Adrianne: This pitch comes to us by way of our old friends and former coworkers, one of whom I married — Sam — and the other one is Rhondo. Sam and Rhondo are both filmmakers and they were telling me about this video shoot that they went on in Indianapolis. And this was back when we were all working for a little website called the verge which is a publication for people who like smartphones.

Billy: And other things.

Adrianne: The fact that it was that we were all working at this nerd website is kind of relevant to this story. So Sam and Rhondo wrap after a long day of shooting, they’re walking around, they go into a bar off the street and there’s this band playing.

Sam: [00:00:53] I remember that the person we interviewed, at the end of the interview I usually ask the locals where we should get dinner or whatever. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the person we interviewed said that there were there were really good shows that this one bar or beer hall or whatever.

Rhondo: We went to this bar and there was a polka band playing.

Like I don’t even like polka music. It’s not like, I don’t hate it. But you had to admit these guys shredded right?

Sam: Yeah I mean sometimes when you stumble into a bar in a random place like you’re not expecting great music necessarily, but yeah we were both kind of blown away by how talented these musicians were.

Rhondo: They were all virtuosos.

Sam: And they all looked like cool dads.

Rhondo: Yeah.

Adrianne: So the band is called Brave Combo and Sam and Rhondo started talking to one of the band members afterward and he gives them a business card.

Billy: Nice.

Adrianne: The band is called Brave Combo. And the website for the band was brave.com/bo.

Regina: Wow.

Billy: They have brave.com

Regina: How did they get brave.com?

Adrianne: Okay. So this is why I said this is not the kind of question that like just anybody would probably like really care about. But um as a tech reporter you’re kind of like, wow, that’s like a really good domain name. It’s one word, it’s in the dictionary, it’s probably something that people thought of in the first waves of naming companies after the internet got started.

So they actually ask this guy if Pixar had tried to buy it for the movie Brave, which had come out a little bit earlier and he says yeah, Pixar tried to buy it, but their offer wasn’t worth it so we turned them down.

Billy: Ah man, this is the most rock and roll polka band I’ve ever heard of.

Adrianne: Extremely rock and roll.

Sam: So weird side note. We were under the impression that they were this unknown small town local band. But it turns out, I think we were looking them up later, and it turns out that they were actually in the Simpsons. So not only not only was a song by them in the Simpsons, but the band was actually animated on a stage in the kind of in the background.

Adrianne: Brave Combo has also won two Grammys, collaborated with David Byrne, and done a bunch of TV shows. And Bob Dylan covered one of their polka arrangements of a Christmas song.

Rhondo: I think they are a polka band with credibility. But like it’s like nobody really likes polka So even like the best polka bands nobody knows.

Sam: But the plot thickens because when we were telling you about this recently, I looked up brave.com and now it is owned by some other company.

Adrianne: You can go to brave dot com now.

Billy: Okay Oh it’s the browser Brave. Your browser of choice.

Adrianne: Brave the web browser, which is made by a San Francisco company.

Regina: So did they make a bunch of money? How did this happen?

Adrianne: Well I asked Sam and Rhondo what they would want to know, and Rhondo said he didn’t care. Sam said:

Sam: I want to know, first of all, if they sold it or if something else happened.

Adrianne: Like they forgot to renew it and then Brave browser snatched it up.

Sam: Right. And if they did sell it, how much they sold it for, and why they finally decided the time was right.

Adrianne: I would like to know what Pixar’s original offer was that they sneered at.

Sam: I’d like to know if there actually was an offer from Pixar, I’m not convinced there was.

Adrianne: Confirm that, right. OK. We’re going to look into this and see if we can talk to Brave Combo and see if they’ll give us a scoop. Thank you both.

Sam: [00:05:42] Thank you.

Rhondo: Thanks.

Regina: Coming up: Lots of cats.

Adrianne: I have some answers. And I have listened to a lot of polka.

John: Rad.

Billy: How are you feeling?

Adrianne: Upbeat.

Billy: Really. Okay.

Regina: Weird.

John: Have you learned the accordion?

Adrianne: I learned the accordion.

Regina: Did you change your outfits?

John: She’s in lederhosen right now.

Adrianne: So none of that happened. I did go snooping around on this story about Brave Combo and their website The first thing I did was to see if there was any information on the record about the sale, because sometimes domain names sales get reported. Maybe because the brokers want people to know how much they’re going for in order to encourage more activity in the market or whatever. So I emailed Ron Jackson, who is the editor of Domain Name Journal. That is a trade publication that tracks domain names sales.

John: Who reads Domain Name Journal? Who is this for?

Adrianne: Oh who knows.

Billy: It’s a whole industry.

Regina: I was wondering that too.

Adrianne: Online marketers, domain buyers and sellers, people who are interested in buying domains and want to know how much they might have to pay for it, people who are interested in selling.

So I asked Ron if he could take a stab at how much Brave.com would have been worth. And he said, quote, “Guesses are meaningless when it comes to domains. There are too many variables involved for an appraisal to mean anything in my opinion. For example is anyone interested in buying that specific domain name at this point? If they are how badly do they want it? How big is the budget? From the owner’s side, how much have they invested in the name? How much do they need money at that point in time? How likely are they to ever get another offer on the domain? These are all unknown factors to someone making an appraisal. That’s why you see such wildly varying prices for domains that would otherwise seem to be similar.”

In other words the price is really personal. So I just went straight to the source and called the band themselves.

Lori: I have to say this is my first podcast.

Adrianne: That’s Lori Young She’s worked for Brave Combo for 22 years.

Lori: The domain was purchased in 1995. Brave Combo had the good fortune tha one of their fans just happened to also be one of the bandmate’s, I believe college roommates, and he was a internet pioneer kind of guy. He’s still does software production stuff, but back then he bought Brave.com. He also used to own butterfly.net. So Brave Combo and, well David actually was technically I think the original owner of it, but we owned it the entire time we had it until we let it go.

Adrianne: Do you remember how much it cost in 1995?

Lori: Oh probably whatever network solutions was charging. $35 or $50 you know whatever it was. It was brand new I mean it was literally you know it was 1995, it was just, yeehaw, you’d buy anything you could get your hands on.

Billy: It’s also worth pointing out that not only was their fan an early internet pioneer but this is like really early to take this kind of approach to a domain, where you have, you’re using the the.com part and the S. That didn’t really start until del.icio.us, I think. So that’s like 2003 or something. So in 1995 to have a clever domain where you’re using the the dot part, I mean that’s pretty ahead of the game I’ve got to say.

Adrianne: Definitely The band also had a listserv at this point which is pretty cool. So they were pretty tech savvy all around. And this guy David who bought the domain, after a couple of years he decides he doesn’t want to keep up the website anymore. So Lori takes it over in 1997 and she doesn’t have a computer so she goes to her father’s house once a week to use his. And every once in a while someone would reach out asking to buy the name.

Lori: Every once in a while we would get an offer from or an inquiry. I remember one that stood out was Adventure magazine, and they made an offer. But back in that time, it wasn’t sufficient, and it wasn’t enough to say we’re going to give this thing up that we’re actually using. And then I kind of thought maybe when the movie Brave came out for Disney that we would get an inquiry. We did not.

They were smart enough to just go “oh, we’ll just get bravethemovie” or something like that.

Adrianne: So either Sam and Rhondo had misremembered the conversation or the person they were talking to didn’t have the right information. Either way, no offer.

John: That’s really surprising.

Billy: That actually makes sense to me because websites aren’t really that important for movies.

Regina: Right.

Lori: It was more about, not about money, more about, this is ours and we are using this as an advertising thing.

Adrianne: How did you feel about giving up the name? Was there any part of you that wanted to hang on to it?

Lori: Little bit. Like you said, it is a top tier name. It is a single word. It was a little bit of a prestige thing. But it’s Carl’s, it’s not mine.

Adrianne: Carl Finch is the founder and owner of Brave Combo.

Carl: Hello? Can you hear me?

Adrianne: He lives in Denton, Texas and he plays accordion, keys, guitar, and sings. He also has two dogs and 11 cats which he and his wife rescued at various places and times.

Adrianne: Some people would say that’s a lot of cats.

Carl: I would say that’s a lot of cats.

Adrianne: Carl started Brave Combo 40 years ago in 1979.

Carl: We wanted to play polka music because it was the least fashionable, most hated music from the hip mainstream. It was the music that was always used to poke fun at people. And we wanted the name to reflect that. And so we knew we were going to be playing polkas in rock and roll clubs, and so that’s where the name brave came from. And then we wanted to take the squarest term for a band, and at the time “combo” was like something your parents would ask you, like, “how are things with your little combo?” So that was kind of a parents’ term. And so Brave Combo kind of fit.

Adrianne: So polka I would not have been able to define polka for you before this, but polka is a style of folk music. It is originally from the Czech Republic and can now be found all over Europe, North America, even South America, with each region giving the music a different spin. It’s very high energy and you’re supposed to party to it and dance to it.

This is a classic polka. It was originally a Czech song that has been adapted over and over again and it’s called The Beer Barrel Polka. And this version I found on SoundCloud by a band called Diet Polka.

John: God, being a tuba player in a polka band seems great.

Adrianne: Why is that?

John: I mean, listen to it.

Adrianne: All right. So you kind of get the idea from that one. That’s the Beer Barrel Polka. And then this is one of Brave Combos polkas. This is a cover of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.

John: You said they were founded in 1979?

Adrianne: That’s right.

John: So they were doing like polka covers before Weird Al.

Adrianne: Yeah. Here is another one that you probably recognize. This is from a Brave Combo show.

John: Ooh a moody minor version of the chicken dance.

Adrianne: Anyway so you get the idea of polka. It’s really boisterous, and their style of it is like a little more rock and roll, a little bit like punk almost.

They start playing this polka music, they’re playing rock clubs, and they actually started to get really popular like, right away. they play Irving Plaza the first time they come to New York. If you don’t know New York, that’s a huge venue. They’re in Rolling Stone. The hipsters that Carl was sneering at love them.

Carl: I’m always curious and I insist on satisfying my curiosity. And I wondered what would happen if a band played polkas in a rock club. That’s it, period. It’s all I wanted to find out and it literally exploded within the first two weeks of us performing. We were forced into the mainstream.

Adrianne: And then actual polka fans started to notice them.

Carl: After a year, about a year, the polka audience who we really weren’t even trying to appeal to started paying attention. And then that led us to well, what if we learn Polish style, German style, Slovenian style, Czech style, Italian style, chicken scratch style, tejano style. So we started learning all kinds of polkas and we started getting invited to play all these disparate polka events around the well around the world.

Adrianne: So Brave Combos fans are not only international, they’re super dedicated. And Carl told me there was basically a group of about 25 fans who he described as quote “tech heads” who manage their online presence.

Carl: They were doing lots of stuff for us. They were listening to all of our music and transcribing all the lyrics and organizing everything and people were doing discographies for us and histories of the gigs, you know, putting everything in order.

Adrianne: Not everyone in the band was convinced that this whole website thing was worth it but Carl thought it was really cool.

Carl: Oh man I remember being on stage in the early days. You do you do http, colon, forward slash forward slash. We’re announcing this to a crowd of hundreds of drunk people. Oh my God, we took this so seriously.

John: I distinctly remember I guess I must’ve been 8 at the time. Toystory.com was the first website that I’d ever been to and I remember the commercial would come on and I’d try to scrawl the http colon slash slash www dot toy story.com onto like a note pad. Beause it was the first time I had seen one of these go by on TV.

Billy: I’m imagining you in front of a PC with your tongue sticking out, like looking at the keys.

Adrianne: Like, where’s the H?

Carl: It was pretty exciting You know we had our own website and stuff and people could check it out. But it seemed pretty, looking back on it, it was pretty clunky.

Adrianne: And I’m guessing that at some point you started to get some outreach from
people who wanted to buy the name.

Carl: Yeah. After about 10 years we started getting lots of people. It was a pretty much a weekly thing and the offers were never enticing until about five years ago. And then this company came through with a substantial offer and then we asked them to double it.

Adrianne: So the band had also registered BraveCombo.com at one point but they forgot to renew it and it got snatched up by squatters. So Carl told the buyer, all right, if you can get us that domain name back too, you have a deal.

Carl: Which was not cheap for them either. Just that alone was $5,000, just to get our old name back that nobody wanted.

Adrianne: So I got the sense that Carl wouldn’t have sold the name to just anybody. He’s pretty principled about who he’ll take money from. He told me that once the Tracey Ullman show wanted Brave Combo to play in a sketch and they asked to read the script and decided they weren’t comfortable with it because it was a sketch about a Polish wedding and they felt like it was too stereotypical. He also told me that he turned down a sponsorship for Japanese ramen because he’s a vegetarian and it had meat in it.

But this software company that offered money for the domain and the price was right, he thought they seemed all right. And I’m actually a user of Brave. It’s a browser that blocks ads and does some other things. It’s my main browser on my phone, I use it sometimes on my computer too. It was started by Brandon Eich who is the cofounder of Mozilla which makes the Firefox browser. So it’s probably you know relatively okay on this scale on the spectrum of evil corporations.

But here is the disappointing part: Carl did not want to tell me how much he got for brave.com.

Regina: Oh no.

Adrianne: Do you want to say how much it was?

Carl: Right. I better not. I probably shouldn’t.

Adrianne: I think you said it was on par with an advance for an album?

Carl: Yeah I could probably have not worked for a year.

Adrianne: Carl had actually bought the band from the other members a few years ago so it was just up to him. It was his decision alone

Regina: How do you buy a band?

Adrianne: My impression from him and from Lori was that the band has been around for 40 freaking years. Carl is still the main force behind the band and always has been. And it’s gotten to the point where it’s kinda like he runs the band and then when they have shows and recordings, he hires the musicians and he’s got like a stable of people that he works with.

John: So Brave Combo is like an idea, a state of mind.

Carl: Well as it turns out, I bought the band from everyone and everything about five years ago and then about a year after that is when we were contacted. So at the time I owned everything. But everybody was still making money, I mean it wasn’t like the only thing that people were depending on with the band, and people were moving on and doing other things. And I was hiring musicians at that point. I was just going and hiring people who had been in the band to play in the band, and I was able to just make the decision without having to consult everybody. Being the control freak that I am, this is where I was wanting to always be anyway.

Billy: So he didn’t say whether they bought it like with cash or equity.

Adrianne: I seriously doubt it was equity, I think it was cash.

Regina: He said “I didn’t have to work for a year.” You can’t take work off for equity.

Adrianne: I’m going to guess like annual incomes, and also he pegged it to the advance of an album, I’m going to guess that’s like $50K, $50 to $80K. Originally I thought, oh brave.com, it’s such an amazing domain. There must be so many people willing to pay so much money for it. But as I kind of went on and I realized it’s not really, it’s like a thin order book, is that what they say? The the demand and supply are just not that thick. There’s not that many players. So it’s hard to set a really high price.

Billy: Well we know that they paid $5000 for the squatted BraveCombo.com domain.

Adrianne: We don’t exactly. It’s possible that that’s that was their initial asking price and that they went down from there.

John: Probably not worth speculating this hard

Adrianne: Anyway I did want to hear more about the economics of being a full time musician and how that might’ve played into the decision to sell the domain or at least been a contrast to it.

Adrianne: You know people work so hard at music, and I mean with Brave Combo it seems like you’ve had a lot of success. Is it like now you’re in the money? Now you’re on easy street?

Carl: Oh man. I am on easy street.

Adrianne: Okay so he was being sarcastic obviously but he told me the internet has been a real mixed blessing for musicians. He just recorded an English version of this Romanian song that he really loves and he’s really excited to be able to put that and have it be the first English version on YouTube. And the idea that people in Romania really loved the song will listen to it. At the same time the internet has led to this explosion of music which makes it really hard to break through the cacophony and it has also pushed the prices for music way down.

Carl: Live music venues, they’ve never sucked more. All clubs are struggling. All people who cater to musicians, recording studios, they’re all suffering because people can make horrible sounding recordings at home with their their tech gear they don’t know how to work rather than paying money, because they’re not making any money. The whole internet has spawned this whole world of free music. The idea of free music has made it really hard for bands to make any money. We had some nights where we were selling like $4,000 a night just of CDs. We went through a few years of this insane thing and now no one will even download a CD because you can stream any song you want. So I don’t know where this is going, I feel really lucky that our path is somewhat plotted and I’m given a lot of artistic freedom because I have a large enough fan base that will support me.

Adrianne: He has so much faith in his fan base that he’s about to release a song that he thinks will be very controversial.

Regina: Ooh.

Carl: I mean I’m I’m just finishing 10 songs and one of them is so radical, it’s going to have thousands of people hating me. It really is. I’m about to step into this so deep, that if the name of Brave Combo skyrockets it’s going to be from controversy at this point. And I’m finishing the song tomorrow. I wish I could tell you what it is. And you would gasp if I told you.

Billy: Does he have the pee tape and made a music video out of it? What is it? What is he sitting on?

Adrianne: Okay I don’t know if it’s the pee tape, I have not listened to it, but I do have it. He wasn’t done with it when we spoke but he said to me afterward.

Should we listen to it? The title of the song is Star Spangled Banner.

Regina: Oh my God.

Billy: Oh yes.

Regina: Whoa. I’m sorry. What is this?

John: Is this a a mashup, and we don’t know the other song?

Adrianne: It is. So he told me a little more information about it in the email.

The music is The Song of the Volga Boatmen, a very popular well-known Russian folk song.

John: I see.

Adrianne: “Since President Putin is pretty much running the country, I thought we should make some practical changes so the new USA anthem would make more sense.”

John: You weren’t far off with the pee tape.

Billy: I get it now.

Regina: Oh got it. Got it. Yeah honestly the pee tape turns out to be very relevant.

Billy: I knew it was a shot at the big man.

Adrianne: So that was great.

Still I was kind of bummed that Carl didn’t tell us how much he sold brave.com for.

Carl: Are you disappointed that I didn’t tell you a number.

Adrianne: I think people would like to hear the number but I also respect your privacy.

Carl: Okay. Well I apologize.

Adrianne: But he did tell me another number.

Carl: All right. Guess what I’m going to do right now?

Adrianne: Play music? Pet a cat?

Carl: Clean litter boxes You didn’t ask how many litter boxes we have.

Adrianne: How many litter boxes do you have?

Carl: Okay let’s see. One, two, three.

Adrianne: This is a number I do want to know

Carl: I’ll say eight.

And not a big house.

John: Underunderstood is produced by Adrianne Jeffries, Regina Dellea, Billy Disney, and me, John Lagomarsino.

Adrianne: For a list of all songs by Brave Combo and others in this episode check out our show notes. You can find them on our website underunderstood.com or inside your podcast app.

Billy: We hope you liked the show. We are @underunderstood on Twitter and Instagram, our website is underunderstood.com. We have transcripts links Everything we talk about is on there in detail, underunderstood.com.

John: And this is important, if you have a burning question that the internet can’t answer, send it to us at hello@underunderstood.com. We might look into it.

Regina: Thanks for listening We’ll be back next week

Transcript Raw

Adrianne: This pitch comes to us by way of our old friends and former coworkers, one of whom I married — Sam — and the other one is Rhondo. Sam and Rhondo are both filmmakers and they were telling me about this video shoot that they went on in Indianapolis. And this was back when we were all working for a little website called the verge which is a publication for people who like smartphones.

Billy: And other things

Adrianne: The fact that it was that we were all working at this nerd website is kind of relevant to this story. So Sam and Rhondo wrap after a long day of shooting, they’re walking around, they go into a bar off the street and there’s this band playing.

Sam: [00:00:53] I remember that the person we interviewed, at the end of the interview I usually ask the locals where we should get dinner or whatever. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the person we interviewed said that there were there were really good shows that this one bar or beer hall or whatever.

Rhondo: We went to this bar and there was a polka band playing.

Like I don’t even like polka music. It’s not like, I don’t hate it. But you had to admit these guys shredded right?

Sam: Yeah I mean sometimes when you stumble into a bar in a random place like you’re not expecting great music necessarily, but yeah we were both kind of blown away by how talented these musicians were.

Rhondo: They were all virtuousos.

Sam: And they all looked like cool dads.

Rhondo: Yeah.

Adrianne: So the band is called Brave Combo and Sam and Rhondo started talking to one of the band members afterward and he gives them a business card.

Billy: Nice.

Adrianne: The band is called Brave Combo. And the website for the band was brave.com/bo.

Regina: Wow.

Billy: They have brave.com

Regina: How did they get brave.com?

Adrianne: Okay. So this is why I said this is not the kind of question that like just anybody would probably like really care about. But um as a tech reporter you’re kind of like, wow, that’s like a really good domain name. It’s one word, it’s in the dictionary, it’s probably something that people thought of in the first waves of naming companies after the internet got started.

So they actually ask this guy if Pixar had tried to buy it for the movie Brave, which had come out a little bit earlier and he says yeah, Pixar tried to buy it, but their offer wasn’t worth it so we turned them down.

Billy: Ah man, this is the most rock and roll polka band I’ve ever heard of.

Adrianne: Extremely rock and roll.

Sam: So weird side note. We were under the impression that they were this unknown small town local band. But it turns out, I think we were looking them up later, and it turns out that they were actually in the Simpsons. So not only not only was a song by them in the Simpsons, but the band was actually animated on a stage in the kind of in the background.

Adrianne: Brave Combo has also won two Grammys, collaborated with David Byrne, and done a bunch of TV shows. And Bob Dylan covered one of their polka arrangements of a Christmas song.

Rhondo: I think they are a polka band with credibility. But like it’s like nobody really likes polka So even like the best polka bands nobody knows.

Sam: But the plot thickens because when we were telling you about this recently, I looked up brave.com and now it is owned by some other company.

Adrianne: You can go to brave dot com now.

Billy: Okay Oh it’s the browser Brave. Your browser of choice.

Adrianne: Brave the web browser, which is made by a San Francisco company.

Regina: So did they make a bunch of money? How did this happen?

Adrianne: Well I asked Sam and Rhondo what they would want to know, and Rhondo said he didn’t care. Sam said:

Sam: I want to know, first of all, if they sold it or if something else happened.

Adrianne: Like they forgot to renew it and then Brave browser snatched it up.

Sam: Right. And if they did sell it, how much they sold it for, and why they finally decided the time was right.

Adrianne: I would like to know what Pixar’s original offer was that they sneered at.

Sam: I’d like to know if there actually was an offer from Pixar, I’m not convinced there was.

Adrianne: Confirm that, right. OK. We’re going to look into this and see if we can talk to Brave Combo and see if they’ll give us a scoop. Thank you both.

Sam: [00:05:42] Thank you.

Rhondo: Thanks.

Regina: Coming up: Lots of cats.

Adrianne: I have some answers. And I have listened to a lot of polka.

John: Rad.

Billy: How are you feeling?

Adrianne: Upbeat.

Billy: Really. Okay.

Regina: Weird.

John: Have you learned the accordion?

Adrianne: I learned the accordion.

Regina: Did you change your outfits?

John: She’s in lederhosen right now.

Adrianne: So none of that happened. I did go snooping around on this story about Brave Combo and their website The first thing I did was to see if there was any information on the record about the sale, because sometimes domain names sales get reported. Maybe because the brokers want people to know how much they’re going for in order to encourage more activity in the market or whatever. So I emailed Ron Jackson, who is the editor of Domain Name Journal. That is a trade publication that tracks domain names sales.

John: Who reads Domain Name Journal? Who is this for?

Adrianne: Oh who knows.

Billy: It’s a whole industry.

Regina: I was wondering that too.

Adrianne: Online marketers, domain buyers and sellers, people who are interested in buying domains and want to know how much they might have to pay for it, people who are interested in selling.

So I asked Ron if he could take a stab at how much Brave.com would have been worth. And he said, quote, “Guesses are meaningless when it comes to domains. There are too many variables involved for an appraisal to mean anything in my opinion. For example is anyone interested in buying that specific domain name at this point? If they are how badly do they want it? How big is the budget? From the owner’s side, how much have they invested in the name? How much do they need money at that point in time? How likely are they to ever get another offer on the domain? These are all unknown factors to someone making an appraisal. That’s why you see such wildly varying prices for domains that would otherwise seem to be similar.”

In other words the price is really personal. So I just went straight to the source and called the band themselves.

Lori: I have to say this is my first podcast.

Adrianne: That’s Lori Young She’s worked for Brave Combo for 22 years.

Lori: The domain was purchased in 1995. Brave Combo had the good fortune tha one of their fans just happened to also be one of the bandmate’s, I believe college roommates, and he was a internet pioneer kind of guy. He’s still does software production stuff, but back then he bought Brave.com. He also used to own butterfly.net. So Brave Combo and, well David actually was technically I think the original owner of it, but we owned it the entire time we had it until we let it go.

Adrianne: Do you remember how much it cost in 1995?

Lori: Oh probably whatever network solutions was charging. $35 or $50 you know whatever it was. It was brand new I mean it was literally you know it was 1995, it was just, yeehaw, you’d buy anything you could get your hands on.

Billy: It’s also worth pointing out that not only was their fan an early internet pioneer but this is like really early to take this kind of approach to a domain, where you have, you’re using the the.com part and the S. That didn’t really start until del.icio.us, I think. So that’s like 2003 or something. So in 1995 to have a clever domain where you’re using the the dot part, I mean that’s pretty ahead of the game I’ve got to say.

Adrianne: Definitely The band also had a listserv at this point which is pretty cool. So they were pretty tech savvy all around. And this guy David who bought the domain, after a couple of years he decides he doesn’t want to keep up the website anymore. So Lori takes it over in 1997 and she doesn’t have a computer so she goes to her father’s house once a week to use his. And every once in a while someone would reach out asking to buy the name.

Lori: Every once in a while we would get an offer from or an inquiry. I remember one that stood out was Adventure magazine, and they made an offer. But back in that time, it wasn’t sufficient, and it wasn’t enough to say we’re going to give this thing up that we’re actually using. And then I kind of thought maybe when the movie Brave came out for Disney that we would get an inquiry. We did not.

They were smart enough to just go “oh, we’ll just get bravethemovie” or something like that.

Adrianne: So either Sam and Rhondo had misremembered the conversation or the person they were talking to didn’t have the right information. Either way, no offer.

John: That’s really surprising.

Billy: That actually makes sense to me because websites aren’t really that important for movies.

Regina: Right.

Lori: It was more about, not about money, more about, this is ours and we are using this as an advertising thing.

Adrianne: How did you feel about giving up the name? Was there any part of you that wanted to hang on to it?

Lori: Little bit. Like you said, it is a top tier name. It is a single word. It was a little bit of a prestige thing. But it’s Carl’s, it’s not mine.

Adrianne: Carl Finch is the founder and owner of Brave Combo.

Carl: Hello? Can you hear me?

Adrianne: He lives in Denton, Texas and he plays accordion, keys, guitar, and sings. He also has two dogs and 11 cats which he and his wife rescued at various places and times.

Adrianne: Some people would say that’s a lot of cats.

Carl: I would say that’s a lot of cats.

Adrianne: Carl started Brave Combo 40 years ago in 1979.

Carl: We wanted to play polka music because it was the least fashionable, most hated music from the hip mainstream. It was the music that was always used to poke fun at people. And we wanted the name to reflect that. And so we knew we were going to be playing polkas in rock and roll clubs, and so that’s where the name brave came from. And then we wanted to take the squarest term for a band, and at the time “combo” was like something your parents would ask you, like, “how are things with your little combo?” So that was kind of a parents’ term. And so Brave Combo kind of fit.

Adrianne: So polka I would not have been able to define polka for you before this, but polka is a style of folk music. It is originally from the Czech Republic and can now be found all over Europe, North America, even South America, with each region giving the music a different spin. It’s very high energy and you’re supposed to party to it and dance to it.

This is a classic polka. It was originally a Czech song that has been adapted over and over again and it’s called The Beer Barrel Polka. And this version I found on SoundCloud by a band called Diet Polka.

John: God, being a tuba player in a polka band seems great.

Adrianne: Why is that?

John: I mean, listen to it.

Adrianne: All right. So you kind of get the idea from that one. That’s the Beer Barrel Polka. And then this is one of Brave Combos polkas. This is a cover of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.

John: You said they were founded in 1979?

Adrianne: That’s right.

John: So they were doing like polka covers before Weird Al.

Adrianne: Yeah. Here is another one that you probably recognize. This is from a Brave Combo show.

John: Ooh a moody minor version of the chicken dance.

Adrianne: Anyway so you get the idea of polka. It’s really boisterous, and their style of it is like a little more rock and roll, a little bit like punk almost.

They start playing this polka music, they’re playing rock clubs, and they actually started to get really popular like, right away. they play Irving Plaza the first time they come to New York. If you don’t know New York, that’s a huge venue. They’re in Rolling Stone. The hipsters that Carl was sneering at love them.

Carl: I’m always curious and I insist on satisfying my curiosity. And I wondered what would happen if a band played polkas in a rock club. That’s it, period. It’s all I wanted to find out and it literally exploded within the first two weeks of us performing. We were forced into the mainstream.

Adrianne: And then actual polka fans started to notice them.

Carl: After a year, about a year, the polka audience who we really weren’t even trying to appeal to started paying attention. And then that led us to well, what if we learn Polish style, German style, Slovenian style, Czech style, Italian style, chicken scratch style, tejano style. So we started learning all kinds of polkas and we started getting invited to play all these disparate polka events around the well around the world.

Adrianne: So Brave Combos fans are not only international, they’re super dedicated. And Carl told me there was basically a group of about 25 fans who he described as quote “tech heads” who manage their online presence.

Carl: They were doing lots of stuff for us. They were listening to all of our music and transcribing all the lyrics and organizing everything and people were doing discographies for us and histories of the gigs, you know, putting everything in order.

Adrianne: Not everyone in the band was convinced that this whole website thing was worth it but Carl thought it was really cool.

Carl: Oh man I remember being on stage in the early days. You do you do http, colon, forward slash forward slash. We’re announcing this to a crowd of hundreds of drunk people. Oh my God, we took this so seriously.

John: I distinctly remember I guess I must’ve been 8 at the time. Toystory.com was the first website that I’d ever been to and I remember the commercial would come on and I’d try to scrawl the http colon slash slash www dot toy story.com onto like a note pad. Beause it was the first time I had seen one of these go by on TV.

Billy: I’m imagining you in front of a PC with your tongue sticking out, like looking at the keys.

Adrianne: Like, where’s the H?

Carl: It was pretty exciting You know we had our own website and stuff and people could check it out. But it seemed pretty, looking back on it, it was pretty clunky.

Adrianne: And I’m guessing that at some point you started to get some outreach from
people who wanted to buy the name.

Carl: Yeah. After about 10 years we started getting lots of people. It was a pretty much a weekly thing and the offers were never enticing until about five years ago. And then this company came through with a substantial offer and then we asked them to double it.

Adrianne: So the band had also registered BraveCombo.com at one point but they forgot to renew it and it got snatched up by squatters. So Carl told the buyer, all right, if you can get us that domain name back too, you have a deal.

Carl: Which was not cheap for them either. Just that alone was $5,000, just to get our old name back that nobody wanted.

Adrianne: So I got the sense that Carl wouldn’t have sold the name to just anybody. He’s pretty principled about who he’ll take money from. He told me that once the Tracey Ullman show wanted Brave Combo to play in a sketch and they asked to read the script and decided they weren’t comfortable with it because it was a sketch about a Polish wedding and they felt like it was too stereotypical. He also told me that he turned down a sponsorship for Japanese ramen because he’s a vegetarian and it had meat in it.

But this software company that offered money for the domain and the price was right, he thought they seemed all right. And I’m actually a user of Brave. It’s a browser that blocks ads and does some other things. It’s my main browser on my phone, I use it sometimes on my computer too. It was started by Brandon Eich who is the cofounder of Mozilla which makes the Firefox browser. So it’s probably you know relatively okay on this scale on the spectrum of evil corporations.

But here is the disappointing part: Carl did not want to tell me how much he got for brave.com.

Regina: Oh no.

Adrianne: Do you want to say how much it was?

Carl: Right. I better not. I probably shouldn’t.

Adrianne: I think you said it was on par with an advance for an album?

Carl: Yeah I could probably have not worked for a year.

Adrianne: Carl had actually bought the band from the other members a few years ago so it was just up to him. It was his decision alone

Regina: How do you buy a band?

Adrianne: My impression from him and from Lori was that the band has been around for 40 freaking years. Carl is still the main force behind the band and always has been. And it’s gotten to the point where it’s kinda like he runs the band and then when they have shows and recordings, he hires the musicians and he’s got like a stable of people that he works with.

John: So Brave Combo is like an idea, a state of mind.

Carl: Well as it turns out, I bought the band from everyone and everything about five years ago and then about a year after that is when we were contacted. So at the time I owned everything. But everybody was still making money, I mean it wasn’t like the only thing that people were depending on with the band, and people were moving on and doing other things. And I was hiring musicians at that point. I was just going and hiring people who had been in the band to play in the band, and I was able to just make the decision without having to consult everybody. Being the control freak that I am, this is where I was wanting to always be anyway.

Billy: So he didn’t say whether they bought it like with cash or equity.

Adrianne: I seriously doubt it was equity, I think it was cash.

Regina: He said “I didn’t have to work for a year.” You can’t take work off for equity.

Adrianne: I’m going to guess like annual incomes, and also he pegged it to the advance of an album, I’m going to guess that’s like $50K, $50 to $80K. Originally I thought, oh brave.com, it’s such an amazing domain. There must be so many people willing to pay so much money for it. But as I kind of went on and I realized it’s not really, it’s like a thin order book, is that what they say? The the demand and supply are just not that thick. There’s not that many players. So it’s hard to set a really high price.

Billy: Well we know that they paid $5000 for the squatted BraveCombo.com domain.

Adrianne: We don’t exactly. It’s possible that that’s that was their initial asking price and that they went down from there.

John: Probably not worth speculating this hard

Adrianne: Anyway I did want to hear more about the economics of being a full time musician and how that might’ve played into the decision to sell the domain or at least been a contrast to it.

Adrianne: You know people work so hard at music, and I mean with Brave Combo it seems like you’ve had a lot of success. Is it like now you’re in the money? Now you’re on easy street?

Carl: Oh man. I am on easy street.

Adrianne: Okay so he was being sarcastic obviously but he told me the internet has been a real mixed blessing for musicians. He just recorded an English version of this Romanian song that he really loves and he’s really excited to be able to put that and have it be the first English version on YouTube. And the idea that people in Romania really loved the song will listen to it. At the same time the internet has led to this explosion of music which makes it really hard to break through the cacophony and it has also pushed the prices for music way down.

Carl: Live music venues, they’ve never sucked more. All clubs are struggling. All people who cater to musicians, recording studios, they’re all suffering because people can make horrible sounding recordings at home with their their tech gear they don’t know how to work rather than paying money, because they’re not making any money. The whole internet has spawned this whole world of free music. The idea of free music has made it really hard for bands to make any money. We had some nights where we were selling like $4,000 a night just of CDs. We went through a few years of this insane thing and now no one will even download a CD because you can stream any song you want. So I don’t know where this is going, I feel really lucky that our path is somewhat plotted and I’m given a lot of artistic freedom because I have a large enough fan base that will support me.

Adrianne: He has so much faith in his fan base that he’s about to release a song that he thinks will be very controversial.

Regina: Ooh.

Carl: I mean I’m I’m just finishing 10 songs and one of them is so radical, it’s going to have thousands of people hating me. It really is. I’m about to step into this so deep, that if the name of Brave Combo skyrockets it’s going to be from controversy at this point. And I’m finishing the song tomorrow. I wish I could tell you what it is. And you would gasp if I told you.

Billy: Does he have the pee tape and made a music video out of it? What is it? What is he sitting on?

Adrianne: Okay I don’t know if it’s the pee tape, I have not listened to it, but I do have it. He wasn’t done with it when we spoke but he said to me afterward.

Should we listen to it? The title of the song is Star Spangled Banner.

Regina: Oh my God.

Billy: Oh yes.

Regina: Whoa. I’m sorry. What is this?

John: Is this a a mashup, and we don’t know the other song?

Adrianne: It is. So he told me a little more information about it in the email.

The music is The Song of the Volga Boatmen, a very popular well-known Russian folk song.

John: I see.

Adrianne: “Since President Putin is pretty much running the country, I thought we should make some practical changes so the new USA anthem would make more sense.”

John: You weren’t far off with the pee tape.

Billy: I get it now.

Regina: Oh got it. Got it. Yeah honestly the pee tape turns out to be very relevant.

Billy: I knew it was a shot at the big man.

Adrianne: So that was great.

Still I was kind of bummed that Carl didn’t tell us how much he sold brave.com for.

Carl: Are you disappointed that I didn’t tell you a number.

Adrianne: I think people would like to hear the number but I also respect your privacy.

Carl: Okay. Well I apologize.

Adrianne: But he did tell me another number.

Carl: All right. Guess what I’m going to do right now?

Adrianne: Play music? Pet a cat?

Carl: Clean litter boxes You didn’t ask how many litter boxes we have.

Adrianne: How many litter boxes do you have?

Carl: Okay let’s see. One, two, three.

Adrianne: This is a number I do want to know

Carl: I’ll say eight.

And not a big house.

John: Underunderstood is produced by Adrianne Jeffries, Regina Dellea, Billy Disney, and me, John Lagomarsino.

Adrianne: For a list of all songs by Brave Combo and others in this episode check out our show notes. You can find them on our website underunderstood.com or inside your podcast app.

Billy: We hope you liked the show. We are @underunderstood on Twitter and Instagram, our website is underunderstood.com. We have transcripts links Everything we talk about is on there in detail, underunderstood.com.

John: And this is important, if you have a burning question that the internet can’t answer, send it to us at hello@underunderstood.com. We might look into it.

Transcript Raw

Adrianne: This pitch comes to us by way of our old friends and former coworkers, one of whom I married — Sam — and the other one is Rhondo. Sam and Rhondo are both filmmakers and they were telling me about this video shoot that they went on in Indianapolis. And this was back when we were all working for a little website called the verge which is a publication for people who like smartphones.

Billy: And other things

Adrianne: The fact that it was that we were all working at this nerd website is kind of relevant to this story. So Sam and Rhondo wrap after a long day of shooting, they’re walking around, they go into a bar off the street and there’s this band playing.

Sam: [00:00:53] I remember that the person we interviewed, at the end of the interview I usually ask the locals where we should get dinner or whatever. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the person we interviewed said that there were there were really good shows that this one bar or beer hall or whatever.

Rhondo: We went to this bar and there was a polka band playing.

Like I don’t even like polka music. It’s not like, I don’t hate it. But you had to admit these guys shredded right?

Sam: Yeah I mean sometimes when you stumble into a bar in a random place like you’re not expecting great music necessarily, but yeah we were both kind of blown away by how talented these musicians were.

Rhondo: They were all virtuousos.

Sam: And they all looked like cool dads.

Rhondo: Yeah.

Adrianne: So the band is called Brave Combo and Sam and Rhondo started talking to one of the band members afterward and he gives them a business card.

Billy: Nice.

Adrianne: The band is called Brave Combo. And the website for the band was brave.com/bo.

Regina: Wow.

Billy: They have brave.com

Regina: How did they get brave.com?

Adrianne: Okay. So this is why I said this is not the kind of question that like just anybody would probably like really care about. But um as a tech reporter you’re kind of like, wow, that’s like a really good domain name. It’s one word, it’s in the dictionary, it’s probably something that people thought of in the first waves of naming companies after the internet got started.

So they actually ask this guy if Pixar had tried to buy it for the movie Brave, which had come out a little bit earlier and he says yeah, Pixar tried to buy it, but their offer wasn’t worth it so we turned them down.

Billy: Ah man, this is the most rock and roll polka band I’ve ever heard of.

Adrianne: Extremely rock and roll.

Sam: So weird side note. We were under the impression that they were this unknown small town local band. But it turns out, I think we were looking them up later, and it turns out that they were actually in the Simpsons. So not only not only was a song by them in the Simpsons, but the band was actually animated on a stage in the kind of in the background.

Adrianne: Brave Combo has also won two Grammys, collaborated with David Byrne, and done a bunch of TV shows. And Bob Dylan covered one of their polka arrangements of a Christmas song.

Rhondo: I think they are a polka band with credibility. But like it’s like nobody really likes polka So even like the best polka bands nobody knows.

Sam: But the plot thickens because when we were telling you about this recently, I looked up brave.com and now it is owned by some other company.

Adrianne: You can go to brave dot com now.

Billy: Okay Oh it’s the browser Brave. Your browser of choice.

Adrianne: Brave the web browser, which is made by a San Francisco company.

Regina: So did they make a bunch of money? How did this happen?

Adrianne: Well I asked Sam and Rhondo what they would want to know, and Rhondo said he didn’t care. Sam said:

Sam: I want to know, first of all, if they sold it or if something else happened.

Adrianne: Like they forgot to renew it and then Brave browser snatched it up.

Sam: Right. And if they did sell it, how much they sold it for, and why they finally decided the time was right.

Adrianne: I would like to know what Pixar’s original offer was that they sneered at.

Sam: I’d like to know if there actually was an offer from Pixar, I’m not convinced there was.

Adrianne: Confirm that, right. OK. We’re going to look into this and see if we can talk to Brave Combo and see if they’ll give us a scoop. Thank you both.

Sam: [00:05:42] Thank you.

Rhondo: Thanks.

Regina: Coming up: Lots of cats.

Adrianne: I have some answers. And I have listened to a lot of polka.

John: Rad.

Billy: How are you feeling?

Adrianne: Upbeat.

Billy: Really. Okay.

Regina: Weird.

John: Have you learned the accordion?

Adrianne: I learned the accordion.

Regina: Did you change your outfits?

John: She’s in lederhosen right now.

Adrianne: So none of that happened. I did go snooping around on this story about Brave Combo and their website The first thing I did was to see if there was any information on the record about the sale, because sometimes domain names sales get reported. Maybe because the brokers want people to know how much they’re going for in order to encourage more activity in the market or whatever. So I emailed Ron Jackson, who is the editor of Domain Name Journal. That is a trade publication that tracks domain names sales.

John: Who reads Domain Name Journal? Who is this for?

Adrianne: Oh who knows.

Billy: It’s a whole industry.

Regina: I was wondering that too.

Adrianne: Online marketers, domain buyers and sellers, people who are interested in buying domains and want to know how much they might have to pay for it, people who are interested in selling.

So I asked Ron if he could take a stab at how much Brave.com would have been worth. And he said, quote, “Guesses are meaningless when it comes to domains. There are too many variables involved for an appraisal to mean anything in my opinion. For example is anyone interested in buying that specific domain name at this point? If they are how badly do they want it? How big is the budget? From the owner’s side, how much have they invested in the name? How much do they need money at that point in time? How likely are they to ever get another offer on the domain? These are all unknown factors to someone making an appraisal. That’s why you see such wildly varying prices for domains that would otherwise seem to be similar.”

In other words the price is really personal. So I just went straight to the source and called the band themselves.

Lori: I have to say this is my first podcast.

Adrianne: That’s Lori Young She’s worked for Brave Combo for 22 years.

Lori: The domain was purchased in 1995. Brave Combo had the good fortune tha one of their fans just happened to also be one of the bandmate’s, I believe college roommates, and he was a internet pioneer kind of guy. He’s still does software production stuff, but back then he bought Brave.com. He also used to own butterfly.net. So Brave Combo and, well David actually was technically I think the original owner of it, but we owned it the entire time we had it until we let it go.

Adrianne: Do you remember how much it cost in 1995?

Lori: Oh probably whatever network solutions was charging. $35 or $50 you know whatever it was. It was brand new I mean it was literally you know it was 1995, it was just, yeehaw, you’d buy anything you could get your hands on.

Billy: It’s also worth pointing out that not only was their fan an early internet pioneer but this is like really early to take this kind of approach to a domain, where you have, you’re using the the.com part and the S. That didn’t really start until del.icio.us, I think. So that’s like 2003 or something. So in 1995 to have a clever domain where you’re using the the dot part, I mean that’s pretty ahead of the game I’ve got to say.

Adrianne: Definitely The band also had a listserv at this point which is pretty cool. So they were pretty tech savvy all around. And this guy David who bought the domain, after a couple of years he decides he doesn’t want to keep up the website anymore. So Lori takes it over in 1997 and she doesn’t have a computer so she goes to her father’s house once a week to use his. And every once in a while someone would reach out asking to buy the name.

Lori: Every once in a while we would get an offer from or an inquiry. I remember one that stood out was Adventure magazine, and they made an offer. But back in that time, it wasn’t sufficient, and it wasn’t enough to say we’re going to give this thing up that we’re actually using. And then I kind of thought maybe when the movie Brave came out for Disney that we would get an inquiry. We did not.

They were smart enough to just go “oh, we’ll just get bravethemovie” or something like that.

Adrianne: So either Sam and Rhondo had misremembered the conversation or the person they were talking to didn’t have the right information. Either way, no offer.

John: That’s really surprising.

Billy: That actually makes sense to me because websites aren’t really that important for movies.

Regina: Right.

Lori: It was more about, not about money, more about, this is ours and we are using this as an advertising thing.

Adrianne: How did you feel about giving up the name? Was there any part of you that wanted to hang on to it?

Lori: Little bit. Like you said, it is a top tier name. It is a single word. It was a little bit of a prestige thing. But it’s Carl’s, it’s not mine.

Adrianne: Carl Finch is the founder and owner of Brave Combo.

Carl: Hello? Can you hear me?

Adrianne: He lives in Denton, Texas and he plays accordion, keys, guitar, and sings. He also has two dogs and 11 cats which he and his wife rescued at various places and times.

Adrianne: Some people would say that’s a lot of cats.

Carl: I would say that’s a lot of cats.

Adrianne: Carl started Brave Combo 40 years ago in 1979.

Carl: We wanted to play polka music because it was the least fashionable, most hated music from the hip mainstream. It was the music that was always used to poke fun at people. And we wanted the name to reflect that. And so we knew we were going to be playing polkas in rock and roll clubs, and so that’s where the name brave came from. And then we wanted to take the squarest term for a band, and at the time “combo” was like something your parents would ask you, like, “how are things with your little combo?” So that was kind of a parents’ term. And so Brave Combo kind of fit.

Adrianne: So polka I would not have been able to define polka for you before this, but polka is a style of folk music. It is originally from the Czech Republic and can now be found all over Europe, North America, even South America, with each region giving the music a different spin. It’s very high energy and you’re supposed to party to it and dance to it.

This is a classic polka. It was originally a Czech song that has been adapted over and over again and it’s called The Beer Barrel Polka. And this version I found on SoundCloud by a band called Diet Polka.

John: God, being a tuba player in a polka band seems great.

Adrianne: Why is that?

John: I mean, listen to it.

Adrianne: All right. So you kind of get the idea from that one. That’s the Beer Barrel Polka. And then this is one of Brave Combos polkas. This is a cover of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.

John: You said they were founded in 1979?

Adrianne: That’s right.

John: So they were doing like polka covers before Weird Al.

Adrianne: Yeah. Here is another one that you probably recognize. This is from a Brave Combo show.

John: Ooh a moody minor version of the chicken dance.

Adrianne: Anyway so you get the idea of polka. It’s really boisterous, and their style of it is like a little more rock and roll, a little bit like punk almost.

They start playing this polka music, they’re playing rock clubs, and they actually started to get really popular like, right away. they play Irving Plaza the first time they come to New York. If you don’t know New York, that’s a huge venue. They’re in Rolling Stone. The hipsters that Carl was sneering at love them.

Carl: I’m always curious and I insist on satisfying my curiosity. And I wondered what would happen if a band played polkas in a rock club. That’s it, period. It’s all I wanted to find out and it literally exploded within the first two weeks of us performing. We were forced into the mainstream.

Adrianne: And then actual polka fans started to notice them.

Carl: After a year, about a year, the polka audience who we really weren’t even trying to appeal to started paying attention. And then that led us to well, what if we learn Polish style, German style, Slovenian style, Czech style, Italian style, chicken scratch style, tejano style. So we started learning all kinds of polkas and we started getting invited to play all these disparate polka events around the well around the world.

Adrianne: So Brave Combos fans are not only international, they’re super dedicated. And Carl told me there was basically a group of about 25 fans who he described as quote “tech heads” who manage their online presence.

Carl: They were doing lots of stuff for us. They were listening to all of our music and transcribing all the lyrics and organizing everything and people were doing discographies for us and histories of the gigs, you know, putting everything in order.

Adrianne: Not everyone in the band was convinced that this whole website thing was worth it but Carl thought it was really cool.

Carl: Oh man I remember being on stage in the early days. You do you do http, colon, forward slash forward slash. We’re announcing this to a crowd of hundreds of drunk people. Oh my God, we took this so seriously.

John: I distinctly remember I guess I must’ve been 8 at the time. Toystory.com was the first website that I’d ever been to and I remember the commercial would come on and I’d try to scrawl the http colon slash slash www dot toy story.com onto like a note pad. Beause it was the first time I had seen one of these go by on TV.

Billy: I’m imagining you in front of a PC with your tongue sticking out, like looking at the keys.

Adrianne: Like, where’s the H?

Carl: It was pretty exciting You know we had our own website and stuff and people could check it out. But it seemed pretty, looking back on it, it was pretty clunky.

Adrianne: And I’m guessing that at some point you started to get some outreach from
people who wanted to buy the name.

Carl: Yeah. After about 10 years we started getting lots of people. It was a pretty much a weekly thing and the offers were never enticing until about five years ago. And then this company came through with a substantial offer and then we asked them to double it.

Adrianne: So the band had also registered BraveCombo.com at one point but they forgot to renew it and it got snatched up by squatters. So Carl told the buyer, all right, if you can get us that domain name back too, you have a deal.

Carl: Which was not cheap for them either. Just that alone was $5,000, just to get our old name back that nobody wanted.

Adrianne: So I got the sense that Carl wouldn’t have sold the name to just anybody. He’s pretty principled about who he’ll take money from. He told me that once the Tracey Ullman show wanted Brave Combo to play in a sketch and they asked to read the script and decided they weren’t comfortable with it because it was a sketch about a Polish wedding and they felt like it was too stereotypical. He also told me that he turned down a sponsorship for Japanese ramen because he’s a vegetarian and it had meat in it.

But this software company that offered money for the domain and the price was right, he thought they seemed all right. And I’m actually a user of Brave. It’s a browser that blocks ads and does some other things. It’s my main browser on my phone, I use it sometimes on my computer too. It was started by Brandon Eich who is the cofounder of Mozilla which makes the Firefox browser. So it’s probably you know relatively okay on this scale on the spectrum of evil corporations.

But here is the disappointing part: Carl did not want to tell me how much he got for brave.com.

Regina: Oh no.

Adrianne: Do you want to say how much it was?

Carl: Right. I better not. I probably shouldn’t.

Adrianne: I think you said it was on par with an advance for an album?

Carl: Yeah I could probably have not worked for a year.

Adrianne: Carl had actually bought the band from the other members a few years ago so it was just up to him. It was his decision alone

Regina: How do you buy a band?

Adrianne: My impression from him and from Lori was that the band has been around for 40 freaking years. Carl is still the main force behind the band and always has been. And it’s gotten to the point where it’s kinda like he runs the band and then when they have shows and recordings, he hires the musicians and he’s got like a stable of people that he works with.

John: So Brave Combo is like an idea, a state of mind.

Carl: Well as it turns out, I bought the band from everyone and everything about five years ago and then about a year after that is when we were contacted. So at the time I owned everything. But everybody was still making money, I mean it wasn’t like the only thing that people were depending on with the band, and people were moving on and doing other things. And I was hiring musicians at that point. I was just going and hiring people who had been in the band to play in the band, and I was able to just make the decision without having to consult everybody. Being the control freak that I am, this is where I was wanting to always be anyway.

Billy: So he didn’t say whether they bought it like with cash or equity.

Adrianne: I seriously doubt it was equity, I think it was cash.

Regina: He said “I didn’t have to work for a year.” You can’t take work off for equity.

Adrianne: I’m going to guess like annual incomes, and also he pegged it to the advance of an album, I’m going to guess that’s like $50K, $50 to $80K. Originally I thought, oh brave.com, it’s such an amazing domain. There must be so many people willing to pay so much money for it. But as I kind of went on and I realized it’s not really, it’s like a thin order book, is that what they say? The the demand and supply are just not that thick. There’s not that many players. So it’s hard to set a really high price.

Billy: Well we know that they paid $5000 for the squatted BraveCombo.com domain.

Adrianne: We don’t exactly. It’s possible that that’s that was their initial asking price and that they went down from there.

John: Probably not worth speculating this hard

Adrianne: Anyway I did want to hear more about the economics of being a full time musician and how that might’ve played into the decision to sell the domain or at least been a contrast to it.

Adrianne: You know people work so hard at music, and I mean with Brave Combo it seems like you’ve had a lot of success. Is it like now you’re in the money? Now you’re on easy street?

Carl: Oh man. I am on easy street.

Adrianne: Okay so he was being sarcastic obviously but he told me the internet has been a real mixed blessing for musicians. He just recorded an English version of this Romanian song that he really loves and he’s really excited to be able to put that and have it be the first English version on YouTube. And the idea that people in Romania really loved the song will listen to it. At the same time the internet has led to this explosion of music which makes it really hard to break through the cacophony and it has also pushed the prices for music way down.

Carl: Live music venues, they’ve never sucked more. All clubs are struggling. All people who cater to musicians, recording studios, they’re all suffering because people can make horrible sounding recordings at home with their their tech gear they don’t know how to work rather than paying money, because they’re not making any money. The whole internet has spawned this whole world of free music. The idea of free music has made it really hard for bands to make any money. We had some nights where we were selling like $4,000 a night just of CDs. We went through a few years of this insane thing and now no one will even download a CD because you can stream any song you want. So I don’t know where this is going, I feel really lucky that our path is somewhat plotted and I’m given a lot of artistic freedom because I have a large enough fan base that will support me.

Adrianne: He has so much faith in his fan base that he’s about to release a song that he thinks will be very controversial.

Regina: Ooh.

Carl: I mean I’m I’m just finishing 10 songs and one of them is so radical, it’s going to have thousands of people hating me. It really is. I’m about to step into this so deep, that if the name of Brave Combo skyrockets it’s going to be from controversy at this point. And I’m finishing the song tomorrow. I wish I could tell you what it is. And you would gasp if I told you.

Billy: Does he have the pee tape and made a music video out of it? What is it? What is he sitting on?

Adrianne: Okay I don’t know if it’s the pee tape, I have not listened to it, but I do have it. He wasn’t done with it when we spoke but he said to me afterward.

Should we listen to it? The title of the song is Star Spangled Banner.

Regina: Oh my God.

Billy: Oh yes.

Regina: Whoa. I’m sorry. What is this?

John: Is this a a mashup, and we don’t know the other song?

Adrianne: It is. So he told me a little more information about it in the email.

The music is The Song of the Volga Boatmen, a very popular well-known Russian folk song.

John: I see.

Adrianne: “Since President Putin is pretty much running the country, I thought we should make some practical changes so the new USA anthem would make more sense.”

John: You weren’t far off with the pee tape.

Billy: I get it now.

Regina: Oh got it. Got it. Yeah honestly the pee tape turns out to be very relevant.

Billy: I knew it was a shot at the big man.

Adrianne: So that was great.

Still I was kind of bummed that Carl didn’t tell us how much he sold brave.com for.

Carl: Are you disappointed that I didn’t tell you a number.

Adrianne: I think people would like to hear the number but I also respect your privacy.

Carl: Okay. Well I apologize.

Adrianne: But he did tell me another number.

Carl: All right. Guess what I’m going to do right now?

Adrianne: Play music? Pet a cat?

Carl: Clean litter boxes You didn’t ask how many litter boxes we have.

Adrianne: How many litter boxes do you have?

Carl: Okay let’s see. One, two, three.

Adrianne: This is a number I do want to know

Carl: I’ll say eight.

And not a big house.

John: Underunderstood is produced by Adrianne Jeffries, Regina Dellea, Billy Disney, and me, John Lagomarsino.

Adrianne: For a list of all songs by Brave Combo and others in this episode check out our show notes. You can find them on our website underunderstood.com or inside your podcast app.

Billy: We hope you liked the show. We are @underunderstood on Twitter and Instagram, our website is underunderstood.com. We have transcripts links Everything we talk about is on there in detail, underunderstood.com.

John: And this is important, if you have a burning question that the internet can’t answer, send it to us at hello@underunderstood.com. We might look into it.

Regina: Thanks for listening We’ll be back next week