Brave
Combo
by Cass Brunner
Now celebrating their 20th anniversary, their second Grammy nomination and their first song in a Academy Award-winning film, the members of Brave Combo keep loyal fans coming back for more.
They came. They studied. They learned the Hokey Pokey (and the Chicken Dance, the cha cha and the polka, for that matter).
Today, Brave Combo's UNT fans number
in the untold thousands.
Many are current students who catch the band at Homecoming pre-game festivities or on Fry Street.
And many more are alumni who frequent clubs like Fort Worth's Caravan of Dreams or Dallas' Poor David's Pub.
Still others can be found in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis. Band members say they run into fans with North Texas connections nearly everywhere they perform -- even on tours of Europe and Japan.
This spring, UNT fans were out in force when Brave Combo got word of its second Grammy Nomination.
Polka Party with Brave Combo: Live and Wild! was the nominee this year; Polkas for a Gloomy World was nominated in the polka category in 1996 (both CDs are on Rounder Records).
Age Is Not An Issue
Recently, as a capacity crowd at Caravan of Dreams waited for Brave Combo to take the stage, the mere mention of the university's name in an announcement brought a raucous cheer from nearly every table in the room -- tables filled with supporters whose ages range form 20 to 60.
These fans attest that when it comes to loving this Denton-based band and its music, age simply does not matter.
It certain doesn't matter to Carl Finch ('75, '79 M.F.A.), who founded Brave Combo as a North Texas art student 20 years ago. He and the band, which includes four other former UNT students, have no intention of slowing down any time soon.
In fact, a new CD, which will include a hometown homage titled, "Denton, Texas," will be released this year.
That will bring Brave Combo's American releases to 20 since 1979.
The Prerequisites
To the uninitiated, the band is difficult to describe. It may look somewhat like a rock band, but its musical roots range from many ethnic forms of polka to a variety of Latin rhythms, including bolero, cumbia, tango, cha cha and merengue.
To describe the music, you'd have to say it "defies categorization," a phrase used perhaps too much in music circles these days. But Brave Combo may as well have invented it.
"We take songs you wouldn't normally associate with a certain style and play them in that style just to kind of shake up people's ideas of what's hip," explains Finch.
The results include the familiar lines from the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," performed as a cha cha (No, No, No, Cha Cha Cha, 1993, Rounder).
Brave Combo 101
Finch formed the band as he was finishing up graduate school. At North Texas he found a fertile environment for exploring new ideas and collaborating with topnotch musicians.
Although he was fascinated with creating sound environments -- one of his favorite conceptual art installations used a dozen drive-in movie speakers -- he realized that musical performances would reach more people. Soon, he found he wanted to cut a record with the band.
The result was Polkamania, Brave combo's first recording. Finch deliberately chose to focus on polka because it was "un-hip" -- something most rock fans at the time would not even consider listening to.
Do Something Different
"Those times (the late '70s) were a real crossroads,"Finch explains. "Disco and punk rock were hitting, classic rock was kind of waning and the corporate music business was still trying to support this grandiose idea of what rock music was supposed to be."
"I didn't see us fitting any of those categories."
For Finch, who as a kid entertained himself by mining Texarkana five-and-dime stores for the most non-mainstream LPs he could find, polka had everything; musicianship, passion and an attractive dearth of popularity.
It became a natural jumping off place.
Soon writers at Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone and the Village Voice were mentioning the interesting new band from Texas.
Today, Finch knows so much about various forms of polka, he could teach a course in it.
The Lore of the Name
Brave Combo has had only one name in its 20-year history, and its origins are as idiosyncratic as the band itself. Back in art school, finch was considering using the word "brave" in the name of his yet unnamed band. He like the word but hadn't quite settled on it.
The clincher came printed on a package for a vibrating pillow his wife had bought from a traveling salesman. Finch remembers:
"It had the word 'vibrate' in these letters that looked like lightning bolts."
He loved the look of that crazy typeface. And "vibrate" contained all the letters he need to make "brave" -- what else could he do but take it as a sign from some higher power?
He added the word "combo" -- and appropriately un-hip word for a band.
And Brave Combo it was.
Six Pieces Max
Today Brave Combo has six members -- Finch, Jeffrey Barnes, Danny O'Brien, Bubba Hernandez ('84), Joe Cripps ('89) and Alan Emert. (O'Brien and Emert attended North Texas in the 1980's and early '90s.)
"That's about the maximum that you can have and still call yourselves a combo, I think," Finch jokes.
An experienced Tejano musician since his teens, bass player and vocalist Bubba Hernandez joined just after finishing his degree in music.
The San Antonio native brought more Latin influences to the band, including a song written by his musician grandfather, a slow bolero titled, "Recuerdos" ("Memories").
Brave Combo's recording of the song was featured in the film The Personals: Improvisations on Romance in the Golden Years, which won an Oscar this year for best documentary short.
Hernandez wasn't present at the Oscars, but he attend the Grammy awards ceremony this year.
Famous Friends
Not normally star-struck, having met so many jazz stars as a music student at North Texas, Hernandez says meeting Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson at the Grammys inspired him beyond words: "I was trembling."
Fans of Brave Combo include many people who are stars themselves. Former Talking Heads front man David Byrne asked the band to play for his wedding a few years ago.
Only recently, cartoonist and Simpson creator Matt Groening introduced Brave Combo as "my favorite band" at the group's performance for the Simpsons 200th episode party in Hollywood.
But perhaps the band's favorite compliment came from another legendary cartoonist, R. Crumb.
Finch remembers chasing Crumb down after a show just to shake the artist's hand:
"He told me, 'Man, you're the only band I'd pay to see.'"
Reprinted with the permission of the The North Texan