Finding refuge in heavy metal music
Sulyman Qardash, guitarist and lead singer of the Oakland band Kabul Dreams, was an Afghan refugee living in Uzbekistan when he discovered punk rock and grunge. The lyrics were a mystery to him, but he responded to the noise and the riffs. Then one day he was listening to Nirvana’s song “Rape Me.” Headphones on, he sang along to Kurt Cobain, attracting the attention of his brother who demanded to know what he was talking about.
“‘I don’t know, I just like this music. I have no clue. I don’t know English,’ ” says Qardash, 27. “I’m like 12 or 13. He was a good brother. He was like, ‘Let me give you something. English, bro, learn. C-a-t means cat. Rape means something else.’ He really helped me out. I found a translation of the lyrics, ‘Wow, this is deep. The way they express their feelings, the way they talk about relationships, it’s very direct and very different.’ I could relate to it even more. That’s how I became really a fan of the music and a fan of rock ’n’ roll.”
The band’s bassist, Siddique Ahmed, had a more traditional music education, learning violin and piano as a child before discovering bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Scorpions and Guns N’ Roses as a teenager. Like Qardash, he was an Afghan refugee, living in Pakistan. The two met in their home country where their families had returned after the Taliban fell, forming Kabul Dreams there in 2008, Afghanistan’s first rock band.
That backstory is part of “Radio Dreams,” Iranian-born English writer/director Babak Jalali’s drama about a day in the life of a San Francisco Iranian radio station, in which the band plays fictionalized versions of themselves. While the station program manager Hamid (Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo) spends a tense afternoon dealing with his bosses over the direction of the station, Kabul Dreams awaits a date with their idols Metallica. That is, if the group shows.
“Kabul Dreams had recently moved to the Bay Area,” Jalali says during a call from London. “I heard this while I was in the Bay Area writing the script. All of these factors that existed in the Bay Area kind of played into the story. I thought it would be interesting for the first rock band from Afghanistan to meet potentially the world’s biggest rock band.
“We asked Lars (Ulrich to be in the movie) when we were already in preproduction — it could very well have been that he said, ‘No.’… We would have shot the film, anyway. It would have been a ‘Waiting for Godot’ situation.”
For an up-and-coming band, making “Radio Dreams” was a dream. It was a far cry from the situation they left in Afghanistan. While the Taliban banned music, it has come back with a vengeance now, something that shows like “Afghan Star” and the country’s franchise of “The Voice” attest to.
But when Kabul Dreams formed, there was nothing to compare them to as they eschewed traditional music for rock. They had to create a music scene in a country where security is not stable. As the band’s reputation grew, so did threats to the members. Kabul Dreams relocated to California in 2013.
“There was hope when we started,” says Qardash. “It was also terrifying, but it was a lot of fun and it was interesting to do, because no one had done it before. … A lot of the places that we played got closed down or a suicide attack happened and that place doesn’t exist anymore. And, musically, you want to play more gigs and there is no possibility of playing more shows. In the end, we’re a rock band.”
Qardash and Ahmed describe making the movie as a good experience, even if a bit daunting. “It’s one thing to be yourself, it’s another thing to have to repeat something that happened, like our stories,” says Ahmed.
“Radio Dreams” also was a rare opportunity for a young band — they just released their second album “Megalomaniacs” in February — to meet an idol when Godot in the person of Lars Ulrich arrived for his cameo.
“He had researched about Kabul Dreams online,” says Jalali. “He had listened to their music. He had researched their life stories and knew where each came from . ... He was really amazing in that he came and he was as good as gold.”
Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer. Twitter: @cinepam
‘Radio Dreams’ was a rare opportunity for a young band to meet an idol when Lars Ulrich arrived for his cameo.