A raucous quest for true happiness
Gogol Bordello’s tunes urge listeners to live in the moment
Gogol Bordello likes to paint itself as a United Nations of Gypsy punks — with members hailing from Ukraine, Ecuador, Scotland and Ethiopia.
Yet all is not let’s-holdhands-and-sing-Kumbaya in the Bordello. At the end of July, former guitarist Oren Kaplan slapped Gogol’s charismatic frontman Eugene Hutz with a lawsuit, alleging “he brazenly absconded with approximately half a million dollars from the bank accounts of the Gogol Bordello entities and deposited those funds into the accounts of new companies which are wholly owned by Hutz,” according to documents filed with the New York County Supreme Court.
Kaplan is suing for $950,000 in damages. Hutz prefers not to worry about such distractions as his band tours through Canada, South America and Europe over the next four months.
“I don’t feel anything about it,” he says.
“I don’t really have time to actually deal with it in any way. I don’t really have time for things like that. Yeah.”
This is in keeping with the philosophy behind Pura Vida Conspiracy, Gogol Bordello’s sixth album of hoist-your-pintand-chant-along anthems and dizzying reels. Songs such as Dig Deep Enough, Is It The Way You Name Your Ship and My Gypsy Auto Pilot urge listeners to live in the moment, not fixate on the past or future.
“There’s nothing there,” says Hutz. “Those things are mind projections that don’t even exist. As a matter of fact, they never existed and everyone is walking around in this ill condition, trying to make sure that their faraway future — that will never be perceived as future — will be fantastic.
“In so doing, people totally misunderstand the whole idea of happiness. They think happiness is some kind of situation, that they’re just going to continue providing you with socalled happiness 24/7. That’s not what happiness is. All the ups and downs and lefts and rights are part of happiness. Pure life is already flowing through you 24/7; there’s nothing you need to do.
“You don’t need to speed it up, you don’t need to slow it down, you just need to understand it and be with it. Musicians, we have an advantage of understanding that a bit fuller because the very experience of playing music demands your attention. When you do that for thousands of thousands of hours, you start taking that into real life.”
Hutz started Gogol Bordello in 1999, a few years after he moved from Ukraine to New York — with a few ups and downs, lefts and rights along the way. His family, which is of Roma ancestry, were forced to flee their home after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, leading to years of refugee camps across Europe.
You’d think these experiences would also have taught Hutz to live in (and sometimes despise) the moment, but he credits his childhood years as a long-distance runner for setting him on the road, as it were, to his pura vida philosophy. (He now lives in Rio de Janeiro — where, he says, most people don’t get caught up in the past or future.)
“You spend a lot of time alone as a long-distance runner — and it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience. There are some heroic moments, but a lot of times, it just sucked. So, dealing with that and understanding the flow of running, being one-on-one with nature, being one-on-one with yourself, I realized later it was a platform for letting creativity come in.”
Nowadays, the 40-year-old musician and occasional actor gets most of his workouts onstage. Gogol Bordello is renowned for its sweaty, raucous shows — the band’s first Edmonton appearance, at the late Sidetrack Café in 2006, is still spoken of in reverential tones.
Recording studios aren’t necessarily his favourite environment as a musician, but Hutz is rekindling his flame with what can be a mundane, repetitive and controlled process.
“I used to love it, then I started NOT looking forward to recording because of how stifling it was. But these last two albums, in particular Pura Vida Conspiracy, I kind of had a different sense about it — something very uplifting.
“We’re much more of a puttogether band. There’s a lot more intelligent environment these days — not in any newage way. It’s still a f----n’ band, but nothing beats experience. You don’t have it, it doesn’t matter how many books you read about it.”