instigator and initially noted that both Burk and Odadjian had struck Hinds in the fight. The end result of that altercation left Hinds hospitalized with brain hemorrhaging, a broken nose and black eyes. He was also left in a coma and required weeks of recovery time.
Members of Mastodon and Hinds have both since downplayed Odadjian‘s alleged involvement in the violence that transpired that night, and now Odadjian himself has once again done the same. In a new interview with Metal Hammer, Odadjian relayed his side of the incident:
“I never knocked out Brent Hinds. That’s something that Brent was told by I-don’t-know-who. What happened was, we were in Las Vegas, outside Mandalay Bay after the MTV Music Awards, and I was with my friend, [rapper] Reverend William Burk. Brent Hinds comes out of a taxi and he’s like, ‘Bro, I love you!’ He was inebriated and swinging his shirt. He kept coming up to hug me. He was very in-my-face.”
Odadjian went on to say that while he left to get into a taxi, he turned around to see Hinds throw a missed punch at Burk, to which the rapper responded in kind in a move which Odadjian classified as ‘self-defense’. Odadjian shared, “Brent fell and hit his head and got knocked out. I was five, six feet away.”
Mastodon themselves previously discussed the aftermath of that incident back in this episode of their “Crack The Skye” documentary.
