A Debauched Night Out With Eugene Hutz
Hutz’s (he likes his name spelled with an umlaut, but we’re not going to indulge him here, because, dude, seriously) band, Gogol Bordello, started playing in small New York clubs and restaurants in 1999 as a barroom cabaret act. Their performances often turned into hedonistic riots. The stage was never big enough for Hutz; he wanted the entire room for his show. He wanted to climb the walls and have the crowd follow him. It soon became clear that his ten-piece backup crew (which included an ex-theater director from Moscow on violin, a kosher Jewish accordionist, a drummer from the Midwest, and dancers of bloods braided from Thailand, Scotland, China and the Americas) – wasn’t big enough. Hutz wanted reliable stampedes, riots on cue; his audience and his songs weren’t finished until every pair of lungs in the room was hollering along with his latest nonsensical slogan.
The fans went home soaked in beer and sweat – usually not their own. They sported bruises from kicks to the face by the musicians, who were known spill into the audience astride the drums, the fans, and each other. All ears echoed with the promise of cultural revolution. This performance style – a Gypsy wedding band marrying itself to the early Stooges – saw the band evicted from every club in their hometown.
The fans went home soaked in beer and sweat – usually not their own.
It also worked. Gradually came the record sales, the radio exposure, and an appearance as talking heads in the documentary Kill Your Idols, legitimizing Gogol Bordello alongside such essential New York bands as Sonic Youth, Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. For Hutz, this led to an even brighter spotlight: a role in Liev Schreiber's Hollywood adaptation of Everything is Illuminated. The video for “Start Wearing Purple,” was given a tardy nod by MTV; finally, Hutz received the ultimate stamp for cultural relevancy – Madonna came calling.
Before long, Hutz was onstage with a gypsied-up Ms. Ciccone at her Live Earth spectacle performing “La Isla Bonita,” and starring as a version of himself in her first and last (if the critics have any say) directorial attempt, Filth and Wisdom. Gogol Bordello concerts are now arena affairs; all genuine madness is confined to Hutz’s standing DJ gig at Mehanata, where he’s been captured for RUSSIA! by New York’s best nightlife photographer, Nikola Tamindzic. Hutz’s night has miraculously survived his rise to fame, the gentrification of the Lower East Side, and the relocation of Mehanata itself; it now threatens to become the debauched downtown equivalent of Woody Allen’s Café Carlyle engagement.
Aware that he’s reached a precarious summit, Hutz maintains a grip on his revolution's guidon. Just like his scratchy accent and curly mustache, his dream of – what, exactly? a worldwide orgy scored with acoustic oompah-punk? – remains central to Hutz’s identity. Four albums and an EP in, his lyrics still appear culled from a thin English dictionary containing only definitions of buzzwords like “green card,” “immigrant,” “border” and “fuck.” There’s the occasional guarded confession, too: “I’m a jester, I’m a clown… so what?” he admits in a rare Russian lyric on his latest album. That line also happens to be the opening one in an aria from the Kalman operetta “The Circus Princess,” the same one given a No Wave treatment in the ’80s by the iconic Russian rocker Viktor Tsoi. So what looks like a moment of teary-eyed spontaneity turns out to be a strategic move that connects Hutz to pre-revolutionary decadence and Soviet underground rock at once. Mighty shrewd for a derelict rabble-rouser: just like his pal Madonna, Hutz is nothing if not a genius of self-positioning.
Then again, one look at the photos surrounding this story, and the suspicions of calculated minstrelsy fall away. What we’ve got on our hands is a freakish anomaly: a scion of the country Boris Grebenshikov termed “the rhythmless land” is somehow getting Americans to dance their feet off. Hutz’s Gypsy sloganeering may be bullshit on par with M.I.A.’s Tamil Tiger affectations, but it’s just the sweet bullshit needed to fertilize the seeds of something real.
(Photos by Nikola Tamindzic)