Connecting the polka dots

When he was 15, Li’l Wally Jagiello headlined his first gig at Lucky Stop tavern on Division Street. Fifty-four years later, in 1999, “Polka King” Jagiello made his triumphant return with local polka-rockers the Polkaholics at Zakopane Lounge—a rare holdover from the 50 polka clubs that once dotted Division, or “Polish Broadway,” from Ashland to Western. (Today, Lucky Stop is the site of Bob San, a sushi spot.)

“It was a freak-out,” Wes Hranchak says of the show. “You could see the terror on the Polkaholics’ faces.” Polkaholics, Hranchak’s documentary about the “transgenerational happening,” premieres in a free screening Friday 5 at the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival.

Jagiello was a DIY pioneer, putting out dozens of records on his own Jay Jay label, with tag lines like “Be happy and gay with Jay Jay” and “The gayest polka and waltzes are on Jay Jay Records.” Jagiello innovated polka’s Chicago Style, slowing it to a danceable tempo and breaking the Top 40 with wedding-reception standby “I Wish I Was Single Again.” He sold accordion-shaped ashtrays and other novelties, spun his own records on his daily radio show and cowrote “Let’s Go, Go-Go White Sox” for the 1959 pennant race.

In the early ’60s, at the height of his fame, Jagiello left it all behind and moved to Miami. “If I’d stayed here, I’d have been in the cemetery,” Jagiello told Hranchak in ’99. Jagiello continued to run Jay Jay, record at his Miami Beach studio and perform, culminating in a 1984 show for Pope John Paul II.

As a high schooler in Highland, Indiana, Hranchak had played Jagiello’s tunes on sax at wedding gigs. When then-Polkaholics drummer Mike Werner told Hranchak about Jagiello’s imminent homecoming, the boutique-marketing-agency owner knew he had a subject for his first documentary. Hranchak, now 43, says he “chauffeured” Jagiello and Polkaholics frontman “Dandy” Don Hedeker during Jagiello’s weeklong homecoming—visiting old haunts, some long gone; paying last respects to a bishop friend at Holy Name Cathedral; bunking at the Chicago-Nile Thriftlodge and drinking at its attached 4am bar, Darlin’s; and squelching persistent rumors of Jagiello’s death.

In his single rehearsal with the Polkaholics, Jagiello was a harsh taskmaster, nixing the reverb and distortion on Hedeker’s guitar and commandeering the drum kit. “It was this collision of styles,” Hranchak says. “The Polkaholics are this no-holds-barred, amped-up, rocking music, and [Jagiello is] famous for dialing polka down to a slower beat.” In footage of the rehearsal, “you can see his disorientation with the rock aesthetic.”

The Polkaholics played their raucous set at Zakopane to a packed house. Then Li’l Wally crossed himself and joined them onstage for 90 minutes of his jaunty standards and bizarre reminiscences. “He was sweating profusely,” Hranchak recalls. “Thank God he didn’t stumble off the stage.”

Hranchak saw Jagiello a few more times, but he says Jagiello “never sat still long enough” to watch a cut of Polkaholics. Before he died in 2006, Jagiello got to see “Go-Go White Sox” become the anthem of the South Siders’ 2005 World Series run. Last year, the Polkaholics released Wally!—a “polka-rock opera” based on Jagiello’s life.

Beset by family and medical troubles, Hranchak let Polkaholics languish until he heard about CIMM Fest and dug out the film. He trimmed a half hour off its 90-minute running time, honing in on the interplay between Jagiello, polka’s king, and its self-proclaimed clown prince, Hedeker—“this intergenerational relationship between these two music lovers who are addicted to polka and fun.”

Polkaholics premieres at the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival Friday 5 at 8pm at the Chicago Cultural Center Claudia Cassidy Theater (78 E Washington St).

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