Before launching the revolutionary punk-rock collective Gogol Bordello, starring in films such as Everything Is Illuminated and popping up in Madonna videos, Eugene Hütz was a Burlington kid, hanging around the all-ages punk club 242 Main. A Ukrainian immigrant who says he “didn’t know a word of English, except for Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols lyrics,” Hütz found a welcoming community in the local hardcore scene and formed one of the most influential Vermont punk bands of the late ’90s, the Fags.
Hütz left the Queen City for the bright lights of New York City around the turn of the century, though his family still lives in the area and he returns regularly. This week, he’s home for Christmas and bringing Gogol Bordello with him as part of the Casa Gogol Holiday Tour. The sprawling nine-piece band plays a sold-out show at the Higher Ground Ballroom in South Burlington on Friday, December 27.
The tour is a celebration of Hütz’s new label, Casa Gogol, that he launched in March. One of its first signees is another band with Burlington ties, Pons, who emerged from the University of Vermont indie scene. They’ll join the show as an opening act.
Ahead of his homecoming, he phoned Seven Days to chat about the new label, how music responds to political adversity and what he sees as the dawn of a new golden age of DIY.
“I think hope is kind of lazy.” Eugene Hütz
Welcome back! It’s been a few years since there’s been a Gogol Bordello show in town.
Yeah, but I come up all the time. I was up for the Agnostic Front show at Higher Ground [in 2023], and the old hardcore crew from 242 Main came out. It was fucking magic, man.
You’ve often spoken in interviews about how important 242 and that scene was to you growing up. What made it such a sanctuary for you?
Well, I had my tiny group of friends who were trying to do our own thing. The town was an oasis for creative people when I got there. You had a DIY punk scene, and you also had musicians from New York and Boston and people like [jazz musician] James Harvey, who would talk about Sonic Youth and Béla Bartók in the same sentence.
These cross-pollinating characters were around. And luckily Bernie and Jane Sanders went to Germany and the Netherlands and saw how the youth centers were run there, and they came back and made 242. Because, and I don’t know anything about running a city, man … but without a place like that, I’m not sure what a lot of us would have got up to if we couldn’t display our energy and camaraderie there.
The whole DIY movement was so important to the hardcore scene you came up in. Does that still inform what you do? Is that why you’ve launched a record label?
Fuck yeah. DIY is so important. I think maybe more now! People are fed up with this uncertain state of affairs with music. Whether you’re a fan of Ronald Reagan or not, that era gave definition to people’s efforts and accelerated the DIY network. It crystallized it. There was a network of powerful efforts like the SST and Dischord labels, but those are all somewhat archaic now. We need a new emergence of portals to do that.
Do you think the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January might set off something similar in DIY music to what the Reagan administration inspired?
I think hope is kind of lazy. I think it’s in the Tao where they say if you have an intention and it is distilled, hope is not necessary. We don’t have to hope; it’s just the way it will go.
And I can already see it bubbling to the surface in New York. There’s never been a time in the music business where people are as confused and out of touch with fucking reality as they are now, but there are clusters of thriving and extremely charged-up new bands — kids who just discovered My Bloody Valentine and Television and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Fugazi. They have their own kaleidoscopic supercollider. Just the way they play their instruments — I watch it closely. It has a certain agitation that was not characteristic in 2013.
The music is getting more aggressive?
I don’t know if it’s aggression; it’s more agitated intelligence. They way they approach things is another spin on postmodernism, but there’s an attachment to emotion, which wasn’t really present with postmodernism. These younger bands seem to have overcome the necessity to be ironic, which was kind of plaguing youth for a while. Not being able to commit to a cause has run its course.
Are those the qualities you look for when you sign bands to your new label? You’re bringing two of the new signees with you to Higher Ground: Pons and Puzzled Panther.
Oh, man, these are the children of no wave, my all-time inspiration — I love it. I didn’t know Pons had a Burlington connection when I signed them; they told me after I put them on the bill for the Burlington show.
It felt like it was only natural to start this label precisely now. There was a time where everything around Gogol, we were surrounded by lethargic people, you know? We were relentless and felt like a crazy horse, surrounded by all these sedated people. But it’s not sedated anymore, and things are shifting.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Intelligent Agitation | Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz is ready for the revolution as he launches his new record label”
This article appears in Dec 25, 2024 – Jan 7, 2025.
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