Gogol Bordello, "Mishto"

Last week I was in New York for work. I checked into my hotel in Times Square at around 7 PM Wednesday, found a record store on West 54th, and immediately went up to have a look. 54 Vintage Vinyl was the name of the place, and I believe I’ve finally found my go-to joint in Manhattan. I didn’t have very much time to dig before the store closed at 8 PM, but boy, oh boy: what I did see—first issues of R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP and Eno’s Another Green World, among others—has me itching to go back. Also, I passed on a vintage copy of The Man Who Sold the World, on the theory that I would have a chance to get back to the store before I flew out Wednesday afternoon.

From the record store I walked to La Bonne Soupe, a longtime favorite French restaurant on 55th. The famed NYC Halloween Parade wasn’t for another two days, but at any given moment the streets of NYC are thronged with zombie pedestrians shambling into oncoming traffic with eyes on their iPhones. That particular yellow cab firing off down Broadway didn’t hit me while I was dialing up “The Width of a Circle” (Apple Music, Spotify) off The Man Who Sold the World, to text to friends over Apple Music—I pulled back over the lip of the sidewalk just in time. Lesson learned, though: I hit Play, pocketed my phone, and applied greater care and attention to the rest of the walk.

I had about reached Sixth Avenue when it occurred to me that “The Width of a Circle” is basically Bowie meets Black Sabbath. Sabbath’s first, self-titled record came out in February 1970. By the time Mick Ronson was laying down the guitar tracks for The Man in April and May, he must have fully internalized what Tony Iommi was up to in Birmingham. Although not quite so heavy as Iommi’s work—Ronson had the disadvantage of fully articulated fingers (see “Fairies Wear Boots”)—the guitars on “The Width of a Circle” rawk, fully and completely. And here comes David Bowie now to swap out Ozzy’s occult musings in favor of lyrics about gay sex. But before he gets there, we’re served this strange and, to me, jarring line:

Got laid by a young bordello who was vaguely half-asleep, for which my reputation swept back home in drag.

Might be I’m just a Virgo and a onetime law review editor, so I’m super-finnicky about language. But a bordello isn’t a person. It’s a place. And this line accordingly doesn’t make any goddam sense. Got laid by a bordello might have legs, if you interpret by to indicate location—i.e., near to—rather than agency. Maybe David didn’t go into the building, opting instead to get his action in the back lot. But once you factor young and who into the calculus, this sentence has gone wildly off the rails. A like-minded critic consulted the r/DavidBowie subreddit on this matter, and one responder suggested a swaggering metonymy whereby Bowie is telling us he took on everyone at the property. Another defender likened this line to lyrical cubism and asked, [W]hy don’t you go into a Picasso subreddit and ask them why he didn’t just paint normally?

These are nice tries, but the Occam’s Razor explanation here is that Young David—barely 23 when he wrote this line—probably thought bordello was synonymous with prostitute, and a half-century later we all have to eat the mistake. All in all, “Width” is a positively poetic song that hits the diction skids for only a few seconds before righting itself again, and maybe I just need to learn how to let things go. It’s just that goddamn, this is a Bowie song, and I think he’s better than this.

The postscript here is I dined solo and well at La Bonne Soupe’s bar, then spent the ensuing two days locked down in conference rooms in Midtown, so that I never did get my second shot at the record store on 54th. Bad news is the work I came to NYC to do didn’t get done, so I’m scheduled for a return trip and a third day in a conference room, next Sunday. Good news is I may be able to pick up that Bowie record after all.

It turns out bordello is the word of the week. While I was killing hours in glass cages thirty stories over street level and stealing such minutes as were available to dig for vinyl and satisfy myself that yes, the Yankees were going down in flames, I was also hatching a plan to go to a concert back in Boston Friday night, with my friends and reformed music aficionados Glenn and Mike (see “Go Your Own Way”). Kate and I had some preliminary discussions about her bringing Lila down to New York for the weekend; I would stick around to receive them and maybe we’d catch a show or two, Lila being such a fan of musicals. But it turned out Kate had a “cut and color” set for Saturday morning, and I am told that a reservation of this nature is not blithely set aside. You’d sooner walk away from a table at (dating myself) Le Cirque.

So Dresden Dolls and Gogol Bordello at the Roadrunner phased into possibility. I only had to make sure Kate was okay with me cutting out for the evening, after being away for three days. She expressed no such concern, and accordingly I met the boys for dinner.

At the brew pub down the road from Roadrunner, the three of us had a lively and wide-ranging conversation. Highlights included a discussion of The Penguin, the aforementioned demise of the Yankees, and the Dodgers’ emergence as the New Enemy. We wondered aloud whether car insurance wouldn’t be cheaper still if the industry’s main players weren’t dropping tens of billions of dollars buying up every scrap of ad time not already claimed by Kamala or The Clown. This brought us to the subject of JK Simmons (We are Farmers!), Mayhem, Flo, and alas, Jake from State Farm. We reached immediate and emphatic agreement that the situation with the State Farm ads has ripened into a full-blown crisis. Like, I’d almost prefer hearing yet again about how Kamala wants to give illegal aliens sex changes, among other Republican Mad Libs that pass for political argument in 2024.

Mike: I was asking myself the other day, if there was some significant million-dollar risk I was incurring, and the only licensed insurer available in the state was State Farm—

Brad [interrupting]: I would move to another state.

Mike: I was going to say I would bite the bullet and run for luck, but that works, too.

When I meet like this with my guy friends, a kind of mania sets in, whereby we just start unloading opinions, hot takes, and trash talk on each other in vomitous tumbledown fashion, barely waiting for the others to finish before taking our turns. We’re positively bursting with pithy commentary. A fair reading of why is we spend the vast majority of our lives walking through and among swarms of schmucks who don’t remotely share our aesthetics, sensibilities, or tastes. Over a period of weeks in this wilderness we back up a million things to say, we find ninety minutes’ opportunity to scrape it all off our brains and tongues over B- appetizers in Brighton, and at first sight of one another we spill our guts like California mudslides. Ultimately for our own goddam sanity, but with the ancillary benefit of amusing one another and carrying home with us the consolation that we’re not alone in the world loving what we love and barfing into our mouths at everything else.

There came a point where Glenn pointed to his watch and said we needed to wrap this up. I had earlier said we should get to the Roadrunner at least early enough to take in Gogol Bordello. They had been the subject of breathless critical reviews some time ago, though I’m old, time melts together, and I couldn’t say when. I had a vague memory of listening to one of their LPs as I was walking up St. Pete Beach; when I scrolled through the several album covers on AllMusic earlier in the week, 2010’s Trans-Continental Hustle looked familiar to me. I remember being not especially impressed with that album, but the concept—Slavic folk-punk—was intriguing enough that fourteen years later, I thought the three of us should at least have a look at them live on stage.

A minute ago I went into Gmail and found a few lines I sent to Kate’s cousin in June 2010:

Just got three new LPs: Gogol Bordello, Broken Social Scene, and Titus Andronicus. Based on everything I had read, I thought Gogol Bordello would be more interesting than they are: I’m not sure Camper Van Beethoven doesn’t do the Eastern European/ rock thing better, and of course bands like the Pogues mastered the folk/ punk combination well in advance of these guys. I dunno. Figured you’d have an opinion, as a Russophile.

So it turns out Gogol Bordello are freaking unbelievable and I fully disavow this commentary, to the point where maybe I need to step up and wear a sign around my neck reading:

THE 2010 VERSION OF ME DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT WITH GOGOL BORDELLO.

Could be that soon we’re all wearing signs on pain of imprisonment or worse—I haven’t fully digested all of Project 2025’s bullet points—but here’s one I’ll happily carry around Harvard Square. To paraphrase Missing Persons, a band I keep giving cameos here, if never their own post: What are words for (Apple Music, Spotify), if you can’t eat them later?

Inside the venue, on the far side of the ID check and metal detectors, we resumed our rollicking discourse. Glenn or Mike had thrust another Diet Coke into my hand, which I appreciated. One or the other of them commented on certain uniformities of the crowd: most everyone over thirty, lots of common elements—striped tights, eye liner, leather jackets—best worn by persons thirty or under. It being November 1, I couldn’t say whether the costuming was specific to Halloween or ordinary for a Friday night out. As with all things, the truth was likely somewhere in the middle: these folks had a natural twee-Gothic lean, but subject to some further gussying-up around All Saints Day. And standing off to the side, ten yards clear of the GA scrum, were the three of us middle-aged men, a bit slantwise to the scene in our Explosions in the Sky, James, and neon-green Kraftwerk T-shirts.

I was seven sips into my drink when Gogol Bordello took the stage and fired shots.

At first just the backing six: guitar, bass, and two drummers, a roaming young accordionista, a graybeard violinist with a bandanna on his head. They got started and had ramped into fourth gear in a matter of seconds, then firecracker front man Eugene Hütz came bursting in from the wings, arriving at the mike just in time to spit out the first verse. The music was fast, heavy, and traditional, landing hard on the backbeats like a very niche kind of ska they play in the foothills of the Urals. Setlist.fm says this first track was “Sacred Darling” (Apple Music, Spotify). With each turn toward the chorus, Hütz bounded to the front of the stage, striking various Iggy-style poses on top of a strategically-placed roadie case.

Hey darling, dar-ling, dar-ling, DAR-LING, MY SACRED DARLING!

The accordionista twirled and twirled. Shredding all the while, the ripped sexagenarian violinist Sergey Ryabtsev dropped in and out of reverse lunges—the very kind that give me pangs of inadequacy when our personal trainer assigns them on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I looked over at Mike. They’re like a Russian Pogues, I said. Or Slavic, I added, as I didn’t know where Hütz was from. (An important distinction, it turned out, when he later revealed he was born in Ukraine.) Mike looked back at me, slack-jawed, as if to say, My God, I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.

Glenn was equally awed. And because I’m who I am, I had my wheels still turning trying to think up other useful analogies. They’re like a Bizarro-world Arcade Fire, I leaned in to tell Glenn—based on their sheer number, the diversity of their instruments, and the magnetism of the front man. But like, a hundred times more fun. Glenn was fixated on the spectacle of it all and didn’t answer.

Suddenly there was a meaty, decidedly non-Slavic man in a loud shirt standing on an amp. He seemed to be playing a Flavor Flav-type supporting vocal role. The three of us looked at each other in confusion. This guy looked like a ponytailed Vito Spatafore from The Sopranos, dressed by Man Ray—ergo, very hard to miss, yet it seemed to the three of us as if he had materialized from thin air. What other surprises did this band have in store? When that song ended, Pedro Erazo (I just looked up his name) skipped to the rear and stage-right and deposited himself behind an array of sundry percussion instruments. Ah, so that’s where he came from. Here Pedro started beating the hell out of a set of wood blocks, which could hardly be heard over the rest of the band.

The sound desk was to our left. TURN UP THE WOOD BLOCKS! I shouted. Later in the set we were able to hear the wood blocks. I claim credit for this.

The band continued at breakneck speed for at least seven or eight more songs before the obligatory ballad. I didn’t have the impression that the crowd—of which I was a part, to be fair—deserved what Gogol Bordello was giving us. There was a desultory mosh about twenty feet back from the stage. It had all the energy and momentum of the waves ten drunk guys in right field try to start after a rain delay. The relative sedateness could have been a function of our collective age: like as not, 80% of this crowd could tear an ACL just bellying up to the bar. One needs to be careful. But this has been my experience of Boston crowds going back decades, to when we all were younger, suppler, and more vigorous. Folks just don’t get wild in Hub venues. If we’d been in a seated theater, half the joint would be sitting down checking work email.

But let it never be said that Glenn, Mike, and I were not rapt, awestruck, and instant converts to Gogol Bordello. We’d spent so much time earlier in the evening sorting any- and everything we could think of into Love and Hate columns. Almost from the first note we had jointly filed this band under Love, and thereafter it was only a question of how much. There came a point where Pedro slapped on a bass drum and was bounding around the stage beating it; then he produced a ukelele and commenced strumming the hell out of that. I love that guy, Glenn said to me. He’s my favorite person right now, I answered. And that may bump you out of my Top Ten, I almost added, before thinking better of it.

Apparently because they weren’t packing enough of a punch (!), the band brought two further musicians on stage. Based on my research of a moment ago, these two are in a band called Puzzled Panther signed to Hütz’s Casa Gogol label. They’re from Bolivia and Ecuador and somehow made the Gogol Bordello stage presence only incrementally more cosmopolitan. (Pedro himself is Ecuadoran, Sergey’s a Russian native, and bassist “Tommy T.” Gobena was born in Addis Ababa.) Between songs Hütz expressed that Eastern Europeans and South Americans have a natural affinity for one another—all I can say is they sure do play tight together. One of the numbers was a joint Puzzled Panther/ Gogol Bordello composition called “From Boyarka to Boyaca” (Apple Music, Spotify). Fun as hell.

But there were still more guest performers to introduce. The time came for Eugene to announce one final song, and two masked personages walked on—obviously Amanda and Brian from the Dresden Dolls, but their disguises conveyed a sense of mystery nevertheless. Tommy T. dropped a familiar bass line, and then this happened:

Not exaggerating here—at the time I was thinking to myself, This might be the best single-song live performance I’ve ever seen. Two days later, I’m still struggling to come up with a better one. And to think when several of my Ohio gang were asked earlier in the week to suggest songs for a friend’s Halloween playlist, not one of us thought of “Red Right Hand” (Apple Music, Spotify). Unforgivable.

Just now I texted Mike, who I understand has been listening to Gogol Bordello all weekend, to ask which song I should pick for this post. Please find below his somewhat scrambled answer, with follow-on corrections:

Start wearing purple (Apple Music, Spotify). Or Dan around the fire (Apple Music, Spotify). Or the one about here not being picked herring at American wdddings (Apple Music, Spotify)

*Pickled

*There

*Dance

Excellent choices, every one of these, but I’m going to go with “Mishto” (Apple Music, Spotify), which is a barnburner in the studio recording and built up to magnificent guitar and violin solos in the live set. I won’t forget that violin work for a while—at least in part because about thirty of the high notes are still stuck in my right ear.

Dresden Dolls next week. See you then.