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Gypsy Rocking
Gogol Bordello’s success isn’t novel
By Alan Sculley
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Gogol Bordello performs June 17 at the Culture Room in Fort
Lauderdale. |
To get a rise out of Eugene Hütz, front man of the highly
entertaining band Gogol Bordello, just ask him if music fans
consider his band a novelty.
“That’s like old news,” Hütz said, dismissing the topic during a
recent phone interview. “That’s like maybe when we put out our
first album, maybe something like that happened. Come on, Gypsy
Punks [the band’s 2005 CD] has been called the rock album of
the decade, of the mother [bleeping] decade…. There’s nothing
about it that’s novelty. It’s stupid to look at it that way.”
In fact, Hütz might be more accurately considered a true musical
ambassador, introducing the uninitiated to the rousing sounds of
authentic Gypsy (Roma) music, updated with a strong dose of punk
rock and mixed with dashes of other styles, ranging from reggae to
spaghetti western-styled folk.
And with Gogol Bordello seemingly on the verge of breaking beyond
the cult band status it has enjoyed, it may not be long before
rock music fans find Gypsy music no less unusual — or dare one say
foreign — than hip-hop or Latin music.
“Somebody had a great quote about our show,” Hütz said. “They said
this is a band that makes all foreign seem familiar and all
familiar seem totally exotic. That’s what we do. It’s not that
we’re exotic. I’m not [bleeping] exotic. I live in New York City.”
Hütz may not consider himself or his music exotic, but his life
story certainly is unusual — almost more like a movie script than
fact.
Born in 1972, Hütz was living in Chernobyl when the Russian city
became famous for the 1986 meltdown at its nuclear power plant.
Hütz and his family quickly got out of Dodge, beginning a travel
odyssey that landed Hütz in refugee camps across Eastern Europe.
During one of their stays in the Eastern European countryside,
Hütz was introduced to the Gypsy culture of his ancestors.
To Hütz, the more extreme the music, the better, and he was drawn
to punk rock and extreme metal. Gypsy music, though, was something
altogether different.
“I hear a music that is just played basically by two guys on
accordion, but played with so much insanity that it like reaches
another form of madness,” Hütz explained. “It was just
mind-blowing. It was just such a serious reminder that the power
doesn’t come from technology and things that are necessarily
loud.”
But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Hütz had the opportunity to
start turning his vision for a Gypsy band into reality. That’s
when the Hütz family came to the United States.
The family settled in Vermont, but Hütz quickly decided to move to
New York. It was there, in that multicultural mecca, that he
gradually began to meet the musicians who would make up Gogol
Bordello.
By 1999, the group’s core members — Hütz, fiddler Sergey Ryabtsev,
accordion player Yuri Lemeshev, guitarist Oren Kaplan and drummer
Eliot Ferguson — were in place. The lineup has since expanded to
include bassist Tommy Gobena and percussionists/dancers Pam Racine
and Elizabeth Sun.
The group quickly gained a reputation in New York City for its
frantic live shows, Hütz’s exuberant onstage personality — he’s
sometimes compared to the ever-volatile Iggy Pop — and the group’s
stirring music.
Hütz and his bandmates also quickly began building a catalog of
original music, debuting in 1999 with the CD Vio-La Intruder,
followed by the albums Multi Kontra Culti Vs. Irony and
Gogol Bordello Vs. Tamia Muskat (J.U.F.) and the EP East
Infection.
But it was the 2005 CD Gypsy Punks that really started to
gain the band attention in the music press and raves from critics.
These days, the group tours worldwide, headlining festivals in
Britain and Europe, and playing large clubs and theaters in the
States. The group also gained considerable notice when Hütz and
other members of Gogol Bordello performed with Madonna during last
summer’s Live Earth concert.
The band’s latest CD, Super Taranta!, should take Gogol
Bordello’s career to another level. The songwriting on the CD has
taken a step up, as songs such as “Ultimate” (with its
attention-grabbing violin hook), “Dub the Frequencies of Love”
(which mixes touches of dub reggae with the Gypsy punk sound) and
“Zina-Marina” (with its punky guitar) are among the CD’s standout
cuts.
What’s more, Hütz feels that Super Taranta! comes closer to
capturing the live Gogol Bordello sound than the group’s previous
CDs.
“It’s funny because working with the order of songs, I was
thinking should we start with ‘Ultimate,’ because starting with
‘Ultimate’ is quite a bar you set for yourself,” Hütz said. “But
listening to the rest of the material, I was like, that’s the
parallel between Gogol’s show and Gogol’s records. When people go
and see us the first time, they literally cannot believe that the
band has started with so much energy. We go from there. But it
does go from there higher and higher and higher and higher. And
that’s kind of how this record is. It really actually goes into
new dimensions all the time.”
Gogol Bordello performs June 17 at the Culture Room, 3045 N.
Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are
$19.99 and can be purchased at ticketmaster.com. |
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