Band Spotlight: Winzige Hosen

Win free tickets to NYE Cleveland by paying money!

If you aren’t making plans to travel to Cleveland for New Years’ Eve, you really should be. Right up front, here’s an offer: do a one-year paid subscription to this Substack and you get two free tickets to see what is looking like it will be the party of the century.

But let’s back up a step. Why do I say that?

Well, Waukesha, WI offered us that Oktoberfest gig I wrote about last time, and I thought: no worries, we’ll fill in the other weekend date with a Chicago-area show. Chicago is big. There will be somewhere for us to play. Even just acoustically doing the sea shanty thing. We’ve got eight months to book this. No sweat.

But then, it was revealed to me that one of those American punk festivals—they are usually held in a shitty parking lot or in a giant pit of mud—was going on that weekend in Chicago. All the trendy bands were there and most of the punk granddaddy acts, as well as the usual “we gave up on remaining cohesive a long time ago” additions like Cypress Hill and Oliver Tree. We have, of course, applied to this festival (and many other US festivals) many times. I think it might be time to stop.

Long story short, you couldn’t book shit within a hundred miles of Chicago that weekend. Uh oh.

But diamonds really are made under intense pressure. Our fiddler is from Duluth, MN and it was (and still is) six hours away. I remembered reading that some young polka-ish band called, um, Wizzer Bizzer Booger or something, lived there. We’d already been in touch about playing our big New Years’ Eve show in Cleveland. It seemed like a nice, last-ditch desperation email to send.

And before you know it, bada BOOM we were booked to play with them at Blacklist Brewing in Duluth, because the lead singer is also the head brewer. And holy shit was it a night to remember. Not only is Duluth beautiful and reminiscent of all the little Canadian towns I grew up in (it looks like a bigger Thunder Bay and everyone talks the same), Winzige Hosen were simply magnificent.

Genuine polka-punk is hard to find. As I’ve written, San Francisco’s Polkacide perfected probably the perfect blend of the two genres. But to the list we now must add Minnesota’s Winzige Hosen (German translation: “tiny pants”), who are blending polka with the music from our punk era—90s punk. The faster tempos and heavy guitars and three-part harmonies reminiscent of those granddaddy bands mentioned above get tossed in with an oom-pah tuba, accordion and horn section. It’s super sweet. By the end of their set we were genuinely intimidated, feeling like we had to bring our A game to match their energy. That was awesome.

And a good party band knows how to toss out great, unexpected covers. “S.O.B.” has long been one of my favorite soul-rock songs, and when they burst into it, I was ecstatic. Here they are doing it a few years ago:

Yes, as you will see from this video I shot that night at Blacklist, their choice in covers is truly A+…

And by the end of the night, we of course had them up to play that song with us, and it felt like the Polka Revolution was well and truly underway. No-one in attendance that night would ever again think of polka as some kind of joke or as something only embraced by the terminally uncool. There is no video of that joint performance because everyone in the room was going bananas. That’s how it oughtta be, man.

And so I cannot wait for New Year’s Eve! The two bands will be joined by the mighty Captain Tom and the Hooligans, which means that this will almost certainly be the largest gathering of under-40 polka musicians in the world. It’s going to be insane in there. I don’t care if you’re far away. Travel. Does that sound too demanding? Ignore that feeling. You won’t regret it. If you’re on the fence about the travel, get in touch and maybe we can work something out with tickets. What matters is that we try to get as many people as possible to see the beginning of the 2025 Polka Revival.

And so again here’s the offer: do a one-year paid subscription to this Substack for a year and you get two “free” NYE tickets.

How can you say no to that? “FREE” tickets! Not only will you get to see the show of the year, you’ll be helping to fund our new album. Oh… did I say new album? Sure did. More on that soon…