Copper Box Collaboration!

Co-founders of the award-winning band Copper Box will perform with me on October 22, 2026 at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton, WI https://foxcitiespac.com/event/the-accidental-hero/ I am delighted to announce Danny and Michelle Jerabek will add their musical magic to my show, The Accidental Hero, which now includes three original songs I sing.

Our first gig together was April 18, 2026 at the Fergus Falls Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls, MN. In addition to playing throughout the show as a live soundtrack, they played twenty minutes prior to the start. As I stood in the wings enjoying their pre-show music, the hoots and hollers from the crowd made it clear — my two musical friends were already transporting the audience.

That’s the same effect they first had on me. My wife, Mona, and I were vacationing in Door County, WI and stumbled upon Copper Box at the Sister Bay community band shell. Their first song was a fresh take on a Rolling Stones tune, and everything that followed had me captivated — the familiar done interestingly, a few originals, and a parade of musical instruments appearing on stage as miraculously as clowns out of a Volkswagen. The affable, quick-witted front man (Danny) sang, played trumpet, keyboard, accordion, cigar box guitar, a penny whistle, and a gigantic brass sousaphone with the ease of pouring you another drink. Michelle, meanwhile, played saxophone, hollow-body guitar, flute, another guitar, sang backup, and belted out a sultry rendition of “Tell Me Something Good” that would make Chaka Kahn proud.

Meanwhile, the band’s Cheshire-Cat-grinned bass player (Danny’s brother, David) sang the middle of their three-part harmonies, and anchored the rhythm section with a rock-steady drummer. The set even included a personal favorite of mine: Dave Mason’s 1970s mega-hit, “We Just Disagree,” written by Jim Krueger of Manitowoc, WI, my hometown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs7RCTOZS1E&list=RDfs7RCTOZS1E&start_radio=1 When I was six years old, I knew about Jim Krueger’s band, Grease, because two teenage girls on our block talked about it all the time. And when I was in high school, my prom date was Jim Krueger’s first-cousin. Danny’s tribute to the international success of a hometown hero was one of many surprises that night along the bay.

Copper Box played the way I try to perform: all-in, authentic, joyful, and inspired. The people dancing in front of the bandshell ranged in age from kindergarten to great grandparenthood. When Michelle’s tenor sax wailed the uptempo “The Clarinet Polka,” Mona and I could not resist the dance floor. I had moved to New York at 22 to be in show business, and this band had The Unmistakeable It — talent, love pouring from the stage, love bouncing back from the audience. And mystery. Where’d all those instruments come from? Dunno. And how’d they get access to the jukebox in my head? Simply magical.

There is video footage on Youtube of the moment we hit the Copper Box dance floor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdSf58ctV6o  At 3:58 on the video, Danny shouts, “you know you want to!” And at 4:12 you can see me stand and ask Mona to dance (I’m wearing a light grey baseball cap). And at 5:33, there is a close-up of the two of us (much to Mona’s humble chagrin) polka-ing in front of the stage. What are the odds of Copper Box hiring a video crew the same night we first danced to their glorious music? Well, the weighty coincidences between me and the band were just getting started.

As the clock approached the hard-stop of the Sister Bay noise ordinance, and the sun dipped toward the bay, Danny bid us all goodnight in several languages — German, French, Spanish, and, finally, “dobrou noc.”

I turned to Mona, “I need to talk to that guy. I think he’s Czech.”

Yes, Danny Jerabek is Czech, just like me. I told him about my grandfather, Matt Konop from Stangelville, and Danny noted his great grandfather had lived on a farm just a mile away. I thanked Danny for his kind words about Manitowoc’s Jim Krueger, and Danny said Krueger’s surviving brother, Wenzel, was a good friend. I mentioned my show, “The Accidental Hero,” and my annual Czech tour. Danny asked a lot of questions about it and said his dream is to visit the Czech Republic. We connected on Wisconsin sports and a few other topics and promised to stay in touch.

I sent Danny a copy of my book about my grandfather with the inscription: “next year in Domažlice!” A few months later he texted me from Mexico, said how much he was enjoying the book, and how mystified Michelle was to see him reading at the beach. I replied we needed to find a way to work together, and he agreed. But Copper Box is so popular from May to October that we had to wait until last November, in Oshkosh, WI, for them to the see the show and discuss afterward how we might collaborate. A few rehearsals later, we were ready for the gig in Fergus Falls, MN. That evening proved to be greater than the sum of our parts, worthy of more gigs. A few weeks after that, we made good on the inscription about Domažlice that I had written for Danny.

At an Applebee’s in Fergus Falls after the show, Danny and Michelle told me they are both fifth-generation musicians. In Wisconsin, that means a polka lineage, the Central European music brought to America primarily by Polish, German and Bohemian (Czech) immigrants. Michelle is of Polish and German heritage, and played in the polka bands of both her father (The Goodtime Dutchmen) and grandfather (Bill Thull Orchestra). Danny’s father, “Tuba Dan” Jerabek, also had his own band and has hosted a weekly polka radio show for over fifty years. From age eight, Danny was his dad’s on-air sidekick, announcing songs and bands, building an encyclopedic knowledge of polka at the same time he was memorizing his multiplication tables in school. Danny could also play, and fix, just about instrument his dad handed him. And I believe those weekly radio gigs likely honed Danny’s ease at a microphone and gift for banter. https://www.riponpress.com/news/getting-to-know-a-q-a-with-ripon-s-tuba-dan-as-he-celebrates-50/article_27a5b8e6-713a-11eb-870d-47f1953a442e.html

At age ten, Danny filled in on drums for Tuba Dan’s regular drummer who was out on a two-week cruise. By the time the drummer returned, Danny, the pint-sized human metronome, had taken his spot. A few years later — of course at a polka dance — Danny and Michelle fell for each other. And today, their eleven-year-old German/Polish/Bohemian son, Bo, tours with Copper Box, running the merchandise table, playing tambourine, and improving daily on accordion and trumpet. Bo makes it now six generations of musicians, the product of two great Wisconsin polka families. Copper Box is rooted in polka, but not limited by it. The Wisconsin Area Music Industry (WAMI) has honored them with several awards, including Album of the Year; Artist of the Year; Americana, Roots, Classic, Ska Performers of the Year; Folk Rock Band of the Year, and a few others. So they are hardly my little secret.

My grandfather grew up when polka was king, the “happy music” played in tavern ballrooms dotted across Northeastern Wisconsin like the many dairies that transformed the morning’s milk into cheese. When radio arrived in the 1920s, polka became an on-air staple of farm life, with one station famously beginning each broadcast day with the familiar sound of milk spraying from a teat into a tin bucket, and a voice-over promising: cows that listen to polka produce more milk. Polka was as much my grandfather’s music as tap beer was his drink of choice.

However, I didn’t like polka when I was a kid. I was all about rock and roll, and polka seemed hopelessly square, the music of old people and church picnics. But the first summer after my move to New York City, a fetching young women pointed out a notice in a New York newspaper for a polka festival in rural New Jersey. “Why yes,” I replied, “I do know how to polka. You know, it is Wisconsin’s state dance.” She and I rode a bus from Manhattan’s Port Authority Station to a little town near the Delaware River and my date (now wife) and I became dance floor sensations, the youngest couple by at least 20 years.

Thus began my Polka Awakening, an embrace of my people’s roots music, our version of Cajun, blue grass, the blues, or Tejano. At our wedding reception in New York, Mona and I danced to The Beer Barrel Polka, a song played at Lambeau Field before the fourth quarter at every Green Bay Packers game. And we spent our honeymoon in Door County, just a few miles from where we would stumble upon Copper Box decades later. On our visits back to Wisconsin from the East Coast, Mona and I would search for polka bands. At the Manitowoc County Fair Grounds in the early 1990s, we stumbled across a hilarious polka/rock novelty group called The Happy Schnapps Combo. When I bought their CD after the show, I learned the band was fronted by Manitowoc’s favorite musical son, Jim Krueger.

Krueger had tired of life on the road as an international rock star, and moved home to Manitowoc to be with family and friends. That day at the fairgrounds, the song that electrified the crowd, and prompted me to buy their CD, was Krueger’s now-famous Green Bay Packers polka anthem, Da Bears Still Suck. Check it out, as the man sure could write a hook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFAvrmbSXg  But, in all fairness, the founder and owner of the Chicago Bears, George “Papa Bear” Halas, was 100% Czech. And Papa Bear helped save the Packers from bankruptcy. So “Da Bears” might not totally suck (and I hope I don’t lose my Wisconsin Card for admitting that).

However, the fairgrounds gig was the first and only time I would ever see Jim Krueger perform, as he died in 1993, at the tender age of 43. That’s why Danny’s tribute in Sister Bay was so touching. Later, I found out Copper Box performs every year at a tavern owed by Jim Krueger’s brother. If you find yourself in Manitowoc, WI, stop in at Wenzel’s Perfect World and check out the Jim Krueger memorabilia.

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Just a few weeks ago, Danny, Michelle, and I met in the main square of Domažlice, Czech Republic. It was their first trip to Bohemia, while I was there for my 12th annual Czech tour. Danny had packed a small button box accordion and played it prior to my Domažlice show on May 5, 2026, the 81st anniversary of Domažlice’s liberation. As Danny played, I was just a few feet away from his left shoulder, sitting on a folding chair in the narrow stage-left wing, my knees pulled up near my chin so the audience couldn’t see my shoes sticking out from underneath the curtain. Domažlice is the city all four of my grandpa’s grandparents had left for their journey to Wisconsin; it was also the city where grandpa rather remarkably was sent by the US Army to lead the advance party of troops to liberate Czechoslovakia on the last week of the war. And just like in Fergus Falls, Danny’s music got the Domažlice audience in the perfect mood for grandpa’s story.

My grandpa’s super-power at the end of the war was his Czech tongue, the only language they spoke back on the farm. His grandparents had told him, in Czech, many of the same fairytales and bedtime stories that the Domažlice Czechs who paraded him on their shoulders had heard from their grandparents. The townspeople couldn’t believe their good fortune, liberated by an American they celebrated as “one of our own!” The smile on grandpa’s face in the photograph above is of a man who finally learned the truth about his heritage: he was from a land of castles and cathedrals, magnificent beer, and toe-tapping music. As Danny played the accordion for the audience prior to my show, he grinned and communicated in the language the Czechs use at all special occasions: music.

The theater in Domažlice is located mere steps from where grandpa was paraded as a hero. It is a performance space as dear to me as Carnegie Hall is to New Yorkers. At the conclusion of the show that night in Domažlice, the audience leapt to its feet and began clapping and stomping rhythmically, in unison, like Italians at the opera. I was so happy Danny and Michelle were in the room too, feeling the love. Later that night, at a celebration in the main square, they both vowed to return next year, to perform with me, just as we had two weeks earlier in Fergus Falls, and just like we will on October 22, 2026 in Appleton, WI.

They named their band “Copper Box” because copper is a great conductor of energy and the “box,” or “squeezebox,” generates this energy. I am so grateful to team with this amazing duo, my dear friends, the founders of my favorite band.