Monday, April 10, 2006
INTERVIEW WITH EUGENE HUTZ, LEAD SINGER, LYRICIST AND VISIONARY OF GOGOL BORDELLO, APRIL 10, 2006
DS: First of all, my previous favorite album of all time was "Complete Madness" by Madness, and that was the case for over 20 years, and "Gypsy Punks" is now my new favorite album.
EH: Oh, awesome!
DS: And you can be very proud of it. It's great that you were able to take some of the harder times and more negative experiences in your past and channel them into an album that's positive and fun and just a blast to listen to.
EH: Yeah, that's the way to process information. Turn minuses into pluses, what the fuck?
DS: You fled Chernobyl, correct?
EH: Well, I was born in Kiev, just 60 kilometers from Chernobyl.
DS: And you fled that when you were 14 or 15?
EH: Yeah, fifteen.
DS: And then you spent a few years in refugee camps?
EH: Yeah, a few years in the countryside. People confuse it often times, those two things, immigration and evacuation, which is different. This was evacuation. So that's when I just lived in a village for a while, for a year, and that's where I started more identifying with that side of things. I don't want to use the word 'folk', but more kind of primitive ways of making music. So when I got back to the city, I was already kind of seriously influenced by the rural ways. So even though I was brought up in a big city, I kind of became, um, de-evolutionized, in a way.
DS: When did you start writing songs?
EH: About that time...actually a little earlier than that. By that time I was already consciously perceiving everything around me as material for songs. Now, it's like an established method, that's just the way I process all information and things around me. But back then it was just kind of in the making. So I pretty much started perceiving everything as material for songs and for creative storytelling.
DS: And it shows up in the song "Sally" in the line, "And I survived even fucking radiation!" When I first heard that, I thought, "Well, he's Ukrainian, that's probably a reference to Chernobyl."
EH: Well, the thing is that there's no way of knowing if I've really survived radiation, because radiation can do subtle damage. But that song...of course, you understand, there's songs that are more direct and more serious. But that song is actually, I was trying to write something as annoying as possible. [laughs] As ridiculous and fucking bravado, fucking bolting out, going out on some fucking serious limb and shit, trying to convince people that I'm the fucking best, but in a self-mocking kind of way. So it's written in that mode.
DS: Sort of the Ukrainian gypsy punk equivalent of a rap group talking about how they're the best and they kick everyone else's ass.
EH: Yeah, the parallel with hip-hop is very accurate, because hip-hop is very primitive, it's a lot about ego, and being witty, and convincing all the bitches and ho's that you're the fucking best mo-fo on the block. And it's the same thing in gypsy music, except they do it instrumentally more than through singing. But that parallel, it's more primitive kind of culture, like Jamaican dance hall reggae, which is really kind of like getting the ladies to fucking understand your demand to fucking spend the night with them. And I am not alien to that fucking mode, you know? [laughs]
DS: You describe your music as Ukrainian gypsy punk cabaret...
EH: Actually I would like to drop the cabaret part. I've wanted to drop it for five years, I just can't get rid of it. I put it on our poster like once or twice in New York, and it's still in our fucking press all the time. I don't think it's accurate at all. We've definitely moved on from that.
DS: So how much of the music is your influence, Ukrainian influence, and how much is influenced by the countries that the other band members are from?
EH: I don't know, I mean, there's no conscious recipe or ingredients that get sorted out. I think that when I write a song, it most likely comes out in eastern European two-step, and A minor. Sometimes consciously, just to get away from it, I try to switch it to a different key. But I literally write every motherfucking song in that key. I just can't exterminate it out of myself. That's where I live, you know. That's my musical address. [laughs] But because of every addition of musicians to the band, because of other backgrounds, the arrangements of the songs, they take on a journey that I don't necessarily predict. And that's the great creative fun of it. I mean, like, I don't want to have, at the end of my life, a thousand songs in A minor. Only 900. [laughs]
DS: I guess your signature song so far is "Start Wearing Purple"...
[BTW I'm kicking myself now because we got sidetracked and I never got to ask about what inspired "Purple", which was one of my main questions going in. D'OH!]
EH: I don't feel that, because we actually didn't play that song for a couple of years. And it just got back in the swing now because we re-recorded it.
DS: What led you to re-record it?
EH: Because our first album was nowhere to be found. And I'm actually urged to re-record some other songs from it. Plus, the first album was basically a demo when it got released. It was recorded in about one day, it was like a day-and-a-half process.
DS: Not bad for a rush job. [laughs]
EH: Yeah, it's not bad, but you can tell how under-rehearsed the whole fucking thing is. Some parts are alright, and I love the material, but I don't think that recording did justice to the material. But also I can't just sit and think about re-recording shit all the time when I've got new material. I'm really urged to re-record "Passport" in a powerful way, but we're probably not going to get to it.
DS: As far as re-recording songs, now that you have different instruments and members in the band, and have progressed a little more, was that sort of the idea with redoing "Purple"? And out of all the songs on the earlier albums, why was that the one you decided to redo and kind of polish it up and punch it up a bit?
EH: Well, because I've always thought of it as a reggae kind of song, but on the first recording you couldn't tell that. So only with the addition of a bass player could that actually sound the way it was meant to be, with the actual dubbing and stuff like that. Like, I don't really want it to be like a trans-Siberian reggae song.
DS: As far as the early stuff, on the first album, the song that sort of became my early favorite when I first heard it, because it's so odd, is "Unvisible Zedd". Where did the idea for that song come from? What possessed you to write that? [laughs]
EH: There's a guy who lives in New York City, his name is Nick Zedd. He's an underground filmmaker. And he's pretty notorious for owing everybody that he knows fucking lots of money. [laughs] He's also...well, scratch that. [laughs] He's been surviving since the 70s, you know, he's a real Lower East Side character, with a huge selection of underground movies that he made, and people like John Waters love him. And I ended up being friends with him through the scene, and he came to our after-hour club all the time for about a year. And he was just such a strange, perverse cat, that basically that song was kind of like, me thinking how he spends his free time...
DS: [laughs] Whether he was invisible and taking advantage of women in various ways?
EH: Yeah, it was basically like, imaginary situations with Nick there.
DS: A science fiction, Twilight Zone kind of song.
EH: Yeah. He was very proud that I dedicated it to him.
DS: Now, Sergey was a big influence on the stage show, the theatrics?
EH: For a long time, theater was his life. So I think a lot of the attraction for him towards the band was the theatrical aspects. So of course, after he got the music down, he started getting involved more in stage tactics. I discuss and design a lot of it with him. A lot of the stage things are developed with him. It's like a work in progress, because we try different things every night.
DS: Things like the theatrics of the song you did on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, "I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again", with the girls bending over backwards and screaming...pretty interesting.
EH: Yeah, that's actually a pretty bold skit. But it's so emblematic for Gogol Bordello, that it's kind of our business card. Actually the inspiration for that, if I may say 'inspiration', it's actually more informed by horrible things like sex trafficking in eastern Europe, you know, it's more about kidnapping girls and selling them and stuff like that. So I play a vicious pimp in that song. [laughs] I mean, the lyrics of the song actually have nothing to do with the skit, except...the terror of youth, you know, goes for both sex trafficking and my youth. A lot of things in Gogol are not necessarily so literal-minded. Just kind of, one thing plays upon another.
DS: Probably the most interesting song title on the new album is "Think Locally, Fuck Globally". Is that sort of the band's general philosophy?
EH: It's a bit of Little Richard right there. That's a song that, the lyrics were written literally in something like 7 minutes, because everything else was written on that album, but I still had no lyrics for that song, I just used to ad-lib all the lyrics to it. So when the time came to nail it...
DS: With a lot of albums, everybody puts down their tracks separately. One of the things I like about your albums is that they sound like everybody plays all at once. Was that the case?
EH: Yeah, we were in the studio all together. In our case, with our way of music-making, it's essential. No way really to channel it separately.
DS: I think that's the best way to go, especially with your style. It lends itself to that sort of on-the-spot, kinetic craziness.
EH: Yeah, you have to capture the chaos.
DS: I wanted to ask what your musical influences are as far as different artists. As for "Never Young", that song reminds me, in particular, because it's so manic and active, of Spike Jones.
EH: Really? I don't really know his work.
DS: Well, because when you listen to it, you can imagine all this stuff going on, all this nuttiness.
EH: It came from experiencing it. I mean, we're influenced by Nick Cave, and...[laughs]...his mustache.
DS: I guess that's what this guy in the MetroTimes was referencing. And in fact you read this during the show tonight: "The so-called 'gypsy punks' have played the 'We dig the eastern European sound, we wear huge mustaches, and play the accordion' card so well that it's almost easy to forget that Nick Cave did it first."
EH: Especially knowing how much Nick Cave is known for his mustache and accordion and eastern European sound? [laughs] Very brilliant. Some people just get paid to write total fucking nonsense.
DS: Maybe he's just basing it on a picture of your band and a picture of Nick Cave.
EH: Oh well, it is what it is.
DS: You're working on an album for next year?
EH: Yeah, the material is already in development. There's 25 songs that I need to boil down to about a 14-15 song album. We're probably going to record it in Mexico City, for a different vibe. Just more nightlife, a loose atmosphere, not so much "Where can I get a bottle of wine now that it's fucking 2 in the morning?"
DS: How are you going to top "Gypsy Punks"?
EH: For us, knowing the progression, there's so much material that that's the least of our worries. People said the same thing about "Multi Kulti" ["Multi Kontra Kulti vs Irony", their 2nd album], like, "That's classic!" The thing is that when it came out, people were like "What the fuck? There's no bass!" Then when "Gypsy Punks" came out it was like, "How are they gonna top this classic?" Like, weren't you the same motherfucker who was bitching about how there was no bass? [laughs] Idiot! Then people were bitching about how there was "too much bass!" It's like, just sit tight, get down with it, if you don't dig it, it's so much easy to just switch the motherfucking channel.
DS: One last question, just because I'd like to know personally...Any plans to make your stuff available for karaoke? I'd love to be able to do "Immigrant Punk" or "Purple" without fighting against the vocals.
EH: How about "Never Young"? Let's see how well people can stumble through that speed of rapping there.
DS: I'd love to try it. I'll take a shot at it. If you make it available I'll do it.
EH: PARTY!