Music

Tragic end for band that brought Iranian rock to NYC

The Brooklyn band the Yellow Dogs had a dancy, punk-infused sound that you could call warehouse pop, for its ability to move a large crowd and also for the aesthetics of the East Williamsburg neighborhood where the band’s members lived.

They looked right at home in the Brooklyn music scene: four dudes with varying degrees of unkempt hairdos and facial hair, wearing snug T-shirts and frequenting edge-of-cool venues like Union Pool, Glasslands Gallery and Shea Stadium.

But while the sound and look blended in, their story was one of rebellion, danger and politics that appeared to come to a tragic end late Sunday when two band members and one friend were fatally shot in a dispute with another Iranian musician at their Brooklyn row house.

The Yellow Dogs were an Iranian band, playing underground venues in Tehran, where strict Muslim rules against rock music could have landed them a night in jail or, worse, gotten them accused of Satan worship.

“They think, ‘Whoa, an anarchist?’ ” guitarist Siavash Karampour said in a 2009 CNN interview from their hidden studio in Tehran. “They think that. I’m not!”

They were saddled with an image as expatriates fleeing an oppressive regime, but in Brooklyn, they never played the political angle for attention. They just wanted to be part of the scene.

In an interview earlier this year, band members joked they weren’t trying to impress the hipster girls in Tehran with their music, because there were no hipster girls to impress.

The members were all in their early 20s when they were playing a cramped garbage room turned into a studio with styrofoam soundproofing and a World War II-era gas container for a mike stand.

They created a musical sound that was distinctly post-punk with psychedelic twists and showed heavy influences from bands like The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand and the vocal style of the Sex Pistols. Only some of them spoke English at the time, but they wrote their songs in English anyway.

Their specialty was toe-tapping bass lines and guitar-driven pop. It’s a sound a little too rough around the edges to ever be destined for top 40 success, but it was popular at weekend dance parties across Williamsburg.

A kind of joie de vivre was packed deeply into most of their songs. The video for their song “Dance Floor” from the 2011 “In the Kennel” EP shows three women shedding clothes and holding guerrilla dance parties in front of unsuspecting passersby on benches, bridges, subways and parks across New York City. The symbolism of being able to have three women celebrate their music on the streets when, just four years ago, they were hiding in a Tehran basement is unavoidable.

In a video interview shot at Glasslands in February with NowThis News, bassist Koory Mirz said his musical awakening started when he happened upon a video by The Strokes on an otherwise mediocre European music station.

“Oh, wait a minute, I’m having a different feeling when hearing this song,” Mirz said.

The band’s songs were vaguely political, taking shots at mullahs and even American greed, but were never a direct attack on the repressive Iranian regime. The fact that they were forced underground highlights just how hard it is for any musician to play freely in Tehran.

“We don’t want to change the world,” Karampour told CNN. “We just want to play music.”

Invited to play some American musical festival shows a few years ago , the group managed to flee Iran, eventually being granted asylum in the United States in 2010. They told The Huffington Post last year that they’d like to play Istanbul, because their parents have never seen them play. But returning to Iran was not in the cards.

“If I go back, they’re probably going to kill me,” Mirz said in the NowThis News video. “I’m serious.”
In Brooklyn — often a refuge for artsy people and outcasts from all over the world — they clearly found a welcoming home, where their sound was celebrated and their fans were growing in number.

“We were like the weirdos back in Iran,” Mirz said in the video. “When we came here, we were like, ‘Oh, thank you. People are like me over here. I’m not that crazy guy back in Iran.’ ”

The Yellow Dogs were well-known in the small, tight Iranian expat community in New York. They were among the bands to appear in the 2009 film “No One Knows About Persian Cats,” which highlighted Tehran’s underground music scene.

Even though they were defined by the circumstances they escaped in their home country, it was clear that they were happy just being absorbed into the vibrant music landscape of Brooklyn.

“It’s not my responsibility to represent Iran, are you kidding me? Or anywhere,” Karampour said in the NowThis News video. (“Or Brooklyn!” singer Ali Eskandarian chimed in.) “I represent my art.”