New Orders big night, Gogol Bordellos wild sets, and performance art with Soviet phones.
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Stephen Morris, the drummer for both bands, remembers the show.
We were transitioning from What are we?
Were not Joy Division to Well, this is what New Order are.
We got rid of one cheesy drum machine and got another cheesy drum machine and a sequencer.
It was all held together with wires on rickety tables.
Would we have to move Ukrainians out for us to play there?
There was a Popeyes across the road, and you could get the 3-D glasses with some chicken.
It was just like anywhere else in New York.
But it was obviously not the sort of place where you would put a band on.
I can remember the plaque for Taras Shevchenko in the back.
And Ill admit it: Id never heard of him.
When I discovered Shevchenko was a poet, it made me interested.
Theres a great tradition of Ukrainian literature.
Guy who wroteThe Master and Margarita,which is a great book, is from Kyiv.
Theres a sort of humor in it, which is bleak its very Mancunian.
What do I remember about the audience?
There definitely was one.
Are the cameras going to work?
Have they actually recorded the sound?I think I played with my eyes closed.
I was very self-conscious.
It was one of those nightmare situations where youre just hoping nothing goes wrong.
Because we were nervous, we took measures, lets say, which usually involved large quantities of alcohol.
Theres a review that describes the crowd as bohemians with their long coats, scarfs, and faces.
That was our typical audience.
And Yeah, they used to be Joy Division, but whats the shit theyre playing now?
Which we got a lot of.
We werent very confident about what we were doing.
And we were all sort of worried about what was going to break down next.
Gypsy Punk Arrived in the East Village
Eugene Hutzfounded the band Gogol Bordello in 1998.
I started coming to Ukrainian places in the East Village before I even moved here.
I was drawn to it, the density of the Ukrainian culture.
Youd hit pockets of Ukrainian culture in Kyiv, but it was pretty diluted.
The Soviet Union was a miserable place.
Not a whole hell of a lot of variety in color.
After Chernobyl melted down, I went to stay all over Ukraine with family.
We are a Romany-mixed family, and I was kind of like the Gypsy Huckleberry Finn.
I was like,Yo, Im living in a magical country.
Then we had to leave because the Soviets were after my father.
In Vermont,I started some hardcore bands.
By the mid-90s, I was coming down to the East Village.
The vibe was a dense Ukrainian mix, like the original Ukrainian magic mix.
The dude was like, When do you want to begin?
I was like, Right now.
It was five oclock.
So I did it.
And after that, I walked around the corner into Blue & Gold and did the same thing.
I just wanted to play Ukrainian songs in Ukrainian bars in New York.
I wanted to combine experience-driven immigrant tales with the duende of Gypsy music.
I needed to hear those old scales and melodies.
So I switched to acoustic guitar and started re-creating them myself.
We played in the Ukrainian National Home, the Ukrainian Sports Club.
We even played at the Ukrainian Consulate.
I dont know how they tolerated me!
Every show was a spectacle and a happening.
It was Gypsy punk rock meets klezmer, with the occasional appearance of a Brazilian drum line.
It was just too many people, too many things flying around, too much debauchery.
I call it joycore.
Its supposed to be flamboyant and rambunctious and overwhelming.
Maria Sonevytsky:My connection to the Ukrainian National Home goes back to my early childhood.
I grew up in the Ukrainian diaspora outside New York City.
We would come in every weekend for Plast.
And sometimes that would end up with a meal at the Ukrainian National Home.
My grandmother actually lived just above it.
And thats how it was in the whole community.
People started to recognize me as the Asian woman who was always singing with Maria.
:I dont remember what the booking terms were.
I could speak Ukrainian to them, but still it took persistence to book the place.
You didnt send an email.
It wasnt easy, but it worked enough times that they started letting me book more stuff there.
And then we could sort of do whatever we wanted.
It was a DIY space, no infrastructure, no sound people, no stage, really.
It was at the moment when there were some really exciting things happening around the Ukrainian scene.
I mean, the bigger Ukrainian scene.
Eugene Hutz was DJ-ing at Mehanata Bulgarian Bar every Thursday night.
Gogol Bordello was the biggest band in that scene.
:Its funny that you didnt think Ukrainian culture was cool.
:And we succeeded!
We did the Irving Plaza show, Halloween 2004.
Main Squeeze Orchestra was 18 women with accordions, and we opened for Gogol Bordello.
The after-party was at Sly Fox a bar my cousins bartended at in the 80s.
:I had collected 25 Soviet telephones in Ukraine.
The phones didnt connect to anything.
They were just art objects.
I had an opportunistic relationship to that venue.
And now other people have that relationship.
:And it still looks exactly the same!
Recently, I booked a performance series there.
The back room where the shows are still looks like a rec room or something.
And the restaurant area looks like I dunno, someone described it as a dentists office.
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