The World’s Most Dangerous Polka Band has secured their first permanent weekly residency since Nye’s Polonaise Room closed in April, and it’s at St. Paul’s new Can Can Wonderland, where they now play each Friday from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. And no one is happier about that than band leader Joe Hayden.

“It’s an experience,” he said of the former canning factory with its artist-designed mini golf and other boardwalk-style attractions. “Do yourself a favor and go.”

The band spent decades playing Friday and Saturday nights — “52 weeks a year,” Hayden added — at Nye’s, a longtime Northeast Minneapolis favorite known for its pierogies and piano bar.

In the months since Nye’s closed, Hayden and the band have played one-off shows on other familiar stages around the Twin Cities, including the Turf Club and Amsterdam Bar and Hall in St. Paul, and First Avenue and the Minneapolis Institute of Art across the river.

“The goal when Nye’s closed was to find another regular place,” said Hayden, who is 74 and lives in Arden Hills. “And it’s not so easy. If you went back 50 years, every bar and VFW and Legion had a band playing. Not so much anymore. Finding a regular job is an accomplishment.”

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Medina Entertainment Center to offer live indoor concerts in October with reduced capacity Can Can Wonderland is a very different type of venue than Nye’s, but Hayden said they share one thing in common. “Nye’s was a bar in every sense of the word. It had a certain crowd and after 10 p.m., the average age of that crowd was 25 to 30. Can Can is not a bar as such. They have drinks, that’s just not the main thrust of it. But the crowd is much like the crowd at Nye’s. Apparently, we can relate to them, or they can relate to us.”

The band is billed as playing polka, but Hayden estimates just 10 to 15 percent of their repertoire falls in that genre. “The rest is all over the spectrum,” he said. “No rock, though. And if you come up and make a request, the first thing I’ll tell you is that it must have been written before 1955. Ninety percent of our music is pre-1955.”

Regardless of the audience’s age, the World’s Most Dangerous Polka Band doesn’t change how they perform. “The configuration is always the same. Three of us, a drummer, an accordion player and myself on trumpet and vocals. When we do a song, we do it the same every time we do it. The American Legions and VFWs are generally an older crowd, and really, our music is geared toward that age.”

But not to say Hayden doesn’t like playing for young people. “(Whatever the age), when the crowd is having a good time, we are having a good time.”

He sounded positively tickled by Can Can Wonderland and raved about the vintage pinball machines and mechanical arcade games as well as the art and the variety of other performers on site.

“Our first night there, they had a cardboard igloo somebody had made,” he said. “It was such an attraction, I told the owner he should be charging admittance. You’ll have a good time there, if nothing else (with the) people-watching. You’ll have a good time.”