For New Yorker Eugene Hütz, the war in Ukraine hits closer to home than for most Americans.
To the Gogol Bordello frontman, it is more than a divisive election issue or an unfortunate news story to casually engage with from his armchair.
Every time the Ukrainian-born singer-guitarist sees TikTok videos of loved ones back home firing rocket-propelled grenade launchers from the trenches, he admits to feeling umbilical whiplash.
“It’s not an option to be an observer from a distance, just like it shouldn’t be an option for people around the world to isolate themselves from this issue and be ‘tired of war,’” says Hütz. “‘Try being at war.’ But the reality is that we all live on the same planet and everything is interconnected.”
To get others more fired up, he and Gogol Bordello violinist Sergey Ryabtsev are touring the group’s new feature-length doc, Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story.
The film chronicles Hütz’s refugee journey to the US following the Chernobyl disaster, the rise of his riotous act Gogol Bordello, and the aid he’s delivered to his compatriots after the 2022 Russian invasion.
Coming to The Great American Music Hall on Fri/15 and Sat/16, the screening is followed by a Q&A and live performance.
Of the 10 North American cities the pair will visit, Hütz is particularly excited about San Francisco.
“San Francisco has been one of the towns that felt like an instant sense of homecoming for our band,” he says. “First of all, due to its musical history. Secondly, there is still a longing for a more ideal state of things and living as a progressive, cosmopolitan, multicultural person there. In a city like San Francisco, that’s deeply embedded.”
It’s fair to say that most Americans, worldly or not, didn’t even know the difference between Russia and Ukraine when the war started, a decade ago. Many still don’t.
“The difference has always been there,” says Hütz. “The people who didn’t know the difference were sipping Moscow Kool-Aid for too long and retranslating Soviet propaganda. The time has come for the truth to bubble to the surface through this catastrophe. The fierce resistance of Ukrainians is a pretty good indication that there is a difference.”
As passionate as Hütz is about Ukraine’s sovereignty, he recognizes that he is no prophet, political analyst, nor world affairs expert. But he does hope to at least leave audiences with the understanding that Ukraine is a nation they already know.
“To have them understand that Ukraine is not an exotic land far away on top of a mountain or down a mystical valley,” he says. “It’s a huge country in Europe and a lot of Ukrainian phenomena have been deeply threaded in American culture for ages. It’s just a matter of scratching the surface and finding out that many melodies, recipes, fashions, and renowned names emigrated from the Ukraine to the US, dating back to the late 1800s.”
As a multicultural artist—Hütz is also part Romani, Lithuanian, and German—who grew up among diverse peoples with idiosyncratic traditions, the multitalented musician learned to appreciate foreign slang, melodies, and rhythms from an early age—even as the Soviet Union was trying to eradicate these cultural differences.
After eventually emigrating to a Vermont refugee camp in 1992, he formed his international punk band Gogol Bordello in New York City in 1999, releasing nine albums through 2022’s Solidaritine. As his star rose, he inspired projects by filmmaker Goran Dukić, Madonna, and Gucci.
Hütz recently collaborated with actress Vera Farmiga’s new band, The Yagas, starring in “The Crying Room” video in support of Ukraine and local nonprofit, Razom, and collaborated with New Order’s Bernard Sumner on the song “Solidarity.”
He is now in the process of mixing his next album with his favorite producer, Nick Launay (PiL, Nick Cave, Yeah Yeah Yeahs). The war in Ukraine will surely come up multiple times.
“We take everything that we have in our hearts and turn it into art,” says Hütz.
He’s also launched his record label, Casa Gogol Records, to give back to New York City, his home for the past three decades, signing and developing the next wave of cool New York City bands like Puzzled Panther, Grace Bergere, and Mary Shelley—all of whom he says grew up listening to iconic New York groups Velvet Underground, Television, Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol.
“All my friends who have successful labels told me, ‘Don’t do it, it’s too much work,’” he says. “But here I come doing exactly that. I only wish I had done it earlier. Partly because Ukrainian people have a pretty damn good work ethic. So that helps.”
It’s the same thing that Ukrainian band Mad Assessor did for him back in Kyiv by taking him under their wing and producing his first two albums when he was an unknown.
For Ukrainians, music has always been a weapon of resistance, according to Hütz.
In the film, he describes how many 18th and 19th-century paintings of Ukrainian Cossack warriors, defending their state’s independence, featured as many musical instruments as swords and pistols.
But with the decade-long Russo-Ukrainian War and the Russian invasion in 2022 causing an estimated one million casualties, the singer-guitarist says he hopes the nation that adopted him and his family continues to aid the Ukrainian people, when Trump takes office in 2025.
“As you can imagine, we are very worried,” says Hütz. “That is a feeling you can’t disconnect from because my umbilical cord leads back there. Our friends and families there are worried about the same thing. This war has been going on for an incomprehensible amount of time, and it needs to end fast.”
He’s made two trips to Ukraine since the war escalated—to play music, support the troops, and launch recovery and rehabilitation centers for the wounded.
“There’s a lot of tragedy,” he says. “Once you drive a highway through Ukraine at 100km an hour and see one cemetery after another with newly buried people, you get the picture faster than any news can deliver. You get the message straight into your heart that this just has to stop.”
GOGOL BORDELLO Fri/15-Sat/16, Great American Music Hall, SF. Tickets and more info here.
