BRAVING THE COMBO
Denton’s polka badboys are celebrating their silver
anniversary this year, and there’s no letup in sight
By Steve Carter
Unless you’ve been Rip Van Winkling the last 20-something years, there’s a better than good chance that Brave Combo has been on your cultural radar at some point. From the band’s modest “Nuclear Polka” origins in 1979, the year that leader Carl Finch assembled his iconoclastic quartet, to today, the band’s trajectory has been a truly remarkable one.
They’ve marched in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, restlessly toured the States, Europe and Japan, played David Byrne’s wedding reception, made frequent appearances on “A Prairie Home Companion,” averaged 150 lives dates a year, and been animatedly immortalized on “The Simpsons.” Yet somehow, in their spare time, they’ve managed to unleash some 26 releases, five of which were Grammy-nominated, and one of which, 1999’s “Polkasonic,” took the Grammy home.
Even in the group’s base of Denton, where “unusual” bands are thick enough to be “usual,” there was no precedent for anything like Brave Combo. Carl Finch, a twice-degreed art student at [then] North Texas State University, had always been a musician, a double threat on guitar and keyboards. The flaccid radio fodder of the late 70’s left him uncomfortably numb, and he experimented with “Room” and “Finch,” unlikely bands of uncertain commercial potential. But a chance encounter with some polka albums in a cut-out bin at the downtown Texarkana Woolworth’s led Finch to his destiny.
There, Carl stocked up on unwanted wax by Larry Chesky, Kenny Bass, Andrew Walter and others; the polka sides began to infiltrate his listening with seditious regularity. Some months later, he was hooked. “I remember one day getting my Andrew Walter or Larry Chesky album out and thinking that that was what I wanted to hear that day,” he observes. “I was actually choosing that music as a preference.”
Finch responded to something ineffable in the grooves of those LPs, rekindling his early years listening to British Invasion hits and popsters like Brian Hyland, Lou Christie and Neil Sedaka. Intrigued and challenged by the popular perception of polka’s “uncoolness,” Finch assembled the first edition Brave Combo. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he muses. “I just knew that ‘wow, this music is kind of interesting- I wonder if you played this with a rock band, what would this sound like?’” Determined to do the undo-able, he’s now actually rendered the uncool cool.
A handful of musicians later, the Combo lineup is unsettlingly settled, with Jeffrey Barnes on reeds (and nearly everything else), Bubba Hernandez on bass and tuba, trumpeter Danny O’Brien, and drummer Alan Emert. Through the years, the band’s playlist of musical concerns has grown exponentially, and now encompasses more styles than you can fill a paragraph with, including Tex-Mex, Klezmer, Muzak, salsa, jazz, rock, zydeco, and tons more. Brave Combo was Post-Modern before the phrase was coined, and World Music before anyone knew how big the world was, or how small it might become.
This year, Combo’s been busy in the studio, recording an as-yet untitled polka album celebrating their silver anniversary, a Holiday smorgasbord of tunes for TM Century, and compiling material for a live CD. If you’re among the dwindling few who’ve never found yourself doing an impromptu Chicken Dance, attempting your tentative first polka, or frenzying an unnameable terpsichorean paroxysm, wait no more.
Catch Brave Combo celebrating Oktoberfest at Dallas’ venue that time forgot, the Sons of Hermann Hall on Saturday, October 2. Then on Sunday, October 3, Combo will be tearing it up at the Vista Ridge Amphitheater’s “Sounds of Lewisville” concert series. Finch offers his usual advice for first-timers and the converted alike: “Never criticize your partner's dancing.”
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Sons of Hermann Hall, 3414 Elm Street (at Exposition), Dallas 75226-1720. For more information, call 214-747-4422; http://www.sonsofhermann.com
Sounds of Lewisville concert series, Vista Ridge Amphitheater, 7:30 p.m. Located at 3049 Lake Vista Dr. in Lewisville. For more information, call 972-219-3550; http://www.cityoflewisville.com
Brave Combo’s website is http://www.brave.com/bo