Brave Combo polka kings continue their waltz with FitzGerald’s

By Selena Fragassi | For the Sun-Times

If there were ever a band to play FitzGerald’s 35th anniversary show, it would be Brave Combo. The zany polka hybrid act from Denton, Texas, was cobbled together by bandleader and accordionist Carl Finch just months before the Berwyn club’s opening in 1980. Bravo Combo has been exclusively playing on its stage ever since, including an annual holiday show that, this year, falls on the exact date when owner Bill Fitzgerald opened for business.

“We’re fortunate it worked out that way. It’s one of our favorite shows of the year,” FitzGerald says, deeming Brave Combo one of the “most creative and best bands in the country,” one that mixes traditional European polka with jazz, ska, dance and Latin American flavors like merengue, samba and Cha-Cha-Cha in a mix of originals and reimagined covers of songs from artists like Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. The band’s three-decade, 34-album discography has attracted fans from David Byrne, who tapped Brave Combo to play at his wedding, to Bob Dylan, who recorded a cover, to rock critic Lester Bangs, who often included the band in his Pazz and Jop polls.

“He fell in love with us,” says Finch, recalling hanging out at Bangs’ New York City apartment in the early ’80s. “Once he gave us a stamp of approval, then every rock critic in the country had to check us out.” FitzGerald says even he discovered the group from a four-star review in the back pages of Rolling Stone magazine that he tore out and stockpiled.

The relationship built with Fitzgerald over the years is a “special, rare thing,” says Finch, and just one example of how rooted Brave Combo has become in Chicago.

“Our ties run all over the city,” Finch continues, referring to kinship with local polka star Li’l Wally and the Eddie Blazonczyk family, who run the “ground zero” of polka, Bel-Aire Records in Bridgeview. “It’s a very important town to us for a lot of reasons,” not the least of which is the large Polish community deeply embedded in the scene. “None of us in the band are Polish. We got turned on to polka late in our lives, so when we started playing and coming to Chicago, our education about American polka music exploded and finally we were part of that community.”

Finch didn’t even know of polka until he was in college. As a kid he grew up in Southern Baptist churches and sang in choirs before discovering rock music. He taught himself to play guitar in junior high. It wasn’t until he was home on a semester break and visiting a local Woolworth’s department store that he found “a wall of vinyl on sale,” and loaded up the $1 polka discount bin.

“At first it was just goofball to me, and then I really got into it, and that’s when I started wondering, ‘Why do people make fun of this music so much and why has it not been able to rise out of land of beer and sausage and lederhosen?’ ”

His theory is that it is has to do with prejudice against immigrants when the style was introduced in the 19th century, and to this day, Brave Combo is selective about festival gigs for that very reason. “It offends me, this idea of keeping polka stupid,” admits Finch, who has always been keen on the idea of challenging mores of hipness and how that stalls personal exploration. “So now we go into clubs and force this music on people, basically,” he says, laughing.

In many ways Brave Combo has become popular by way of its eccentricities, being featured on an episode of “The Simpsons” and winning several Grammy awards — two hallmarks of the many highlights in an impressive career that will be told in an upcoming documentary by Bart Weiss. The band’s prolific career also has in part helped move the genre forward, resulting in the short-lived “Polka Kings” reality show on Reelz and a resurgence of instruments like the accordion, now seen in a number of experimental and indie bands.

“It’s so much better now and I think we are an easier sell. We’re no longer looked at like a Lawrence Welk joke,” Finch says, saying for Brave Combo, that means there’s still so much to do. “The list of songs that we haven’t even done yet; I wake up under the weight of it every day.”

Selena Fragassi is a local freelance writer.