Nicolae Guta: Part I

Animal metaphors are not incidental to any physical description of Guța. From the reedy man in solid-color polyester suits in the early videos – now recently reposted on Youtube – to the ever-more-portly incarnations of the late 1990s and beyond, Guța’s face comes increasingly to resemble a bulldog. His bulbous eyes are planted at a slightly sad angle on either side of a huge slab of nose. His default gaze is somewhat addled, as if withered under the relentless impact of poor quality alcohol. Chin, dimpled; teeth, rabbity; jowls, packed; gums propped up and tight as if packed with immense wads of cotton; a single fang (upper, right) points slightly outward, describing the arc down the immense bulb of his belly. The latter object is perched atop two spindly legs, which originate from a dark cavern deep underneath it. These are capable of shifting the bulk of the item around with considerable grace, given the circumstances. It is often nowadays in a white suit. Particularly in light of the imbalance between torso and disembodied head, his dance style owes something to Charlie Chaplin. This effect is heightened by the fact that current Romani shoe styles render even longer his already over-long feet. Stuck to either side of his muscle-bound head are a pair of elfin ears and pasted across the centre of his face, the trademark moustache, curved in two sad half-moons downward. The organizers of this year’s New Years Eve television gala gave him a slapstick role dressed in a Securitate uniform, which seemed strangely appropriate.3 Remarkably, in light of the sum of the parts, the overall impression is of devilish charm.

But Guța’s voice, at the height of its powers, has been pure gold: instantly recognizable, precise in several octaves of range, in turns honeyed, sharp, gravelly, slightly nasal. He has – or at least had –immense stamina for the endless, quavered and embellished keened notes of the siniake/doina table-song laments. He has seemed never to need to resort to crooning because his voice has managed to

follow even his more intense emotional ambitions. In some films of weddings – his natural performative element – even he seems surprised at his abilities. In this sense, neither his children, nor national rivals such as Adrian Minune, Copilul de Aur or Florin Salaam, nor his only approximate rival on the Romani scene — Sandu Ciorba — are in his league.

Despite a boom in Romani music – including Romanian Romani music – taking place over the last decade in the “World Music” scene, Guța is relatively unknown outside Romania. He does not appear on the major World Music labels and is not featured in the major summer festival circuit of Europe’s summer. He is too expensive. In 2005, he cost 2500 EUR per hour or 10,000 EUR per night. Since his milieu is Romani weddings and similar Romani community events, this sum is a mere down payment for bakshish and request payments at the event itself.

As a result, particularly prior to his Bucharest move, his has been a performative mode developed almost entirely facing traditional – and highly demanding — Romani audiences, in performances generally lasting twelve hours or more. These Romani audiences come for the most important affirmative event on the Romani calendar – the wedding – and expect the Romani world reflected in the mirror of the band – and especially the singer. In the case of virtuoso wedding performers like Guța, the singer becomes the narrator of Romani values and of a Romani lifeworld, played out in the course of the event itself.

TO BE CONTINUED

Coming next…

Coming next: Part III – Nicolae Gutsa: Esteemed Listener

Third Saturday of October, 1999: A thin, poor and obviously Romani man is peddling wares on a ragged blanket at the annual market at Negrin/Fekete tó, just outside Cluj Napoca, the capital of Transylvania.
The Negrin market is held in an open expanse of field just off a small railroad stop. The Hungarian name for the village – Fekete tó – adds mystery to the place; the Romanian name means “Black”, while the Hungarian name means “Black Lake”. There is no lake anywhere nearby. Clear, blue sky; cold, bright autumn sun. A cloud of smoke from roasting meat drifts past. Behind the man are two tattered columns of audio speakers, blasting music at such high volume that it is impossible to get close enough to see what he is selling. The music is so distorted that it is barely recognizable as music, more pulsing fuzz than anything else; unbearably, shockingly, painfully loud. The man rocks back and forth, as if in a trance. Guța Volume 7.

1. claudecahn@gmail.com. The author is grateful to his wife Cosmina Novacovici for extensive assistance with the translation of the texts of songs quoted in this essay, as well as for critical comments on a number of observations included here.
2. This is a somewhat different kind of claim to the series of observations concerning “the invention of tradition” included in the volume of the same name edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Traditions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
3. Vaguely suggestive of brutality is Guța’s past in heavy industry in the town of Petroşani, a mining centre. On several occasions after 1989, miners been summoned to Bucharest to violently quell protests by students and intellectuals. Among many Romani fans, Guța is believed to have actually been a miner. However, his official website (http://personal.nicolaeguta.ro/, accessed 30 January 2009) identifies him as having worked for the railroad.
4. See Stewart, Michael, Time of the Gypsies, Boulder: Westview Press, 1997, particularly pp.50-72 and 181-202.
5. Someone has recently uploaded videos of these – featuring Romani dancing in the Timiş style and a thin Guța seemingly from a different era — onto YouTube. The direct links are provided with each song.
6. Lyrics are not included on Guța cassettes, though the titles of songs are. For a number of reasons, I am not using the Romanian-language orthography used by Guța on the cassettes to render Romani. I use instead spelling more conducive to unequivocal recognition by native English speakers. Thus, for example, I have rendered “Shukar San, Shukar Kheles”, where Guța uses “Şucar san, Şucar cheles”.
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch8
9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?9
10. For an excellent exploration of this tension, see Sante, Luc, “The Genius of the Blues”, in New York Review of Books, Volume 41, Number 14, August 11, 1994.
11. See Verdery, Katherine, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.
12. This is a somewhat different kind of claim to the series of observations concerning “the invention of tradition” included in the volume of the same name edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Traditions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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There’s a riot going on.

A wackoid troupe of dancing, freaking, musical mavericks is pushing the festival into a welcome blast of technicolour. Gnarled vocals and a wild gypsy violin combine with a punk rock dynamic to turn the mosphit into a seething pile of flesh. In a sea of indie-by-numbers bands Gogol Bordello are like a fucking riot. Sunday afternoon at a festival and the last six bands have droned away – each one armed to the teeth with music mag front covers and best band ever epitaphs, each one as thin on the talent front as their skinny chicken legs – then this riotous explosion of colour and sex rips the stage like it owns the place.

Their new release Live From Axis Mundi captures this show. On the DVD, you get the full fierce rush of how music can make you feel so alive – it’s the gypsy way. The other CD is stuffed full of out-takes and versions of band staples.

It’s a great package and one that marks the end of an era, as scarecrow frontman Eugene Hutz explains in his thick Ukrainian accent: “We are more about the music now, we were thinking of scaling down the show because in some ways it was detracting from the music.”

Er, please don’t scale down the show Eugene! In these dismal times we need a florid riot. We already take you seriously without you having to be serious!

“The album is about closing the gypsy punk chapter for sure. It’s very clear which songs people go bananas for and it’s good to have the show captured. People say that Gogol Bordello has to have a fucking DVD unlike other bands whose DVDs are boring. Also I thought it was a good way to put out unreleased tracks and BBC sessions. It actually shows the amazing musical moments this band is able to create.”

It’s been a long and strange journey for the frontman who grew up in Kiev with a musician father and Roma gypsy mother. He eventually washed up on the shores of the USA and mashed his previously ignored gypsy and East European roots with punk rock. Growing up as one of the few punk kids in Kiev he had loved The Fall, Joy Division and Neubauten, picking up their tunes from hand-me-down battered cassettes – the classic pre-internet music trade – all the time keeping quiet about his gypsy roots: “I didn’t tell anyone I had gypsy blood because the whole block would have asked us to leave.”

Eugene’s life has taken some weird curves, from growing up near Kiev in the Ukraine to being the toast of the New York art world to breaking through with his band and appearing in a new movie Filth in Wisdom directed by Madonna.

“She just called me. I picked up the phone and there she was. She was already a fan of Gogol Bordello. Every time I played in London, there was a rumor that she was coming. We met naturally – there was no managers sorting it out. Pretty much everything fell into place. We had good vibes right away. I don’t think there was much as far as a script at the beginning. It was filmed gonzo style. It’s a fun movie – when I went to the early screening people were laughing and enjoying themselves.”

Dipping a colourful toe into the mainstream, Gogol Bordello are readying a new album. They’ve enlisted one of the best producers in the world and the perfect choice for this attempt at the top of the greasy pole – enter the legendary Rick Rubin.

“My friend Rick was with us pretty much 5 days a week for the whole recording. It was exactly the time when the band was ready to work with someone like that – a musical guru. It ended up being the most creative experience in the studio. It comes from a serious commitment to the notion that music is a sacred art discipline. The way Rick likes to work is about getting rid of all the obstacles. It’s about the constructing. We pretty much had the best creative time in the studio. It opened up everybody’s channels to just rocking like fucking! Bonkers! Wild style!”

Rick Rubin, Madonna, world tours – it’s a long way from Eugene arriving in New York City as a refugee with no money and very few contacts, apart from his kinfolk who had always made him part of a micro community in every town in the world he visited.

Just being in New York was enough after a tangled upbringing in the Ukraine and several years schlepping around East Europe as a refugee: “It would be pretty funny to imagine that a punk rock kid in the Ukraine would listen to folk music at that time. When you discover punk rock you go to the most far away thing possible. You get a musical wanderlust. I was listening to the Clash, Joy Division, Mano Negra, The Fall. It was right around glasnost. Music was cassette driven, word of mouth, hand to hand driven. It was so under the radar that if you would see somebody on the subway in Kiev who had a remotely funny kind of funky haircut you would walk up and start talking to them – ‘Yeah man wanna go to my house and listen to the Sex Pistols?’, ‘Fuck yeah! Let’s go!’. There were a couple of places where sub cultural kids would hang out. It was so tight in a city of 3 million – we would have a couple of hundred of us punks – then there would be a couple of thousand of kids who would specialise in beating us up! We were outnumbered by everybody.”

The folk music that would be so important in his later career was initially dismissed as being old man music before it found a purpose in unifying a nation of malcontents sick of the suffocating Soviet presence.

“When punk rock became strong in Russia and Ukraine a couple of bands reacted to the soviet union policy of eradicating all the differences in the republics. They were Russifying everybody. Everybody had to speak Russian so there were several bands who took it the other way round. I was influenced by that but not by any nationalistic reasons. In Ukraine, you could not find its cultural beauty. I was lucky to encounter it through my relatives. When I came to the United States as part of the diaspora I found a version of Ukraine culture there. The culture is always stronger when it is somewhere else like in America. That influenced me even more. These people cherished their culture and they had no reason to be nationalistic about it. So that was another major reason why we sound the way we sound.”

Euege was exposed to a diverse range of music while growing up, from mainstream rock ‘n’ roll to gypsy tunes. “I was always aware of it. My mother was half Roma gypsy and she made me aware of it. We always had a neighbourhood party which was spirited in a lot of ways. I learned a lot of what I do from my father. He was in band. He would sing songs for hours – from Rolling Stones to Jesus Christ Superstar to Russian folk songs to prison songs. People would say, ‘What the fuck man! How can you remember all this shit?!’ It’s the same thing they ask me now! I saw a lot through childhood of him busting out the party through the block. My mother and uncle would contribute one thing or another – it was always pumping. Originally I thought when I was a kid that my parents really liked gypsy music. One day I was finally delivered the message that we were actually part of that community and had to mask it for political reasons. It was like we would not be living in the apartment we were living in if everybody had known that!”

The gypsy diaspora is not only crucial to this story but fascinating as well. The word ‘Gypsy’ derives from the word, Egyptian, because that’s where the 15th Century Europeans perceived that these people had come from: “Gypsy became important to me – as time went on living abroad I met gypsies from a lot of different tribes – France, Spain, Brazil, Greece, Sweden, The States… There is Roma almost everywhere – before I left I thought there were gypsy only in the Ukraine.

“There is a lot of under the radar intellectual activity that goes on in my community – thinkers and scholars – amazing musicians who remain closed off from the rest of the world community. They are scared of being stigmatised to this day and are very shy. Listen, after World War 2, which persecuted Jews and gypsies to the same extent, the Jews were able to get organised – they dealt with the holocaust by getting orginised and by fighting back and claiming their culture back. The Roma did it by dispersing and hiding away – that’s just the way it is. It’s growing back now. It’s amazing. It’s a very special, unique culture. If you are part of this culture it allows you to have a world wide family wherever you go. For example two years ago I moved to Brazil. By the time I got there I was welcomed as part of the family there by an amazing, old fashioned Roma family who – after spending some time playing music and talking about life – said, ‘Listen when you have babies in Brazil we are going to raise them for you!’ You don’t get stuff like this from other cultures…”

He adds: “Gypsy music is always a unique blend with local stuff but there was always a unifying emotional thread, it’s so bonkers you know! The music is always so emotional and ultra positive. It comes from the mentality of always living in the moment – for centuries all the wisdom of the world was to live in the moment, however nobody fucking did apart from the gypsies!”

The older Eugene is fascinated by his roots: “I went back to my community in Ukraine and we talked about all these things. Amazingly enough some of the Roma philosophers and historians from the Ukraine believe that the Roma came from Atlantis – I don’t know where they get it from. [laughs] Maybe unlike the Jewish people who claim back some land that’s Israel, the Roma can’t claim anything because it doesn’t exist but it’s always there in your heart.”

His family was edged out of the Ukraine: “Technically we could have stayed but we were also on the radar. It sounds corny nowadays but because of the cold war my family was in the KGB files and my father was interrogated just like thousands of other people – put all that together and we were able to apply for refugee status and get the fuck out. We went to Poland, Hungry, Austria and Italy – the whole fucking thing…”

Getting to New York in the late 90s was the same thrill for Eugene as it had been for generations of immigrants arriving at the ultimate, immigrant city – living proof of the power of immigration: “I got there in 1998 and I almost lost my mind from happiness.”

He started off by busking in the New York subway before putting the band together without a clear idea of where it could go: “It wasn’t like things suddenly happening. I started off playing in a subway. Things developed underground wise in 6 months I was making a record with Jim Sclavunos who plays with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but as far as further recognition went; well that was fucked up basically. No matter how much our fan base developed and how much of a cultural phenomena we were becoming there was always resistance from labels – especially indie labels. That was very ironic – the place were I actually experienced racism was not from the rednecks and not from the skinheads I lived with who were not Nazi skinheads – the actual snob racism I experienced was from the indie rock scene and the people in control of late 90s indie. They were not down with us even though we would outsell all their bands put together. What we got came from hardcore touring and people realising we were a song based band.”

Their earliest supporters were, bizarrely, the New York art scene. At the same time they were getting adopted by the punk kids who recognised that East European folk was like a punk – a people’s music: “We were getting flown round the world to play galleries in Spain and Europe. It was great but one day I thought I didn’t start a band to play an art gallery. So we started to enter the rock & roll circuit and make it loud and clear that we were a rock & roll band.”

With their impassioned delivery and great songs, they were quickly finding a space for themselves as the ragbag of various tribes that came to check them out exploded into a mass audience and now they seek another evolution: “In recent years we were able to strip down the stage show. We have got to a point in our evolution that we are able to join forces with Rick Rubin.”

Eugene seals the first chapter off on this fascinating band’s existence and prepares to open the next one – where to next?

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