Gogol Bordello—The Pageant—St. Louis—July 23, 2009
Oh, my neck! My ribs! My moustache! You see, I’ve just been to a Gogol Bordello concert. And if you attend one of those, you’d better be ready, if not for an elbow in the ear, at least for the ethno-clash dance party of your life. Anyone describing this band is required by federal mandate to use the phrases “gypsy punk” and “multi-ethnic,” true enough labels, but whatever you call them (I’m tempted to go with “Slav-rock” or “Ukrave” or “Worldcore”), Gogol Bordello is a band that you have to experience to truly comprehend.
For the uninitiated, Gogol Bordello is a nine-piece group (counting their two female dancers) formed by singer/guitarist/songwriter/actor Eugene Hütz on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1999. They may be a New York band, but their individual members are almost all immigrants from the world over: Bassist Thomas Gobena is from Ethiopia; accordionist Yuri Lemeshev and violinist Sergey Ryabtzev were both born in Russia; percussionist Pedro Erazo is from Ecuador; guitarist Oren Kaplan is Israeli; etc. It’s an eclectic, high-voltage ensemble, but it’s impossible to take your eyes off Ukrainian-born Hütz, the wild, mustachioed ball of sweaty charisma who arrived in the US in 1991. I’ll be damned if I could make out a word he said all night—he sings in a garbled English (his least-favorite part of speech: articles) with a strangled, hot-tar voice—but I haven’t seen anyone work this hard on stage since, well, ever. Hütz prowled the stage, assaulting his acoustic guitar, leaning menacingly over the audience, spinning in circles on one foot, and banging on fire buckets. The dude knows how to party—by the second song, he was shirtless and slugging a bottle of wine.
Violinist Ryabtzev is the Kenickie to Hütz’s Danny Zuko. He’s an elegant mover, all silver beard and jaunty beret and tasteful footwear, and his streaking violin runs provide the rocket fuel in these songs’ arrangements. Fiddler on the Roof? With this band’s mind-bending spectacle, it’s more like Fiddler on the Acid. Indeed, a GB show is part concert, part manic cabaret—the two dancers, Pamela Jintana (Thai descent, born in Vermont) and Elizabeth Sun (Hong Kong Chinese, raised in Scotland), came out with a variety of schemes: first wearing little shimmery-silver dresses and executing playground choreography, later wearing washboards on their backs, which Hütz played during a hilarious sequence, and finally wearing roller-derby uniforms and banging marching-band bass drums and cymbals. It’s all a zany blend of Les Miserables, Bad Brains, Stomp! , and the craziest Russian wedding ever.
Gogol’s set tonight featured a cross-section of songs from its four-album career mixed with revved-up versions of traditional Eastern European folk songs. They attacked that upbeat with punctuating violin/accordion/percussion for two hours, most successfully on the songs from their most recent album, 2007’s excellent Super Taranta!. There were too few of that record’s tunes tonight, but on “Ultimate” and, especially, “Wonderlust King,” both played early, the band established its finest blend of melody and poly-rhythmic punch. But the crowd reached a fever pitch toward the end of the main set when Hütz strummed the opening chords to their 2005 single “Start Wearing Purple,” the most passionate invocation of that color since Minneapolis’s First Avenue club in 1984.
Speaking of the crowd, I learned early last night that the audience is a major part of the Gogol Bordello spectacle. The place was packed with a surprising mix of drunk undergraduates, Pitchfork-reading intellectuals, heavily-tattooed Against Me! fans, aging hippies, costumed gypsy girls, and facial-hair aficionados, but once the band came out, that diversity disappeared (similar to the integration onstage) into a roiling bowl of jumping and dancing and fist-pumping, to such an extent that I had my internist on speed-dial. The pit wasn’t for casual participants, to say the least, as evidenced by the NFL defensive tackles who lined the front of the stage and manhandled body surfers out the side doors. In fact, the least musically-effective moments of last night’s show were when percussionist Erazo functioned as an MC/hype-man, rushing the front of the stage and doubling Hütz’s vocal lines. These episodes of strident punk felt unnecessary, as they erased the band’s instrumentalists and hammered an otherwise wholly-original band into ugly mook rock.
Those moments came and went, however, and the band did plenty to justify its growing reputation, bolstered recently at well-received festival appearances this summer, as one of America’s best live bands. GB isn’t currently touring in support of a specific album, but their website encourages fans to learn the newest Ethiopian dance craze, called Gurage, which looks like deranged post-hole digging, and to get down with it at this summer’s shows. Good luck catching anyone doing it, as jammed as the dance floor was, but Eugene did break into it a couple of times. The evening ended with two terrific performances: Hütz’s acoustic love letter to booze, “Alcohol,” one of his best melodies and the night’s only remotely-chilled-out song, and then the go-for-broke marathon of “Baro Faro,” a rousing, swirling shout-along that served as an accumulation of Gogol Bordello’s singular achievement—coalescing cultures and styles, both onstage and off, into a common, exuberant melting-pot dance party.
