‘Sing every single song like it’s your last’: How conflict in Sarajevo changed this musician’s life

Gino Yevdjevich — who goes by “Gino” — is intense. 

The founder and lead singer of the Seattle-based punk band Kultur Shock sports a bald head and a salt-and-pepper ZZ Top-style beard that he sometimes ties in a knot beneath his chin. Onstage, he pumps his fist in the air and sings in a deep growl.

But Gino wasn’t always a punk — he was a pop singer in Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, who rose to fame in the years before the war in Bosnia. 

Gino said he remembers a particular day when the war became real for him: April 2, 1992. 

“I was living in my place in my condo. My mom’s living across the bridge, so every single day, you know, you wake up, I don’t have food at home. I go and, and like, you know, kind of linger on her food … And then, one day when I came to my mom’s, the bridge closed,” he said. 

That moment changed everything for him. His own home was on the front line. He ended up staying at his mother’s place for three years. He said he still thinks about what might have happened if he’d been stuck on the other side of that bridge. 

“I would not know you. You would not know me. I would not come to the United States. I would not make this band,” he said. 

Sarajevo was under siege for almost four years. During that time, Gino and the other artists he knew were trapped, so they did what artists do — make art. 

The way he describes it, most artists get less and less radical as they get older. His story is the opposite. 

“It’s logical, you know, to be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid,” he said. “I mean, I was a pop musician for the first 10 years of my [artistic] life. Yes, I sold the records, but I was miserable.” 

Gino said he turned to theater and later punk rock when he realized that the music he had become famous for had become too commercial. 

“Life is way too short to waste it on stuff that you don’t believe in. I was at the end of the world and I realized when it’s up to disappearing, art will prevail,” he said.

A friend’s father suggested they produce a musical in the local chamber theater. 

“You know, before the war, you could not push people in the theaters. … We were packed for three years because there was no electricity, there was no running water, there was no nothing. There was just art.” 

One day, in the middle of a performance, a woman jumped onstage, and she started singing with them. Gino said it surprised them at first.

“Like, why is this woman jumping on stage and singing at us? But the woman looks familiar. Who’s the woman? Joan Baez!” 

At one point, the director and writer of the film “Field of Dreams,” Phil Alden Robinson, showed up at the theater and he went out for a drink with Gino and the other performers. 

“This is the best show I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told Gino. “I would love to have you guys in the United States.” 

But there was no clear way to leave at the time. 

“Being trapped, being used as a pawn in the negotiations, I remember what I discovered, that, you know, terror is a war of the poor men toward the rich man. And war is a terror of the rich man toward the poor man.” 

But Robinson continued to encourage Gino to find a way to the US. 

“I just went underground and I ran … I got to Croatia and then after that, the United States,” Gino said, adding, “At that moment, I felt really homesick.”

He went on to create Kultur Shock, a band that brings together punk, metal and Balkan folk. 

“You know, I’m a pop-rock musician. I don’t do folk music much, ethnic music much. I know how to do it because of my Roma background, and I started singing that just for myself. And we did it acoustically.” 

Fans loved it but Gino said something was missing for him: “There was still a lot of rage inside me.” 

“I don’t want that rage to go out in my private life … so we plugged in.” 

He realized that “you need to sing every single song like it’s your last song or it doesn’t count,” adding, “So that’s Kultur Shock, doing everything you have, like it’s your last thing. Like you have five minutes, five minutes to sing, sing.”