Gogol Bordello

With Dub Trio and DJ Dubtra. 9 p.m. Oct. 7 at Toad's Place, 300 York St., New Haven. $18. (203) 624-TOAD, toadsplace.com.

Imagine you are a traveler on a stretch of long, foreboding highway. The landscape is strange, and the destination uncertain — perhaps an undiscovered country. A parallel universe. Maybe Hell itself. You stop into a roadhouse, where the air is darkly festive, and the drinks flow without end. Packed in around you are the people who make their homes along this path. They are denizens of a demimonde between dark and light: Rebels, outlaws, whores, artists, the displaced and disaffected, just looking to get them some peace, or whoop it up as much as they can until the final judgment comes down. The feeling of being surrounded by stories, by people with no fixed forms or identities, whispered secrets and angry poetry, Faustian bargains and Dionysian escapades is both intoxicating and frightening. You're either lucky or cursed to stay forever.

The resident band of this refuge midway between nowhere and everywhere is Gogol Bordello. They are the living link between our past — when mankind roamed the earth in bands and extended tribes, wild, hungry and free — and our ever-uncertain future, the globalized polyglot network in which everyone knows everything about anything except who they are and how to live in the world. In the commingling of history, myth, tradition and technology, and amidst the collision of cultures was born Gogol Bordello — fittingly, at the turn of the century, in the immigrant jungle of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where leader of the tribe Eugene Hutz came to rest from a journey that began with his family's flight from Ukraine to escape the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

"There was never a day it started," says Hutz in a phone interview, with a tone that suggests that anything as standard as a band "being formed" is on the other side of the globe from where Gogol Bordello stands. "I was playing guitar, and then there were three of us — Sergey [Ryabtzev, fiddler] and Yuri [Lemeshev, accordionist] — then six months later we were a quartet, and now we are nine. It just snowballed."

To get at the roots of the band requires a trip with a caravan of Roma, or Gypsies, traversing Eastern Europe hundreds of years ago, holding celebrations around fires, riffing on ancient tunes. Hutz's grandmother was a Gypsy, and the rest of his family had the inborn musical tastes and exuberance known to the peoples of the Carpathian and Ural mountains and the trans-Slavic steppes.

"My main influence was people making music around a table filled with food," recalls Hutz. "There were always four or five guitars floating around the house. My father and uncle would play whatever strikes the drunken brain. It would be urban folklore and traditional songs, or the Beatles and Stones." When there was no spontaneous outburst of song from around the table, Hutz would consume the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, his other "main influence." By the time Hutz and his parents left his home for a life of wandering at age 13 or 14, he was carrying with him Gypsy, Ukrainian and Russian culture, flavored by the Clash, Parliament Funkadelic, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.

"I wrote 'My Strange Uncles from Abroad' about those people," says Hutz:

Through the mystical communication

deep within it all comes true

forming underground railroad

for our ultimate breakthrough!...

Bright open eyes, they are still looking

They are still finding

A few unpoisoned hearts

No matter where you are exiled

No matter where you are exiled!

Hutz and his family spent seven years traveling through refugee camps in Europe before being accepted to a resettlement program in Vermont. From there, Hutz made a beeline for New York, where he discovered a community of "our generation of immigrants.

"Immigrants have amazing destinies," Hutz asserts, and this is evidenced by the two men who joined him initially. Sergey Rjabtzev's fiddle attains brain-scrambling speeds when the band kicks into its furious punk dervishes, evoking Celtic dances and Appalachian campfires, kibbutz klezmer weddings and Hungarian festivals. It's hard to think that he was a Moscow theater director for 10 years. Yuri Lemeshev is the accordion player, adding a pulsing, whirling carnival sound, somewhere between Kurt Weill and Frank Yankovic. He is 53 years old.

The others joined later, each adding a new level. A heavy surf/punk guitar imbues the music with a sense of destiny, while Hutz's speed licks are death metal and ska in one. Two of the most recent arrivals, amazingly, are the drummer Eliot Ferguson, the sole American-born player, and Eric Gobina, the bassist.

Hutz doubts there will be any more additions. "I hope not," he says. But he's thrilled at how the sound has "refined itself." "We have sure found our frequencies," he says.

Perhaps more importantly, every new traveler in the Gogol Bordello caravan brings influences, stories and anecdotes.

"The most ridiculous songs are autobiographical," according to Hutz. "The stories and characters are from the experiences of friends and relatives. ... These are the anecdotes that fly around when the drinking
starts."

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