Get Out: Kultur Shock @ Neumo's
The first time we saw Kultur Shock, they were opening for Gogol Bordello at Neumo's, and we have to admit, we'd never heard of them. It was an all-ages show, so we were drinking our fill in the Bad Juju lounge next door, until the insane sounds of the band dragged us away from our beers. Quickly we came to regret missing the first half of their set.
Kultur Shock is self-described "Balkan punk rock gypsy metal wedding-meets-riot music from Bulgaria, the US, Japan, and Bosnia," and after much effort, we have to admit that's the best way to put it. The band takes southeast European trad, gypsy music, and Balkan brass, and processes it through a blender of punk and metal. Led by a one-time pop star in the former Yugoslavia, with a Croatian and a Bulgar on guitars, a Japanese bassist, and Americans on drums and violin, Kultur Shock is a multicultural band performing a musical bricolage that epitomizes the harried mish-mash of cultures produced by the churn of globalism, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Last fall we caught up with Gino Srdjan Yevdjevich, Kultur Shock's lead singer, about a week before the band took off for a two-month European tour that lasted through New Year's. Gino's a hard guy to miss: Tall and burly, his head's shaved except for a long tangle of dreadlocks coming off the crown of his skull. Sitting outside a coffeeshop in Lower Queen Anne, we couldn't help but ask how a guy who was once Yugoslavia's answer to Duran Duran wound up a Seattle punk.
“At sixteen, I was the drummer in a band that had a hit, a one-hit wonder,” he laughs. “I was big.” The band was called Zov, and although they'd hit the sort of pop-rock stardom of teeny-bopper bands like Hanson, they unsurprisingly broke up by the time Gino was 19.
“We pretty much made it, all [of us],” he said, speaking of Zov’s members. “The guitar player is a pretty famous artist, a visual artist, painter right now. The bassist is a politician, and the singer is the biggest pop star in all of those countries right now, the former Yugoslavia...his name is ‘Harry.’”
For his part, Gino spent a couple years retooling his act. “I was going more theatrical, more jazz...they stayed more pop,” he explains, though taking pains to explain that what he was doing was still pop, too. Under the name "Gino Bananas," he became Sarajevo's answer to Wham. If it sounds a bit of stretch, it isn't--Kultur Shock draws out the former-Yugoslav émigré community, older people you wouldn't normally expect to see at a punk-metal show. Outside of Solo Bar in Lower Queen Anne, co-owned by Kultur Shock guitarist Val Kiossovski, a middle-aged Serbian woman with a dark complexion and a husky voice that bore witness to years of smoking assured us that, " “When he was like eighteen, you know, he had all the bitches,” she said, pronouncing the "i" like a long "e" and suggestively thrusting her loins toward us.
“Probably my biggest achievement last time we were there on tour was that Kultur Shock overshadowed" Gino Bananas, explained Gino. "The success of Kultur Shock in Europe came back to where I’m from and it was kind of like, ‘Shit, look what he’s doing!’ It’s kind of like, imagine if Justin Timberlake came back in 20 years with some insane band, and your son would tell you, ‘Dad, you know Justin Timberlake from your time?’ And you’d say, ‘Oh shut the fuck up.’ ‘He’s great!’ ‘No he’s not!’ And that’s pretty much what was going on there with me.”
It was, unsurprisingly, the war that changed everything for Gino. A native of Sarajevo, he was trapped in the city during the siege in 1992.
“I changed in the war,” says Gino. “When you face death every five minutes, you realize, you don’t want to do shit for anybody else...you do what you like to do.”
The story of how he wound up in America is itself a crazy tale. “During the war I did the musical Hair, but I made it dark and insane and with a bunch of other people, my friends, recording artists...who were trapped in the city,” he explained. “Imagine if this city got trapped and everyone from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Nirvana, whoever, we all get together and we make one huge, shit musical, because you can’t really get out.”
Western artists and intellectuals were lining up at the time to show their solidarity with the besieged people of his hometown, and with the help of Joan Baez and Phil Alden Robinson (the writer-director of Field of Dreams), Gino came to the US on a cultural visa to perform the show in the US. Plans to make a movie fell through, and after touring around, Gino wound up in Seattle playing traditional, acoustic Balkan music under the name Kultur Shock, with a different line-up.
The story of how Kultur Shock gave up the acoustics and became a rock outfit is itself the stuff of Seattle rock legend. The most common iteration has it that Krist Novoselic, himself of Croatian descent, caught the band playing a show and told Gino he should plug in. According to Gino, the story is actually that he got them tossed out of Serafina, the ritzy Eastlake eatery.
“People were just drinking and breaking glasses and jumping on tables and taking off their bras," he explains of his rabid fan-base that followed him to the staid restaurant. "When Greeks do it, that’s cool,” he adds sardonically.
Needless to say, the management didn’t agree. “They liked the band, the Serafina people, so they came to me and said, ‘Can you kind of tell them not to come?’ And I said, ‘For you, for Serafina, so you can have some other people in here? Do you hear yourself? Do you think you’re more important to me than my audience, the people who love me? Fuck you!’ You know.” The rest of the band wasn't too pleased that Gino had flipped off a good employer, and they went their separate ways.
Shortly thereafter, Gino rounded up a couple other Eastern European exiles. Val Kiossovski had been the guitarist in a popular Bulgarian rock band in the late 1980s, Orion. While playing an Italian festival, Kiossovski and another member of the band defected. Mario Butković was a musician of Croatian descent living in Bosnia when he was drafted in 1990 to fight in the war. Showing up with a British flag cheekily sown into his jacket, he was sent off to Kosovo. Forced into a refugee camp in Croatia following the war, he eventually was accepted to the US and wound up in Portland before moving to Seattle when he was inexplicably called up one day by a certain pop star he used to watch on TV.
Picking up Masa Kobayashi on bass, Chris Stromquist on drums, and Matty Noble on violin, the band was signed to Kool Arrow Records, a label founded by Faith No More bassist Billy Gould. Kultur Shock has released three albums: FUCC the INS (2001), Kultura-Diktatura(2004, produced by Seattle legend Jack Endino), and last year, We Came To Take Your Jobs Away.
Kultur Shock is playing Neumo's tonight, Friday, March 23.
8pm // $10 Advance // 21+
