Gogol Bordello

Bobby: I guess starting with the basics, this is your last show on your west coast tour of America, how was it?

Eugene: Awesome. The band has gotten a great reception everywhere we go. Not because we are some big sensation but because of long years of grass roots touring. We’ve got the following. We got the grassroots now meeting with all of the people who thought we just fell out of the sky. Our ranks quadrupled.

Bobby: Tonight will my first time seeing you live but I’ve heard that you guys put on an unforgettable live show. You’ve even been called “the world’s most perfect festival band”

Eugene: Yes!

Bobby: and were so crazy that you even got banned from CBGBs way back in the beginning. What do you do to make your live show so immensely unforgettable?

Eugene: I don’t do anything but play music, you know? In the past, it’s been said a lot of times that my main strength was that I was fucking insane. But I am not insane, I’m a songwriter. My main strength is songwriting and everything else around it is just pretty much spontaneous, psychotic reactions. I don’t spend nearly as much time on stage tactics as on songs. So as time went on, of course, people realized that that was my main strength so now I more enjoy that recognition. No craziness, no exoticism, no eccentricities can hold anybody’s interest really for that long if you really think about it.

Bobby: Yeah, you need the backbone behind it, you need the music.

Eugene: The backbone is there and I’m glad people started seeing it for the backbone and not for the lowest denominator they can digest.

Bobby: In June you guys broke away from your regularly scheduled tour in Turkey to play at Sulukule, an old Roma settlement in Istanbul which is slowly being destroyed to become a more urbanized area. Why did you decide to do that one off show?

Eugene: Well, how could we not do that show? Those are my issues; those are direct examples of political improvements that we can make as artists and as just people of communities versus people from the parliament and government. I am a big believer in big changes through million of small changes. Unfortunately, schools of revolutionary thought discredited itself in the twentieth century pretty massively. None of them led really anywhere. Revolution itself is a very brutal act but I think a bigger hope lays in individual overcoming of average intelligence and millions of small changes that individuals kind of push. Because everybody can teach their friend and neighbor and educate their neighbor if they think they’re stupid. This kind of direct artistic activism, I suppose you can call it, is the least you could do. It activates a lot of spirits, first of all for people in this historical neighborhood for example; it activates them to do more. It inspires them to be more proactive, it inspires them to remember they’re not forgotten and living on the outskirts of the world. It also, hopefully, embarrasses the authorities who don’t deal well with these issues and think that bulldozing over historical neighborhood for the sake of new parking lot and a Ramada Hotel is a fucking great vision of the future. You know?

Bobby: Yeah, like that was one thing you said about your performance. You said “the incidents happening in Sulukule are happening in many places around the world. Do people want more McDonalds and hotels or is it more logical to protect a country’s cultures and historical structures?” Why do you think so many governments and people are letting others destroy their culture and history for hotel chains?

Eugene: Greed. There is no other explanation about it. Anybody who is coming up with another explanation is just lying straight to your face. In third world countries, it’s even easier for politicians to steal. So places like that, they exist in Ukraine and Romania and Greece and Brazil, and some of them are more notorious than others but a lot in these countries they force feed the stereotypes as the ghetto being the epicenter of crime and drug trade. And of course it’s there, of course; but another truth is that ninety percent of people who live in favelas in Brazil or in any other ghetto are actually just people trying to get by in the most normal possible way by working the crappiest of jobs and have no ties with crime world. As a matter of fact they oppose it. As a matter of fact it’s hanging above them as well. I can’t claim to have all the solutions, but when you see so many people buy this so obviously fabricated lies, the least you can do is bring out the truth.

Bobby: After that performance, the mayor of Sulukule, Ismail Altintoprak, had said that he had started making plans for a carnival to support the cause. You guys had said that you would happily return to the carnival if it did happen. Has there been any word on the carnival? Will there be a carnival that you will be attending?

Eugene: It will be like in a year or so. Plus it’s a very explosive situation there. Unfortunately the destruction of that area happened partly already. It actually happened several weeks after we were there. It happens in the most brutal way, bulldozers show up and start. Not even warnings. There’s a lot can be done but carnival itself won’t just stop it. Whatever we can do, of course we’ll do it.

Bobby: You once said that you don’t make music for the media or for the fans but for the children on the streets to teach them to build their own environment and make their own music that is inspired by their roots. Can you explain that a little bit?

Eugene: Well, to make this picture bigger, of course we make it for the fans because they are part of our community at this point. The deeper kind of fans. But yeah, essentially I think what differs our band and the bands who we side with from the typical show business driven band is that we’re experienced driven. We make experienced driven music, not only because documentary driven, not only because we talk about our past in kind of a futuristic and try to make the best part of it part of the future. It’s music that’s alive, it breathes with us; you know what I mean? It’s a live being; it’s not limited in any way to what is expected. There is no formula to it. Most of the bands, of course you can see what they are trying to be or what they kind of are. That’s a pretty sad story right away because that’s just such a life of doom. No wonder all those guys complain about touring because they don’t essentially live their life, they try to live life of somebody else.

Bobby: Yeah, instead of going out and enjoying it and doing it for themselves.

Eugene: To enjoy it you really have to be speaking your soul. To enjoy it you really have to be writing the wave of your own spirit. Then you can endlessly enjoy it, but to get to that point takes a lot of years and uncompromising behaviors and many levels. Once you’re there, then things start. It’s easier to call the shots but getting there and being for years and years out casted and looked upon like some asteroid that somehow fucking hit this planet is the part where the test of bullshit lays. Not many make it. Like Bukowski says, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” The fire is guaranteed to be there, the suffer is there; it’s just how you enter and what kind of dignity you have to enter it.

Bobby: In 2005, you were in the movie Everything is Illuminated with Elijah Wood and directed by Liev Schriber. How did you get involved with that?

Eugene: It had nothing to do with how people like to say “getting hooked up.” It never was the story of my life; I didn’t get hooked up with anything really. Originally the band, Liev was just a fan of the band and he wanted me to write music for the film. It started as an offer for the soundtrack. It was only when we met that ten minutes into talking he basically asked me to do the lead role in the movie. He put his ass on the line big time because he didn’t know what the fuck he was getting into. He gave a lot of trust here, into me. He could say that I am an endless worker and that I have the energy and imagination to do it but I can also get pretty difficult at times. And also, waking up six o’clock in the morning, which is required in the cinema world on daily basis, that’s not my forte.

Bobby: *laughs* Yeah, it can get tough getting up that early.

Eugene: Well, what happened is that a lot of time I stayed up all night and take a shower and go on the set and pretend that I am fresh; and pretend that I also learned the lines when I was basically DJ’ing out all night. DJ’ing and romancing like a fool. Liev basically didn’t know he was getting himself in the same train with me. Often times he ended up doing that with me together. *laughs*

Bobby: You have said that Gogol Bordello doesn’t want to only be a band that releases a new CD every year or two but also want to release a movie every year or two. So far you’ve kept up that tradition with Filth & Wisdom, the Madonna directed debut, which comes out this Friday in the States. Are you excited to see it out of the festival circuits and in select theatres?

Eugene: Sure. Actually, I was just at the premiere yesterday, the day before yesterday in New York. I think it premiered in Europe a couple months ago but the premiere in New York was a great night because my friends are no bullshit kind of people and the screening and everything was a big relief. Everybody liked the movie, as what it deserves to get. I know where the movie belongs and I think it’s a decent indie film for sure, any way you look at it. But you know there’s always the cynical bastard that is waiting in the bushes just to stab you in the back. The most exciting part about it is that the predictions of the cynics and the skeptics, they are all in the toilet. Madonna is a target for them and they could just not wait to tear apart the movie, but there is nothing to tear apart. It’s a pretty well made film regardless of who would’ve made it and that’s the strength of it. It doesn’t live on the premise of being made by Madonna. It really doesn’t. The expectations of cynics and skeptics kind of summed up into two schools, into two versions. One was like “okay, it’s going to be a bullet proof thing made by a bunch of amazing hired guns with Madonna name on top of it.” Or “it’s going to be so fucking far left, deliberately incomprehensible abracadabra for the art world that you just could not criticize it in anyway.” But it’s neither. It’s actually a movie that Madonna thought up and made as a person. It’s full of her biographical material as well as mine and that’s the beauty of it. It actually completely dilutes those expectations.

Bobby: I’ve also read that you actually want to write and direct a movie too; you’re actually working on a script called “The History of American Silence.” What made you decide to write one and what’s the movie about?

Eugene: I basically write all the time, every day. It seems to be my main activity out of all of them. Whether it’s songs or prose or something that eventually might become a script or anything, that’s almost a second question for me. It’s just one huge front of writing. The ideas leak into one another and cross reference and then cross themselves out and end up in one or another bin. That’s my way, that’s my system. I don’t know how else to organize it any better. So after a while I realized I had a lot of ideas that cumulated into the script bin. As simple as that. I also stumbled into some interesting historical information about America that was not explored by anyone. As a matter of fact, one of my friends from National Geographic heard about it, they also wanted to send me on a mission to make a documentary about it. But I said “no, no.” Maybe I will make what I want to make out of it; and I am not going to tell what it is. For those same reasons I can’t go on explaining things here about that because I’ve already done that mistake. I think my ideas are pretty exciting and I don’t want to see them anymore getting executed by somebody else before I get them. There’s a lot of people just living off that, snatching other people’s ideas.

Bobby: You once said that mainstream pop being force fed to the children are damaging their souls. What did you mean by that?

Eugene: Well, it’s very, I think, obvious what it means. I think that music, in a deeper sense, is very essential for our well being. Music is for the soul like water is for the body. We all know what it’s like to take a hot bath; we all know we can’t live without uplifting showers, we all know we can’t live without drinking water, we all know we can’t control ourselves if the rain is warm and you want to run fucking naked through the nature under it. Same thing with music. Evolution is tricky, you know. Only a hundred years ago there was no music industry whatsoever. It was just musical notes on paper. There was a lot of live music everywhere and the condition of them was very different. But also the quality of musician was a lot higher because if it doesn’t sound good live with you just playing guitar then you suck. You know what I mean? Get another job. Fuck you. See ya. It was as simple as that. Now at times there are people who suck and basically could not get a gig under any circumstances, they’re exactly what you get on the radio. So, I don’t know what kind of fucking bath and shower we’re all taking in these circumstances. To find water for your soul takes a lot of fucking effort. It’s an actual constant effort, music finding and music appreciation. I mean, Tom Waits is still not ultimately played on the radio. Know what I mean? Something as common to you and me that name is, you go out on the streets and ask anybody do they know who Tom Waits is, they have no fucking clue. This is one of the key musicians of our time, the real musicians. So that’s just one example of a musician who is actually in touch with his and channels his soul, you know? The conditions are strange. What I’m saying is just, I guess, just an effort to keep people’s enthusiasm for finding the real music and taking that and bathing in the good stuff, you know? Music is extremely important. Everything in the world is kind of trying to be music. Everything, from the numbers to the structures of all molecular world. Everything has a certain flow and resonance and vibration which basically, in the best way, is expressed through music to our cognitive powers. And many profound works were written about it. About musicality of birth, musicality of universe. If you’re not in touch with it, it’s sad fucking news. It’s literally like drinking fucking contaminated water.