GYPSY PUNK ARRIVED IN THE EAST VILLAGE

Eugene Hütz founded the band Gogol Bordello in 1998. Through wild sets at a variety of venues on the Lower East Side, it defined a new universe of Ukrainian music.

Istarted coming to Ukrainian places in the East Village before I even moved here. I was drawn to it, the density of the Ukrainian culture. In Kyiv, where I grew up, the Soviets drilled it into people’s heads that we had to eradicate Ukrainian culture. You’d hit pockets of Ukrainian culture in Kyiv, but it was pretty diluted. The Soviet Union was a miserable place. Cement block–y. Not a whole hell of a lot of variety in color. After Chernobyl melted down, I went to stay all over Ukraine with family. We are a Romany-mixed family, and I was kind of like the Gypsy Huckleberry Finn. Especially in western Ukraine, in the Carpathian region, everyone was wearing colors, and the music and dancing and language was hard-core. I was like, Yo, I’m living in a magical country. Then we had to leave because the Soviets were after my father. I crashlanded in Vermont and changed my name from Nikolayev to Hütz, my mother’s maiden name, to cut my ties with anything Russian. In Vermont, I started some hardcore bands. By the mid-’90s, I was coming down to the East Village. The vibe was a dense Ukrainian mix, like the original Ukrainian magic mix. I always carried my guitar, and I walked into the bar Lys Mykyta, “Sly Fox,” in the Ukrainian National Home and said, “I want to play a small set of Ukrainian songs.” The dude was like, “When do you want to begin?” I was like, “Right now.” It was five o’clock. So I did it. And after that, I walked around the corner into Blue & Gold and did the same thing. I just wanted to play Ukrainian songs in Ukrainian bars in New York. I still loved hardcore, Bad Brains and Agnostic Front, but I moved into this head space where maybe I’m ready to tell my story. I wanted to combine experience-driven immigrant tales with the duende of Gypsy music. I needed to hear those old scales and melodies. So I switched to acoustic guitar and started re-creating them myself. I soaked myself in the culture—Ukrainian records, art galleries, meeting vital people like Virlana Tkacz of Yara Arts, kind of a Ukrainian Patti Smith—and that’s when Gogol Bordello came together. We played in the Ukrainian National Home, the Ukrainian Sports Club. We even played at the Ukrainian Consulate. I don’t know how they tolerated me! Every show was a spectacle and a happening. It was Gypsy punk rock meets klezmer, with the occasional appearance of a Brazilian drum line. We played a lot of art galleries because we were quickly banned from just about every club, even CBGB. It was just too many people, too many things flying around, too much debauchery. My uncle is a wellknown painter in Ukraine, so I know the “less is more” thing, but I was also kind of just like, A lot of times, more is more. So let’s not get too pretentious. It’s music. I call it joycore. It’s supposed to be flamboyant and rambunctious and overwhelming. From left: Yaryna Turianska, Eugene Hütz, and Sergey Ryabtsev rehearse before a performance in 2000.