Top-selling Iranian Sings Again

By Tom Cohen

July 27, 2000 Associated Press Writer

TORONTO (AP) - Two decades of silence ends Saturday when Googoosh, Iran's best-selling performer, sings publicly for the first time since her homeland's Islamic revolution.

The sexy singer-actress captured the imagination and hearts of her generation in Iran, first as a child movie star in the 1960s and later as a pop princess of the 1970s.

Then she was gone, shut away with everything else deemed decadent and subversive when Iran's revolution took hold in 1979. While other entertainers left Iran to keep working, Googoosh chose to stay.

Saturday's concert at Toronto's Air Canada Center launches a series of shows in Canada and the United States, followed by the shooting of a film directed by her husband, Massoud Kimiai.

"She consistently sells more CDs and tapes than any other Iranian artist," journalist Jahanshah Javid wrote in an article reprinted on the U.S.-based Web site www.googoosh.com. "Hikers sing her songs on Tehran's mountain trails. Children who were born after she stopped singing listen to her tapes on Walkmans at school. ... She is, without a doubt, the most-loved Iranian alive."

At a news conference in Toronto and a follow-up interview, the 50-year-old Googoosh called her return historic, saying ``something like this has never happened for anyone else.''

Her motivation, she said, was to give back some of the "beautiful waves of love" expressed by fans.

That devotion is clear in e-mails on the Web site, messages that reflect a nostalgia among many Iranian expatriates for the lives they left behind.

"The sadness I feel when I see what has happened to Iran in the last two decades is equal to the one I feel when I remember how much I miss hearing you," wrote one fan identified as Babak, a cancer research scientist in the San Francisco area. "That feeling is shared by millions of Iranians around the world."

Back then, Googoosh symbolized the Western excess and decadence stamped out by the revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. With her short skirts and cropped hair, she created fashion trends.

Like Elvis and the Beatles, she was so strongly associated with the '60s generation that even after she stopped performing, her music continued to sell and parents today teach the songs to their children.

Googoosh was only a child when she began singing, and made her first movie at age 8. She grew up with her audience and its overwhelming adoration.

"They lived with me, I lived with them," she said. "They really brought me up."

She was in the United States when the revolution occurred, and decided to go back to ``the air that I breathe,'' despite warnings she might be executed upon arrival.

"I was dying a slow death there, so I thought I might as well have a quick death," she said.

Revolutionary Guards took her passport after she landed in Tehran in May 1979, three months after the fall of the shah, and she thought she would be killed. Instead, they came back five minutes later with an entry stamp, recommending that she cover her hair to avoid recognition.

"I was in shock," she said. "I couldn't believe that I was alive and they were greeting me in such a way."

The strictures of the Islamic republic forbade her from performing or even dressing in her usual manner. Over the next 20 years, she spent much time alone in her Tehran apartment, sometimes humming or singing softly to herself at the piano.

``I never thought I'd be singing in concerts again,'' she said.

The 1997 election of a moderate leadership under President Mohammad Khatami brought change, and Googoosh applied for a passport a year later to visit her new grandson in Los Angeles. The passport came through this year - and then plans for the concerts and film.

She doesn't yet know whether she'll be allowed to sing publicly in Iran, where female singers are only allowed to perform for other women.

But by granting her the passport, Googoosh said, the government is letting her know she can perform again - at least overseas.