Iraqi Heavy Metal Band Asks for Help as They Fight to Survive

When Rock Daily reported on the stirring Spike Jonze-produced documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad as part of our Toronto International Film Festival coverage, we were told the bandmembers' situation was dire. Now new information has emerged about Acrassicauda, Iraq's only heavy-metal band, and their fight to survive. The group, which formed in 2001 and was influenced by Metallica, Slayer and Slipknot, almost immediately began receiving death threats from fundamentalists who called their music Satantic -- playing in public became almost impossible, and even practicing was dangerous. Like approximately two million other Iraqis, they fled their home country and became war refugees in Syria, but as of October 10th, their visas expire -- if they return home, they will almost certainly die. Now the filmmakers who documented their struggle in the film are asking for help raising money to relocate the band someplace safer (they're not disclosing where for fear of endangering the band further). For more information and instructions on how to donate, check out the movie's Web site.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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