Rock solid in Saudi Arabia

It was past sunset, a little after the call to prayer, and time for the mic check at the sometimes-weekly jam session of Hasan Hatrash and his friends in this city on the Red Sea.

"Test, test, one, two, three," Hatrash said. They adjusted the bass and fiddled with the reverb.

Then they broke into an improvised, bluesy number that enveloped the makeshift studio at Amer Tashkandi's house.

Islam Abu Jebara manned the Premier drums, Tashkandi glided his hands along the Roland Fantom keyboard, and Hatrash pulled at the strings of a bass emblazoned with stickers.

"Iron Maiden" read one; "Megadeth, Cryptic Writings," said the other.

Hatrash nodded, his foot keeping cadence. His eyes, half-closed, suggested another world. "I was born a rocker," Hatrash said.

Hatrash is 32, having spent some of his childhood in Britain, Egypt and Jordan, where his father was posted in Saudi embassies.

His hair is salted grey, and his beard narrows to a point.

His yellow T-shirt reads "Authentic Hendrix".

Hatrash works as a reporter, but music with his friends is his passion.

He calls himself a rocker, but he exhibits a Zen-like approach to life.

"Heaven and hell is here, man," he said, pointing to his head.

"It's what you create."

A simple life

Hatrash doesn't smoke. He doesn't drink. He prays five times a day and, like the others, considers himself a good Muslim.

"Life is all about simplicity, but we tend to complicate it, intentionally," he said.

Hatrash met Abu Jebara in high school, as they shopped for music at a store called Billboard.

They traded names of their favourite bands: Metallica and Megadeth.

They decided to jam together, and the friendship has lasted.
 
Tashkandi came later, by way of classical training on the piano as a 7-year-old, and he still cites as his inspirations Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and Bach.

After an interlude in their jam, they began again, each taking signals from the other, usually with no more than a glance.

"We just came up with that now," Hatrash said.

An hour into the session, Mohammad Shata arrived.

Just 23, he wore his baseball cap backward, with a shy smile. He picked up the bass, and Hatrash took the guitar, held by a rainbow-coloured strap.

They launched into the Doors' Riders on the Storm.

"Into this house we're born," Hatrash sang. "Into this world we're thrown."

A spiritual language

After a cigarette break, the men plunged ahead.

Abu Jebara tapped his drumsticks four times, and they started Bob Marley's Waiting in Vain.

At 11pm, Tashkandi's father popped his head in the door.

He didn't have to say anything; his look made it clear it was time, three hours in, to wrap it up. The men retired to the carpet.

Every so often, one would grab an acoustic guitar.

They chatted about other Saudi bands, most of whom they insisted were only in it for fame.

They lamented the commercial direction of Arabic pop and its staple of sultry videos, racy by any standard. Music is too good for that, they agreed.

"It is an international language," Hatrash said. "Everyone understands it." The men nodded.

"Music has no insults. It's just a spiritual language," Hatrash said. "It?s the purest language that exists."

A culture shock

Seven months ago, Hasan Hatrash returned from Malaysia, where he had spent two years.

He went there with little more than a backpack and a custom-made, maroon Ibanez electric guitar, still part of his collection of nine guitars.

When he returned to Jeddah, long among the most liberal of Saudi cities, he said he felt "culture shock" at the speed of change in youth fashion and attitudes, and the onset of surreptitious dating made possible by cellphones.

Music was part of the transformation: There were two bands in the early 1990s, he said, "and they were really underground". Now there are as many as 15.

Mohammad Shata emerged from that milieu.

Last month, his former band, the Grieving Age, played with seven others at a private villa in Jeddah, drawing 300 fans, all men.

Some were enticed by advertisements circulated on the internet that read, "Support the rock scene in Jeddah."

His band played doom metal, which he admitted "is very, very depressing".

The band Wasted Land played death metal; Deathless Anguish and Creative Waste preferred brutal death metal.

Nemesis, he said, was a little lighter.