Rocker dad mum on Al Qaeda son

Peace and love and treason

BY MICHELLE CARUSO
DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF


Adam Yahiye Gadahn, aka Al Qaeda stooge Azzam al-Amriki, is the son of '60s music man Phil Pearlman Gadahn (above).

LOS ANGELES - As a 1960s-era underground musician, Phil Pearlman Gadahn had a cult following. Now his funky homemade recordings are hot commodities again - thanks in no small part to his son's notoriety as an Al Qaeda mouthpiece.
Adam Yahiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old convert to Islam who now calls himself Azzam al-Amriki, or "Azzam the American," was indicted last week on charges of treason and providing material support to terrorists. He could be sentenced to death if convicted of treason.

While the FBI seeks Adam Gadahn, European music buffs are hawking bootleg copies of his dad's 1967 psychedelic album, "Beat of the Earth," on the Internet.

Phil Pearlman Gadahn, now in his late 50s, lives far from the spotlight in rural Riverside County, Calif. Neither he nor his wife, Jennifer, could be reached for comment. "The family is not doing any interviews," said his sister, Nancy Pearlman.

When the Daily News called Pearlman's home, a man who refused to identify himself ranted that the number was unpublished and warned, "Don't ever call this number again!"

But a colorful portrait of the musician-turned-goat farmer and father of the country's No.1 jihadist emerged through the recollections of former bandmate Karen Darby.

"Phil was unique even for the all-time uniqueness of the '60s," Darby told writer Patrick Lundborg in 2004.

Darby described Pearlman, the son of a Jewish doctor dad and a Christian mother, as "always a contrarian."

He wore his hair and beard long, burned incense and drove a hippie-type Volkswagen bus, but "he was very against drugs," Darby said.

Pearlman also had a strong anti-establishment streak. "He invented a prank called 'reverse shoplifting' where he would walk into a record store with his own LP and unnoticed, place it among the other albums for sale" said Lundborg, editor of the Web site Lysergia.com.

The self-produced 1967 "Beat of the Earth" recording originated as a project for an art class.

"The music was free-form, original and unrehearsable, since it was all ad-lib and spontaneous...the steady thrum one experienced when you went to a love-in," said Darby.

"Pearlman wasn't an imitation, but a true original," said Lundborg.

In all, Pearlman made four indie records between 1965 and 1976. The first was a 45rpm parody of surf-hot-rod songs by "Phil & the Flakes."

"Beat of the Earth" followed in 1967, "Electronic Hole" in 1970 and "Relatively Clean Rivers" in 1976.

For a time, Pearlman and his records vanished from the music scene after he married in the late 1970s and began raising children and goats on a farm with no electricity. The couple home-schooled their four kids.

During this phase, Pearlman adopted the surname "Gadahn" (derived from the biblical Gideon) and became religious after finding a Bible on the beach, according to his son Adam Gadahn's 1995 essay, "Becoming Muslim."

Pearlman made his living as a halal butcher who slaughtered his goats in a manner acceptable to Muslims. "He once had a lot of Muslim friends," the son wrote.

In the late 1980s, a music collector stumbled on a used copy of "Beat of the Earth" in a bargain bin, liked it and tracked Pearlman down, buying up all unsold copies of the disk. The record made the rounds with rare music dealers and soon a cult classic was born, Lundborg said.

In 1994, Pearlman visited Darby when he was about to release a "new" album using outtakes from their 1967 recording sessions. He complained about "consumeristical society," she recalled.

A year later, Adam Gadahn, who had moved in with his grandparents, ditched his self-described obsession with "demonic heavy metal music" and converted to Islam.

Adam Gadahn, who is believed to be in Pakistan, has appeared in several Al Qaeda videos since 2004, including one released last month.

"It's tempting to find some sort of relationship between Phil's unusual lifestyle and what happened to his son," said Lundborg. "But I tend to look at it more as a sad coincidence."