Gogol Bordello - “Baro Faro”
One my favourite things in the world is that choppy Klezmer sound you get by making your bow dance/bounce on top of a fiddle—you’ll hear/recognize it a lot in this song, starting at around 1:00.
So about ten years ago I decided I wanted to learn how to play it, but I didn’t have a fiddle; I saved up for a lot of months and made my way downtown. The first attempt failed when the store was randomly closed and I ended up in Brossard, sharing a phone booth with my fried Sue while we waited in the cold for a bus. The next time I went down, the shop was opened and I picked out the cheapest fiddle/bow/case set I could find. The clerk made an inappropriate joke about my friend Sophie, so I feigned my best shock and insisted, even though she was older and very Greek, that she was actually my little sister and how dare he make such a joke!
He was a bit horrified and I ended up getting a nice discount: the full setup and a “how to play fiddle” book for $80.
The problems started right away when the string holding the tail piece snapped. I headed down to Wal-Mart, picked up some nylon string, and fixed it. Then the bow started to fall apart. A fiddler friend tried to fix that, but it ended up with only half the original hairs and effectively unplayable. I took a couple months off, saved up for a new bow, and tried again.
The nylon string broke, the bridge cracked, the chin rest fell off, the strings snapped, etc. etc. Every time I got to the second lesson in the book, it broke again. Maybe it should be expected from an $80 fiddle, but I kept going. My repertoire consisted of 2-3 Irish songs, Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” and the intro riff of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.”
Then I moved. Unsurprisingly, the instrument I could barely play and broke all the time didn’t make the “what do I bring?” cut. My best friend’s Mom wanted to keep it above her fireplace because she thought it looked fancy… weird, but that’s where it stayed for about five years.
When I eventually got it back, I started to tune and *snap*, the nylon string breaks on me. Back in the closet until earlier this year when I took it out, fixed it up, tuned it up, and went to tighten the bow. It wasn’t getting tighter. I looked closely at the frog and there was a crack from one end to another. It turns out that it “fell” off that fireplace “frequently.”
I still can’t make that sound, and even though my fiddle doesn’t want to let me make it, I’ll be doing my best to epoxy that frog back together. Then I’m going to start a band called Epoxy the Frog and my fiddle will break during our first performance.
