WATERTOWN — Music producer Armen Zabounian, known to most of the world as Peyote Beats, worked hard over a decade before receiving global acclaim for his work as producer of the track Boiled Peanuts on the album “Alligator Bites Never Heal” by Doechii. Break out star Doechii’s album won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album on February 2. Almost two weeks later, the elated Peyote declared, “It’s surreal, still.”
Born in the United States, Zabounian grew up in Palm Springs, Calif. When he was five, he said, his parents started him on piano lessons, and once a year he would play at piano recitals. As proud Armenians, his parents made him learn Aram Khachaturian and Arno Babajanian pieces, and since he was the only Armenian child at these recitals, he would be the only one playing this music, which was new to the audience.
Fast forwarding to freshman year at high school, Zabounian played piano in a jazz class in a band and heard someone play Hey Joe by Jimmy Hendrix on the guitar. This captivated Zabounian intensely and two weeks later his father bought him a guitar. He soon started a rock band, and studied every era of rock music, though his band particularly loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine.
He said as the band performed at house parties and high school events, its members wanted to stand out from the type of rock music famous in the 2000s, and so they also covered rap songs by the stars of the genre, such as Doctor Dre. That is where his love for hip hop was born.
Zabounian recalled that his parents, like many Armenians, especially in the older generations, did not believe that a career in the arts could provide a reliable livelihood. He said, “I wanted to leave Palm Springs, and the only way I could do it was to attend a real university with some kind of major like business or law.” So that is what he did.
After two years at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, he went to Woodbury University in Burbank and majored in business marketing. He happened to live with roommates from Dubai who also played music, and they would all play together for fun. He said, “I was getting ready at that point, in my late, late teens, my early, early 20s, to kind of stop the music, because that is what you get in your head, that this music stuff isn’t going to bring me any real career.”
