BREAKING

Iranian Rockers Call Time on Tehran

Indie band Yellow Dogs
on Brooklyn and leaving
their home country

T
he phone line has
gone dead for the third
time, and it takes a few
minutes to dial the epic se-
quence of digits that connects a
shaky New York cell to a Dubai
office. When Obaash, frontman
of Iranian band Yellow Dogs,
comes back on the line he is
laughing: “Man, maybe I talk
too much,” he says, as we try to
pick up where we left off. Some-
thing about an illegal show in a
Tehran basement. Oh yeah, he
says. That show.
It had been Yellow Dogs’
first, held in the days before the
documentary No One Knows
About Persian Cats made Iran’s
underground music scene the
stuff of legend, and before sub-
sequent heat motivated the
indie-rock four-piece to head
for safer pastures. It was just a
couple of hundred kids gathered
in a basement garage, two local
bands – dancing, smoking, min-
gling, rocking out.
“We really had no idea what
crime we were commiting
by playing music,” explains
Obaash. “In our concerts every-
thing that was illegal was legal.
People didn’t have to wear the
veil; boys and girls were to-
gether; there was a dance floor.
None of those people had been
to a rock concert before, includ-
ing me.
“We did everything we could
to avoid being seen,” he recalls.
“But after our second show we
heard that some neighbors were
calling the cops, telling them
that weird activity was going
on. So we said, ‘F*** that. We’re
never playing here again.’”
After the venue was shut
down, Yellow Dogs moved to
a rooftop ‘practice room’ on
the outskirts of Tehran, which
was where they met filmmaker
Brahman Globoid. Globoid
included the band in No One
Knows About Persian Cats,
which told the story of musi-
cians fighting censorship and
repression in Iran. The movie
“The government suddenly
got very interested. They made
a TV series about musicians
and said all these people are
Satanists and we have to ex-
ecute all of them and they don’t
believe in God. So, after we saw
that stuff and after the film, we
thought, ‘Man, we have to get
out of the country before we
get our asses busted,’” Obaash
explains.
“In our concerts,
everything that was
illegal was legal. We
really had no idea
what crime we were
commiting.”
And so they did, first f ly-
ing to Istanbul at the end of
2009 – where they played their
first legal show – and then to
Brooklyn, where they hooked
up with Iranian-run record
label Never Heard. Since then
the band has come forward in
leaps and bounds, playing a
U.S. tour which encompassed
they started a run of shows at
SXSW (South by Southwest).
“We didn’t expect any of this,
no. Of course we always had the
dream to do this and just travel
around playing shows but we
never expected that it would
become reality,” Obaash says,
pausing for a second before
adding, quickly, that it is not
only luck that has brought Yel-
low Dogs from a Tehran base-
ment to U.S. tours. “We really
pushed ourselves,” he says. “We
pushed all the limits.”
Persian Cats certainly gives
the impression that the ma-
jority of young bands from
Iran seek eventually to f lee
the country, unlike in Saudi
Arabia, where musicians face
significant odds but still choose
to organize shows and record
albums. It’s a point that Obaash
is happy to concede, not only
because of the risks that bands
are forced to take in Iran, but
because the future of the music
scene is, shall we say, bleak.
“I’m telling you, it’s a sick so-
ciety. In Saudi Arabia they don’t
automatically punish you and
throw you in jail for playing rock
DOG EAT DOG WORLD
The Iranian four-piece
left Iran for the U.S.
sion. You’re never going to play
stadiums in Tehran,” he says.
“There’s no future for musi-
cians in Iran right now, even the
folklore musicians, any kind of
musicians. It’s really hard, you
have to either sell yourself to
the government or get out of the
country. That’s it.”
But if Yellow Dogs moved
from Iran to make it, it is just as
true that they want to make it on
their own terms. They are not,
Obaash explains, going to rant
and rave about their country
every chance they get as a way of
garnering support. Yellow Dogs
may hail from Iran, and their
experiences in the country have
certainly shaped the band, but
Obaash believes that the music
speaks for itself.
“We try not to say ‘Iran, Iran,
Iran;’ because the essence of
the band is not only that we’re
from Iran. I like our music and
I know a lot of other people who
like our music. We really want
to play and make progress like
any other band from any other
country,” he says.
“The things we sing about
right now, they are surrealistic,
courtesy of yellow dogs

won a Special Jury Prize at the
2009 Cannes Film Festival, but
– perhaps unsurprisingly – was
not received quite so sympa-
thetically in Tehran.
everything from empty halls
in Phoenix, Arizona, to sell-out
shows in L.A. and Brooklyn. In
2010 they released In the Ken-
nel, their first EP, and in March
& roll, but in Iran they will put
you in jail. When we did all those
concerts and all that crazy stuff
in Iran, we were just playing for a
small community, it was all pas-
symbolic… They are stories.
You can relate them to Iran
or to America, whatever. We
don’t want to be only a political
band.” ORLANDO CROWCROFT

20 • Rolling Stone, April 2011