Promotional Photo Gogol Bordello With Dub Trio and DJ Dubtra. 9 p.m.
Oct. 7 at Toad s Place, 300 York St., New Haven.
$18. (203) 624-TOAD, toadsplace.com .
Imagine you are a traveler on a stretch of long, foreboding highway. The landscape is strange, and the destination uncertain perhaps an undiscovered country. A parallel universe.
Maybe Hell itself. You stop into a roadhouse, where the air is darkly festive, and the drinks flow without end. Packed in around you are the people who make their homes along this path.
They are denizens of a demimonde between dark and light: Rebels, outlaws, whores, artists, the displaced and disaffected, just looking to get them some peace, or whoop it up as much as they can until the final judgment comes down. The feeling of being surrounded by stories, by people with no fixed forms or identities, whispered secrets and angry poetry, Faustian bargains and Dionysian escapades is both intoxicating and frightening. You re either lucky or cursed to stay forever.
The resident band of this refuge midway between nowhere and everywhere is Gogol Bordello. They are the living link between our past when mankind roamed the earth in bands and extended tribes, wild, hungry and free and our ever-uncertain future, the globalized polyglot network in which everyone knows everything about anything except who they are and how to live in the world. In the commingling of history, myth, tradition and technology, and amidst the collision of cultures was born Gogol Bordello fittingly, at the turn of the century, in the immigrant jungle of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where leader of the tribe Eugene Hutz came to rest from a journey that began with his family s flight from Ukraine to escape the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
There was never a day it started, says Hutz in phone interview, with a tone that suggests that anything as standard as a band being formed is on the other side of the globe from where Gogol Bordello stands. I was playing guitar, and then there were three of us Sergey [Ryabtzev, fiddler] and Yuri [Lemeshev, accordionist] then six months later we were a quartet, and now we are nine. It just snowballed.
To get at the roots of the band requires a trip with a caravan of Roma, or gypsies, traversing Eastern Europe hundreds of years ago, holding celebrations around fires, riffing on ancient tunes. Hutz s grandmother was a gypsy, and the rest of his family had the inborn musical tastes and exuberance known to the peoples of the Carpathian and Ural mountains and the trans-Slavic steppes. My main influence was people making music around a table filled with food, recalls Hutz.
There were always four or five guitars floating around the house. My father and uncle would play whatever strikes the drunken brain. It would be urban folklore and traditional songs, or the Beatles and Stones.
When there was no spontaneous outburst of song from around the table, Hutz would consume the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, his other main influence. By the time Hutz and his parents left his home for a life of wandering at age 13 or 14, he was carrying with him Gypsy, Ukrainian and Russian culture, flavored by The Clash, Parliament Funkadelic, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop. I wrote My Strange Uncles from Abroad about those people, says Hutz: Through the mystical communication deep within it all comes true forming underground railroad for our ultimate breakthrough!
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Bright open eyes, they are still looking They are still finding A few unpoisoned hearts No matter where you are exiled No matter where you are exiled! Hutz and his family spent seven years traveling through refugee camps in Europe before being accepted to a resettlement program in Vermont. From there, Hutz made a beeline for New York City, where he discovered a community of our generation of immigrants.
Immigrants have amazing destinies, Hutz asserts, and this is evidenced by the two men who joined him initially. Sergey Rjabtzev s fiddle attains brain-scrambling speeds when the band kicks into its furious punk dervishes, evoking Celtic dances and Appalachian campfires, kibbutz klezmer weddings and Hungarian festivals. It s hard to think that he was a Moscow theater director for 10 years.
Yuri Lemeshev is the accordion player, adding a pulsing, whirling carnival sound, somewhere between Kurt Weill and Frank Yankovic. He is 53 years old. The others joined later, each adding a new level.
A heavy surf/punk guitar imbues the music with a sense of destiny, while Hutz s speed licks are death metal and ska in one. Two of the most recent arrivals, amazingly, are the drummer Eliot Ferguson, the sole American-born player, and Eric Gobina, the bassist. The incongruity that this frenetic, highly nuanced and hard rocking group added a rhythm section when they already had more members than most bands have is just par for the course.
Hutz doubts there will be any more additions. I hope not, he says. But he s thrilled at how the sound has refined itself.
We have sure found our frequencies, he says. Perhaps more importantly, every new traveler in the Gogol Bordello caravan brings influences, stories and anecdotes. The strange inhabitants of Gogol Bordello s universe many resembling characters out of Nikolai Gogol s stories, or those of Mikhail Bulgakov, the original namesake of the band.
( Nobody d heard of Bulgakov, so we changed it. We didn t realize nobody d heard of Gogol either, relates Hutz.) Bolgakov s best known work, The Master and Margarita , is about the hilarious and poignant interplay of the devil, literary Muscovites, Pontius Pilate, a girl and a talking cat in the early days of Soviet rule.
It is the sort of milieu that Gogol Bordello s tribe is familiar with. The most ridiculous songs are autobiographical, according to Hutz. The stories and characters are from the experiences of friends and relatives.
The whole extended family of Gogol Bordello is these people. These are the anecdotes that fly around when the drinking starts. Even those more fantastical ones, the ones Eugene calls flights of the phantasmagoric, are at their core the holographic images of people known to their band.
These tales and influences the records of journeys undertaken in mind and body are evident not only on the albums, but within the songs. Eschewing the ABAB songwriting format, Hutz, who prides his lyrical and musical abilities, agrees that within each song there is a journey. They evolve throughout, starting soft then slamming into overdrive, or beginning in English and slipping into Ukrainian, without a thought of ending up at the start or giving a sense of closure.
Hutz calls them asymmetrical. Right there, Hutz hits Gogol Bordello s relevance, strength, originality and gusto on the head. Our influences are bands that had a unique path.
They had no time for copycatting, took whatever they could, and you couldn t tell what the fuck their influences were. Without caring about a particular sound, or identity, or image without trying to conform to anything at all, even logic Gogol Bordello has come to lead those willing to follow to a more interesting future. editor@newhavenadvocate.
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