How four teenagers smuggled the first electric guitar into Jerusalem

“We were walking outside the old city walls of Jerusalem, right between Herod’s Gate and Damascus Gate,” Hagop Kaplanian recalls exactly — one step at a time — how The Flintstones came to be Palestine’s first rock band.

Strolling through early ‘60s Jerusalem, only high schoolers at the time and infatuated with the few Beatles records they could get from Beirut, Hagop and his two cousins, Mardo and Peter Sarkissian, along with their classmate Serop Ohannessian, declared a local share of Beatlemania. An impromptu decision that demanded the conjuration of four Beatles-inspired instruments by any means necessary. 

“Back then, we knew nothing. We had no music lessons, no real musical background, just an old accordion at home and my sisters playing piano at school,” explains Hagop, who now resides in Germany.

At Collège des Frères, the school that the boys attended, the kids were familiar with church choirs, pianos, and even acoustic guitars, but what’s a rock ‘n’ roll band with no electricity? An electric guitar was not even an option.

Envision this: it is 1964, and The Beatles are as hot as ever, they had even just stopped at Beirut Airport on their way to Hong Kong for a refuel, and the dream is as close as ever. Four infatuated Jerusalemite boys decide to start their own rock band, but this is early ‘60s Jerusalem, and not one instrument shop is within sight; the solution? A Höfner order catalog sat on Serop’s living room table. 

The four, then 15 years old, placed an order: 3 Höfner electric guitars to be shipped from Germany. At the time, under Jordanian rule, the guitars arrived at Aqaba Port. For months, they sat at customs—misunderstood, unclaimed, stranded. “The customs people did not know what the hell they were,” says Hagop. 

It was time for alchemy once more. Brother Norbert, the choir instructor at Collège des Frères, had to intervene.  In a selfless attempt to help the aspiring boys, Brother Norbert traveled to the port and claimed the instruments: he alleged they were for school use and explained what they were— “ouds”.  He even opened the school hall for the boys to practice. 

Seven months later, Hagop, Serop, Peter, and Mardo had a place to rehearse, 3 electric guitars, and no amplifiers— but a makeshift radio would have to make do. Beatlemania had finally found its way to Palestine. 

“One of our first shows was at Birzeit College (now Birzeit University), and if you saw pictures of the instruments we used on stage, you would laugh your head off. Actually, before that, we played at the Grand Hotel in Ramallah (now Odeh Hotel), where many foreign bands would come from Italy, Spain, and France in the summertime. Occasionally, we could use their amplifiers. Even strings, we had to beg anyone going to Beirut to bring some back for us. We had no microphones, no amps, and no speakers; it was like dipping into the unknown.” 

In the beginning, The Flintstones was mostly a cover band, singing The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Shadows, even Ray Charles, and of course, The Beatles, and that was enough for them to start touring the country. For just 250 Fils, you could imagine Serop as John Lennon, Mardo as Ringo, Peter as George Harrison, and Hagop was the Palestinian Paul McCartney. From customs to concerts, The Flintstones were now playing in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Birzeit, Bethlehem, and Amman, with live recordings of shows where the crowds were bustling and buzzing, to the extent of ending up banned from performing in Schmidt’s Girls College. “It was too much for the nuns to hear girls shouting and developing teenage boy crushes,” Hagop recalls, laughing. “It was some sort of undesired revolution. People would say: ‘Look at these khanafis’ (Arabic for Beetles) as we carried our guitars down the street.” 

Although short-lived, operating from 1964 until the boys travelled for studies each in a different country in 1968, The Flintstones were all the hype, memorable to the point of imitation. “After us came a band called The Yarnies, whose parents were well-off and bought some Italian instruments for them, and it went one step further. Suddenly, you had professional amplifiers and speakers, and then it kept growing. The Mosktios emerged, then The Bats, The Blooms, and so on.”

Emile Ashrawi (The Blooms) and Ibrahim Mourad (The Silverstones) both credit The Flintstones as the spark that pushed them to start their own bands. From al Baraem / The Blooms (1968-1976) to The Hard Rocks (1972-1976), The Red Spots (1974-1977), and The Silverstones (1972-1987), the Flintstones created a ripple of Palestinian Beatlemania that evolved in all directions, all highly distinct in sounds and visuals as they went on; some, like the Silverstones, leaned into commercial success, making soft-rock love songs and pressing vinyl and cassettes, and others, like The Blooms, who later adopted an Arabic name and became more engaged politically, evolved into a more activist and national soundscape.

But The Flintstones were not finished defying borders, nuns, and customs agents. Serop and Hagop occasionally returned to play with these bands after university, and Hagop went on to design posters, tickets, and vinyl sleeves for them, and this time it was Brother Bernard who reopened the school hall for The Silverstones to rehearse.

For nearly twenty years, these bands branched out and intertwined endlessly, all stemming from one fateful walk through the Old City of Jerusalem. Perhaps much like a walk through Chicago’s South Side that introduced DJ Kenn (fresh from Japan) to a young Chief Keef by chance, birthing Chicago drill music.

The flame eventually burned out. Like all great movements, all legendary bands, there was an eventual and bounded decline. The era of Palestinian rock concluded with the first intifada, coincidentally, the intifada of stones or rocks. That was the deal: Palestine practiced rock music on its own terms— terms that inevitably included an uprising of the people. The Silverstones, the longest-running band out of the bunch, locked their guitars away ever since, alongside stacks of vinyl records and performance photo albums, the mere remains of our Palestinian raging ’60s.