Polka King Read online

  All I could do was say, “You SOBs.” Then, because I’m a good sport, and because it never hurts to have friends in high places, I bought the cop a beer.

  When the regular season started, Phil decided to forego living in Florida, New York; he moved to New Jersey in order to be close to his brother. They lived in what was then the Loews Glenpointe Hotel, in Teaneck, right off of the Jersey Turnpike. Right about now, you may be asking, “Why would I care where Phil and Joe Niekro lived during the 1985 Major League Baseball season?” Well, I’m about to tell you.

  One of the great milestones for a pitcher is winning three hundred games. Since baseball started keeping statistics, only twenty-four men have reached that lofty number. The last guy to do it was Randy Johnson in 2009; as of this writing, no other pitcher is even close. Considering how today’s managers rest their hurlers for four games in between starts—up until the beginning of this century, three games was generally the norm—pitchers have fewer opportunities to win games, so there’s a possibility it’ll never happen again.

  Phil won his three-hundredth game on October 6, 1985, against the Toronto Blue Jays. I couldn’t be there—and believe me, I wanted to be—because the band was booked for a show in New York City. After the show, when I found out he’d won the game, I told Gussie, who doubled as our bus driver, “Let’s go to the Glenpointe.”

  He said, “But the Yankees are in Toronto. And we have the whole band with us.”

  I said, “That’s fine. It’s the last game of the season, and I’m sure they’ll do their damnedest to get back to their place ASAP. We’ll wait there for them. It won’t take too long.”

  An hour later we pulled into the hotel’s parking lot, and I strolled into the lobby. I asked the concierge, who knew me from my numerous previous visits, “Any idea when the Niekros will be back?”

  He smiled and said, “They just went upstairs about five minutes ago.”

  I said, “Great,” then I poked my head out of the front entrance and called to the band, “Come on in, boys!”

  All twelve of us piled into the elevator and tiptoed down the hall to Phil’s room. I knocked on the door, and Joe answered. We shook hands, then I said, “Where’s Mr. Three Hundred?”

  Cocking his thumb over his shoulder, Joe said, “In the living room, on the phone, talking to the missus.”

  When he rounded the corner, the entire band burst into a song I’d written for Phil that appeared on my album I Remember Warsaw. The title was, of course, “Hey Niekro!” and the chorus went a little something like this . . .

  Hey Niekro, hey Niekro

  Throw that knuckleball

  Strike ’em out, we’ll all go home

  But we’ll stop at the Polish hall

  And if he thinks he can keep up

  And if he wants to go

  Tomorrow night when we return

  We’ll bring your brother Joe

  Phil burst into tears, hugged each and every one of us, then said, “Gentlemen, let’s go downstairs. Drinks are on me!”

  And the drinks were on him. Many, many drinks, the majority of which were a concoction called moon shooters, whose ingredients are forgotten by everyone who was there, probably because we all drank too many of them. After the hotel bar closed at ten, Phil said, “Come on, guys. The celebration has to continue because I’m pretty sure I don’t have another three hundred wins in me. I know another place down the street that’ll still be open. It’s called the E Street Bar. Let’s go!”

  We all hopped onto our bus and drove the few blocks to the E Street. Since it was well after midnight on a work night, the bar was relatively empty, but when the owner saw that we had the Niekro boys in tow, he got on the phone and called everybody in his Rolodex. Before we knew it, the place was jam-packed; looking around at all the smiling faces, I pulled Gussie aside and said, “I have an idea.”

  He took the bus keys from his pocket and said, “You want to get our instruments and play for the people, don’t you?”

  “Indeed I do!”

  We played our first note at 10:25 and didn’t pack up until three in the morning. Phil later told me that our performance made it the perfect night.

  And you know what? I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

  Postscript: Phil’s love for polka spread to his entire family; Joe was a huge fan, and his parents were so enamored with the music that Phil arranged for my band to play at the celebration for their fiftieth wedding anniversary in their backyard in Lansing, Ohio. (At the party, I learned that that tiny street in Lansing was one of the most important streets in sports history, as Phil and Joe weren’t the only great professional athletes to call it home. Boston Celtics legend John Havlicek grew up across the way, and Pittsburgh Pirates mainstay Bill Mazeroski lived just down the block. It was like the Polish Sports Hall of Fame.)

  Phil was so pleased with the way things went that night that when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1997, he invited my band to perform. Unfortunately, I was booked for another job and I couldn’t get the bigwigs at the National Baseball Hall of Fame to change the date of the induction ceremony.

  12

  Polish Hall Madness

  Being an entrepreneurial spirit—and being the kind of guy who gets antsy if I have too much free time on my hands—I took almost every musical job that came my way: outdoor festivals, fairs, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and anything else. If somebody wanted polka, I’d happily supply it. The type of affair meant nothing to me because as far as I was concerned, if people wanted to hear polka music, who was I to refuse them? That said, one of my favorite things to do was to create jobs that hadn’t previously existed, to have people hire me when they didn’t even know they wanted or needed a band.

  For instance, a friend of mine, Gussie Zygmunt, owned a bar just outside of Florida called the Crystal Inn. The Crystal was busy almost every day of the year, except the evenings you wouldn’t expect a bar to be busy, like late on Christmas night, or the evening of New Year’s Day, or Easter Sunday night. It dawned on me that somewhere out in Florida and points beyond, there might be some people looking to cap off their holiday celebration with some polka, so one Thanksgiving night, I asked Gussie if he’d be interested in having a scaled-down version of my band—a trio rather than the full octet—play for a few hours.

  Once word got out around town, polka fans were waiting outside for hours until they could squeeze into the restaurant. We’d start playing at 10 p.m. and go until 2 a.m. or beyond, just me, an accordion player, and a drummer. We’d blow through medley after medley, taking on such polka classics as “Ballroom Polka,” “Jasui,” “Oh Dana,” “Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie,” “Clarinet Polka,” “Violins Play for Me,” “Caroline Polka,” “Tic-Tock Polka,” “Siwy Kon,” “Saxo Polka,” “Pennsylvania Polka,” “My-T-Peppy Polka,” “Our Mary,” “Tam Pod Krakowem,” “Our Gang,” “Hosa Horasa,” “Wish I Were Single Again,” “Red Lantern,” “Hu-La-La Polka,” “Apples Polka,” “Rising Sun Polka,” “Domino Polka,” “Zlonczki Na Lacze,” “Happy Birthday Polka,” “Fire Polka,” and “Na Zdrowie/Lovers Polka.” The crowds drank and danced and drank and sang along and drank some more. A ripping good time was had by all.

  And those were some big-money gigs! I paid my sidemen twenty dollars each, and since I was the leader, I gave myself twenty-five dollars.

  But bar jobs were far from the norm. Before I started winning Grammy Awards, the majority of my gigs were dances, and the majority of the dances were wedding receptions that were held at dance halls, or as they were referred to around our area, Polish halls. These Polish halls were generally big, empty spaces that held about three hundred people. Most of them weren’t particularly fancy or ornate—they didn’t have chandeliers or bay windows or gold leaf on the ceiling, but rather they were simple, no-frills places where you could host a raucous party.

  As Jimmy Sturr and His Orchestra grew in popularity, we played fewer and fewer Polish hall gigs, which was bittersweet. On one hand, it was wo
nderful to take the next step up the ladder of the music world, to perform for three, or four, or ten, or a hundred times as many listeners. On the other hand, there was something special about the intimacy of helping a bridal party celebrate its magical day.

  (A brief digression for you audiophiles out there. Very, very few of those Polish clubs came equipped with a sound system, so we had to haul our own P.A. from show to show. That was an arduous task, but as least we knew that the shows would be well mixed. Today, even though the majority of our performances are at venues that feature their own sound systems, we still always take that unwieldy P.A. system with us, just in case the one waiting for us isn’t satisfactory. I’ll always take that route because I never want anybody to come up to me after a show and say, “You guys sure looked good up there, but I couldn’t hear a thing.”)

  There were things that happened at Polish clubs that could never happen at, say, the Grand Ole Opry. One night, while this then twenty-one-year-old was still living at home with my parents, I was playing a show at an armory not too far from the house. It was a special evening for me because one of my close friends from New Jersey—a friend whom I didn’t see nearly enough—had make the drive up. I put a little something extra into my performance that night because I wanted to make sure he felt the trip had been worthwhile.

  After the show, a beautiful young woman sidled up to me, put her hand on my arm, and, in a breathy voice, told me, “I really loved your band. Really loved it.”

  We spoke for about ten minutes, then, being young and brazen, I gave her my parents’ address and phone number—my parents were out of town that week—and said, “Come on over in a couple of hours. The back door is unlocked. Come in, go up the stairs, and my bedroom is the first door to the left.”

  Her eyes lit up. She said, “Okay. I’ll see you soon.” Then she gave me a kiss on the cheek and skipped off.

  A minute later, my Jersey friend wandered over and said, “She was cute. Listen, I’m starved. Let’s go grab some grub.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, and off we went to a nearby diner. After a two-plus-hour meal filled with bad jokes, great laughter, and a couple of drinks, I looked at my watch and said, “You know what? It’s after midnight. It’d be ridiculous for you to drive all the way back up to Jersey. My parents are out of town, and I have the place to myself. How about you come on back to the house and stay the night. You can have my room. I’ll take my parents’ bed.”

  “Jimmy,” my pal slurred, “you’re a prince among men.”

  By the time we got home, it was well after 2 a.m. I set up my friend in my bedroom, then, exhausted and possibly a tad inebriated, I staggered into my parents’ bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. About two hours later, the phone rang. Who the hell’s calling at this hour?, I wondered, then picked up the handset and grumbled, “H’lo.”

  “Where were you?!” It was a female voice, and that voice wasn’t the least bit happy.

  I rubbed my eyes and asked, “Whozis?”

  “I’m the girl you met at the dance, dummy. Where were you? I went to your house, just like you said, and I went up to your room, just like you said, and I got undressed, and got into your bed, and it wasn’t you!”

  I sat up as if I’d been stabbed in the backside with a knitting needle. “What happened when you got into the bed?”

  “Nothing! He didn’t even wake up!” She hung up on me, hard. Unsurprisingly, I never heard from her again.

  And then there was a dance we played in Brooklyn, New York.

  It was Halloween night, and our drummer was sick as could be, but, as would be the case with pretty much anyone in the band, he sucked it up and made the gig. Not only did he show up ready to play but he had enough energy to put on a Halloween costume. (For some reason, he decided to dress as a colonial aristocrat, complete with a three-pointed hat and knickers. I still have no idea why.)

  When he got onto the bus, the rest of the guys gave him a long, sarcastic round of applause. Coughing, he said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. So listen, guys, I have this killer cold and just got these new covers for my drums, so be careful.”

  When we got to the club, our revolutionary war hero set up his drum set, and, with the help from a couple of band members, neatly piled his cases behind his kit. Much to his credit—and much to my pleasure and relief—he rose to the occasion and played wonderfully.

  During the show, in between songs, one of my instrumentalists, who shall remain nameless, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Jimmy, give me a few minutes before the next song. I’ve gotta take a leak.”

  I said, “Why didn’t you go before we went on stage?” (Sometimes being a bandleader is like being a kindergarten teacher.)

  One look into his bloodshot, watery eyes and it was quite apparent that he’d downed a drink or five. Great. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “I just didn’t. It’ll take, like, one minute.”

  “We have to keep playing. Take your seat,” I said, then I counted off the next tune.

  He glared at me, then stomped behind the band, unzipped his fly, and began to urinate . . . all over the drummer’s new cases. When we left, the drummer left the covers on the stage. I can’t say I blamed him, because who wants to walk around with urine-soaked drum covers?

  We had some great times at those Polish halls and tiny clubs of the Northeast; while some of those shows could be frustrating, I wouldn’t trade the experiences for anything. But after the Grammys started coming in, that sort of monkey business mostly went right out the window.

  13

  The Grammys

  Over the last two decades, the Grammy Awards have gotten a bad rap. For a good twenty-five or thirty years after they originated in 1958, the Grammy was a sought-after prize, a special, one-of-a-kind honor that rewarded an artist for his or her unbeatable combination of excellence and popularity. In the beginning, the voters bestowed Album of the Year honors to the legitimate Album of the Year, regardless of the genre. Here’s a list of the first seven winners: Henry Mancini, Frank Sinatra, Bob Newhart, Judy Garland, Vaughn Meader, Barbara Streisand, and João Gilberto and Stan Getz. We’re talking a composer, a crooner, two comedians, two chanteuses, and a guitarist and jazz saxophonist. Diversity, originality, and quality, with little regard for trendiness. Even though the last seven Albums of the Year have been nearly as diverse—stadium rockers U2, country crooners the Dixie Chicks, jazzer Herbie Hancock, the killer combination of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, pop/country singer Taylor Swift, alternative rockers Arcade Fire, and retro soul shouter Adele—the Grammys have lost much of their luster. People in and out of the music industry have their theories as to the cause, but I believe folks are less respectful of the Grammys because it’s now perceived as a politics-drenched popularity contest, in which the voters are more concerned about casting their ballot for either a million-record seller or for a close, personal friend. Whether or not any of that is true is debatable, but as they say, perception is reality.

  Because I was a professional musician, I had to pay at least a little bit of attention to the Grammy Awards—it’s part of the job to know who’s capturing the industry’s fancy, regardless of genre—but I never went out of my way to watch the ceremonies on television; if I missed the show, I’d just read the results in the newspaper. But in 1985 when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), the Grammy Awards’ governing body, added a category for Best Polka Album into the mix, I started paying a lot of attention. I didn’t necessarily think I had a chance to even be nominated, let alone win (I was, after all, as I told Cousin Brucie, just a country bumpkin), but there was always the chance it could happen.

  Much to my surprise, it did happen. Actually, surprise is an understatement. Shock is probably more accurate.

  When I was leading the first edition of the Jimmy Sturr Orchestra, the thought of winning any kind of major music award never even entered my mind. I was playing polka music for the sheer joy of performing, and besides, the baseball
trophies on the mantel were all the accolades I needed. Even when I was recording album after album after album, and playing my 204 shows a year, I never imagined that anybody in the music industry would give us a second thought. But they did, and when the notices from outside the polka world started trickling in, I embraced it. I suspect that any musician, no matter how jaded he or she may be about the Grammy Awards or the voting process, would feel the same way. When I hear an artist say, “I don’t care about the awards one iota. It’s all about the work,” I think he’s lying through his teeth. If you’re not at least a little bit honored by a nomination, you’re missing something inside.

  My first nomination was in 1986 for my record I Remember Warsaw. I was up against two great musicians and their great albums: Frankie Yankovic’s America’s Favorites and Another Polka Celebration by Eddie Blazonczyk’s Versatones. Frankie, who passed away the following year, was one of the best-known polka musicians in the country, partly because he’d been playing great music for decades, and partly due to the popularity of his nonrelative “Weird Al” Yankovic. (By the way, Al chose the name “Yankovic” as his stage name because his parents were huge fans of Frankie’s.) America’s Favorites is loaded with several classics that my band has been playing for decades—“Pennsylvania Polka” and “Too Fat Polka” are two that come to mind—and it was a terrific album, more than worthy of the acclaim.

  (A brief digression about Frankie Yankovic. Despite the title of this book, Frankie was, is, and always will be the first “Polka King.” Before he passed away in 1998, he played a Slovenian style of polka, which is a bit slower tempo and accordion-heavy. In the late 1940s, Frankie had a couple of massive hits with “Just Because” and “Blue Skirt Waltz.” Then in his heyday, he recorded for Columbia Records, and his face was in every record store in the country, right next to fellow Columbia labelmates like Tony Bennett and Miles Davis. Even though Frankie wasn’t a direct influence on my music, I have the utmost respect for his work ethic and was proud to have him sit in with the band at several shows. I was even prouder to call him a friend.)