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Pucker the Polka Man
By Tim McNellie
Foot-stomping,
leg-swinging,
hip-swiveling…
The music of Steve Pucker
has brought smiles to
generations of immigrants
from Eastern Europe
Pucker the Polka Man
The first time Steve Pucker played
the saxophone in front of an
audience, he hardly knew what he
was doing. Fresh out of high school,
he’d only had the instrument for a
few months, and was still taking
lessons when a neighbor who ran a
polka band asked him to help out
with a show at a bar in Carnegie.
“Don’t worry about lessons,” the
man said. “The best thing is to learn
on the job.”
A learning experience it was.
Within minutes of the band’s first
song, a barroom brawl broke out,
with fists flying, bodies crashing, and
a woman being hoisted up by her
ankles. Instinctively, Pucker stopped
playing and started packing up his
saxophone.
“What are you doing?” the
bandleader said. “Keep playing.”
"This thing cost me alot of money!” Pucker said. “One of these
guys is going to grab it and smash
somebody over the head with it.”
“Keep playing!”
So he did. And he kept playing
for six decades.
Late last year, Pucker, 77, was
awarded a spot on the Trustee’s
Honor Roll of the United Musicians
Polka Association of Pennsylvania
(yes, that’s UMPAPA for short).
The award recognized him for a
lifetime of playing and promoting
polka music. Since 1949, he’s
performed in nearly a dozen bands,
played at countless tri-state area
venues, appeared on television, cut a
few 45s, and even made a CD.
Along the way he has accumulated a
lifetime’s worth of wild stories from
nights on the road, including bizarre,
pathetic and weird tales of swearing
parrots, stale sandwiches, drunken
accordion players, and other sundry
characters. (Steve’s wife, Marge, received her own award for the support she’s provided him through
the decades. They got plaques of
similar size, though she insists hers
should have been bigger for all the
nonsense she’s had to put up with
over the years.)
“They say polka people are happy
people, and it’s true,” he says.
“Wherever there’s a polka band
playing, there are people having a
good time.”
The good times started the day
Gene Viola, who ran a local band,
walked by Pucker’s house and heard
a saxophone playing. Viola needed a
player for a Friday night gig, so he
convinced Steve to play. That
fisticuff-filled first night turned into
a regular gig, which Pucker kept for
a few years.
Eventually, he moved away from
the music scene and packed away his sax. Then one night, Marge came home from work and said that Joe
Tasz, who had a band that was very
popular in Western Pennsylvania,
was looking for a saxophone player.
Steve auditioned and joined the
group, though Marge sometimes
wished he hadn’t. “Those guys were
a little too wild,” she says with a
laugh.
One of the band’s guitar players,
for example, somehow managed to
juggle nine girlfriends at once. He
tried to enlist Marge’s help in this
balancing act. “He’d come to me,”
Steve says, “and say, ‘Tell your wife
that if Betty calls, we’re in
Canonsburg. If Jackie calls, we’re in
Washington…’”
“I said, ‘I’m not going to be his
secretary,’” Marge recalls.
That same guitar player had one
particularly foul-mouthed girlfriend
who came to watch their show one
night. They had a fight, and the
guitarist stormed out, leaving it up to
the band to drive her home. Along the way, she wouldn’t stop talking, and
cursed up a storm in the process.
When they finally got to her home,
she realized that she didn’t have the
keys. Steve decided there was no way
they were driving her anywhere else, so
he climbed through a window to
unlock the door. He didn’t know she
had a parrot though, and as soon as he
poked his head in, the bird began
swearing at him too, in language even
raunchier than the girl’s. “That’s
enough of that,” he said. So instead,
the band just pushed the girl through
the open window and drove off with a
sigh of relief.
Another time, a band member
called the Puckers at 5 a.m., saying he
was going to be thrown in jail. Earlier
that night, after a few too many
drinks, he had decided it was a good
idea to drive home. Somewhere in the
town of McDonald he got a flat tire.
It didn’t stop him though, and he
simply drove all the way to
Burgettstown on his rim. The road
had been freshly paved, however, and
his car tore up the fresh asphalt. “The
police tracked him down by following
the groove marks all the way to his
front door,” Steve says.
Then there was the time the band
leader forgot he had stuffed about five
pounds of banquet sandwiches in his
accordion case. The next week, the
smell of the stale air escaping the
accordion nearly knocked the band
offstage. “He did the same thing with
cake another time,” Marge remembers.
After 10 years with the Joe Tasz
band, Steve started his own group, the
Royal Trio. He played the drums for a
time, simply because they needed a
drummer. But his heart was with the
sax, so he found a new drummer,
turned the trio into a foursome, and
dubbed them the Vel-Dets. The group
was popular in the area, playing out
two or three nights a week. Pucker still
has a scrapbook full of memorabilia
from those days.
The Vel-Dets specialized in
the Slovenian style of polka,
which Marge describes as
more of a gliding sound
compared to the superupbeat
Polish style. “With
the Slovenian style you can
dance all night. The Polish
style is so fast that you have
to take a break after a
while,” she says.
In 1980, Steve retired
from performing due to
lingering back problems that made
it hard to stand for long periods.
To convince Marge that he really
was quitting, he sold his sax. “I told
her, ‘Now don’t come home one
day and tell me that some band
needs a saxophone player,’” he says
with a laugh.
As time passed, many of his
former band members passed away.
“I was thinking about it, and I’ve
had three or four accordion players,
and they’re all gone. You’re around
them so much it’s like you’re married
to them.”
But the good memories remain,
and today, still going strong in their
mid-70s, Steve and Marge are a fixture
on the local polka scene, attending
dances and visiting regional polka
festivals. Occasionally, Steve will play
a song or two on a borrowed sax
(Marge practices on a button box-style
accordion at home, but never has
played out).
In 2005, Steve took a temporary
step out of his musical retirement
when a friend convinced him to sing
on a CD of polka classics. Though
mainly a sax player, Pucker had done
some singing in the past, and couldn’t
pass up the chance to re-engage with
his polka past. The disc, entitled
“Steve Pucker Sings… Again!” is a
fitting cap to his performing career.
Full of upbeat energy and good cheer
(and a few vocal cameos by Marge),
it’s an audio love letter to a style of
music that’s helped define his life and
to the woman who’s been the love of
his life.
At the bottom of the case, under
the song titles, is a special thanks
that reads, “To Marge Pucker, for
puttin’ up with me for 50 years. How
I love her so!” |
Home Remodeling 2008
