Someone Else's Chicago

He became curious, then hooked. "Polka opened up the city for me," he says. "I found some of my best stuff in thrift shops in Mexican neighborhoods. Because when the older Polish people who still lived there, when they died, their stuff goes to the thrift shop, and nobody in the neighborhood wants it." Why did he want it? "Partly it was a childhood ethnic connection, but partly it was something else." Rock was beginning to feel like a rut, and he wanted to find a roots music in which he could immerse himself. "Iggy Pop once said something like, 'I gotta find my own blues,' and I felt the same way. I couldn't see myself doing it with blues or jazz, and I had this Eastern European background, so I got into polka. And then I discovered that it was good. I said, 'This is my blues.'"

Chicago is not only a big city but a long one. The three-stop itinerary for Saturday night calls for 62 miles of driving. Hedeker has a gig tonight, so I have no guide. After dinner, I head southeast on the interstate almost all the way to Indiana. Down there on the East Side, Chicago's starkest quarter, truncated slices of neighborhood are wedged between wide stretches of industrial landscape, much of it going back to prairie. I am on my way to the Club 505, which faces train tracks and a vast Ford assembly plant. Inside the club, there is a largish rectangular room for bands and dancing, also a darker barroom featuring a jukebox stocked with Al Martino, Santo and Johnny, and the Ampol Aires' "Hot Pants Polka." This is Hegewisch, a neighborhood named for a 19th-century industrialist whose company built rolling stock for the railroads. It lies 20 miles southeast of the Loop, but still within the city limits. Rarely if ever has any booster urged visitors to the city to make their way to Hegewisch, but if you want to hear accordion music in its native habitat, try the Club 505 on a live polka night.

The Ampol Aires are playing tonight. The band has been around for half a century (as its pitch-perfectly '50s name will attest), and with fewer personnel changes than you might expect. Uniformed in dark blue pants and blue-and-white checked short-sleeve shirts, the six band members overspill the narrow raised stage as they crank out a pleasingly rattletrap sound. They lope and clunk with easy precision, doubled horn lines weaving confidently over and under the melody of "Honky Tonk Polka," "Stevens Point Oberek," "Sparkling Eyes," one brisk tune after the next. Tom Kula, a founding member of the band, serves as frontman. His concertina playing, like his singing and his teasing between-song patter, balances just enough roughness against just enough lilt.

The Saturday night crowd is thin. Where is everybody? Home with a video, out doing something more up to date, at the casinos in nearby Gary and Hammond -- or maybe they are just resting up for Sunday, the big day for polka exertions in banquet halls and Elks lodges. Some idlers trickle in from the bar, and a few dedicated polka people do show up. Most are old-timers: a trim, straight-backed lady named Janina; a codger in an outdated suit who gets up to push Janina around the dance floor with boozy courtliness; a guy with a face straight from the old country who waits his turn and then takes Janina for a jolting, stamping spin on a fast number.

But not everyone is an old-timer. Dan and Jen, a young married couple from the southwest suburbs whose on-the-beat timing and precise moves suggest that they have taken lessons, swing around the floor with long-stepping formality on an oberek (an up-tempo waltz) while an older couple provides counterpoint with a loose, busy shuffle that manages to be in time without ever being anywhere near the beat. Two little boys, one white and one black, run around and have a terrific time, interrupting a game of Little Pig to briefly polka together. Their flashing-lights sneakers seem to wink on and off in 2/4 time.

The band knows its business, the Club 505 feels extra-cozy when you picture the dark acreage of overgrown rail spurs and silent industrial buildings that begins across the street, and American currency will get you a beer -- so all seems good here. But those few in attendance cannot bring the room fully to life. As one of the Ampol Aires puts it during a break from the bandstand, "This is basically a paid practice for us." Tomorrow they will play a banquet hall packed with a sizable crowd; tonight, the huff and grind of Tom Kula's concertina sounds a little forlorn, bouncing off the walls of the half-empty club.

I get in the car and head back toward the heart of the city. Exiting the expressway, I roll past the big turreted prison at 26th and California and pass under a banner that says "Welcome to Little Village." This is one of the neighborhoods where Hedeker shopped for records in thrift stores. Formerly Polish and Czech, it has been almost entirely Mexican for more than a generation. Bungalows and walkups, immigrants and aspiration -- it hasn't changed much. Neither has its music. Polkas and waltzes suffuse Mexican music, descending in part from 19th-century musical styles brought by the French to their one-time colonial possession and to what is now Texas by Germans and Czechs who settled there.

At Los Globos, a rambling no-frills barn of a dance hall in Little Village, I walk past the impassive tough guys minding the door and into a blast of Mexican polka. Onstage, wreathed in smoke-machine smoke, a band called Pensamiento Negro is working hard. Its music, and that of other local bands playing tonight, sounds like a blend of traditional ranchera genres -- norteno, banda, mariachi -- but punchier, giddier, like the buzz from drinking too much champagne too quickly. The hoarse, harmonizing singers race one another to the end of the chorus, keyboards do most of the work of a horn section, and drummers define the beat with bass drum, cowbell, and a high-hat played caveman fashion by holding the detached top cymbal in one hand and bashing it down on the lower one, which is fixed to the bass drum's frame. Nobody is playing accordion at the moment, but an accordion would fit right in, and I have hopes.

People in the United States know this music as Durango-style; back in Durango, in northern Mexico, it is known as Chicago-style. More urban-cowboy disco than folk music, it has lately been winning an ever-larger following. Grupo Montez de Durango, a Chicago-based band with roots in Durango, has led the way to nationwide prominence with hits on the Latin music charts, and local bands in Chicago seek to follow it to the big time.

There is no celebrated out-of-town band to pack the house at Los Globos tonight, but even so a good turnout of perhaps 300 is on hand, mostly young and Mexican. The men, like the bands, wear cowboy hats, dress shirts, new jeans and boots; the women wear dresses or tight pants, heels, plenty of makeup. The dance of the moment is an appealingly frantic, hip-swaying, ultra-close partner dance called the "Pasito Duranguense," the Durango Step. It seems a little goofy at first, but it looks like fun, and even the most initially skeptical people discover that once you start you can't stop. It has been catching on across the United States, thanks in great part to the success of Grupo Montez.

I have been keeping an eye on a hatless fellow in a white suit whose recently shaven head makes him easy to spot in the crowd. He came in alone and has been hanging on the sidelines among minky-mustached young men, many of them not much more than 5 feet tall if you subtract boots and headgear, who drink beer and scan the room under their hat brims. I lose sight of White Suit for a while and then he reappears, doing a do-si-do step with a game-looking young woman with long blond hair. During the next tune, a smeary waltz, the dancers all do a jerk-leg hesitation step. White Suit and his partner perform a hitch so pronounced that they appear to be playing freeze tag on the crowded floor. Other dancers, impressed, clear away from them and they find themselves at center stage: a "Saturday Night Fever" moment, white suit and all.

I become aware that while I've been watching the dancers I have been hearing a squeezebox. Turning back to the band, I see that one of the keyboard players has produced a white, red and green button accordion, which he manipulates enthusiastically while singing harmony, now and then dropping one hand to add a blast from his keyboard. At least to my ear, the accordion cuts through the clamor like a soulful singer; all the other sound seems to coalesce around it. People often compare a band playing in the Chicago-Durango style to a calliope, but to me it sounds like an outsize accordion played by a tireless, many-handed, bibulous giant. After a couple more tunes, Pensamiento Negro's accordion goes back into its case, but the ghost of the instrument's voice stays in the air.