Lawrence Welk vs.The Hippies

"A-One-Uh-Ana-Two-Uh...."

Maybe it's because Life has gotten a little insane lately (o.k. A LOT
insane), but I actually felt the tender pang of nostalgia while
watching these clips. I even felt warm and fuzzy during "Hey Jude"
Pass the Geritol ....

Lawrence Welk vs. The Hippies
By Destiny
March 13th, 2008
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/03/13/lawrence-welk-vs-the-hippies/

Lawrence Welk was approaching his seventies when radical changes
suddenly hit America's music scene.

The clash in the late 1960s shook the band leader, America's most
famous square, and he confronted the raging turmoil in a series of
shocking performances -- at least, according to these five videos.

Thirty years before American Idol, parts of America were still
uncomfortable with the very idea of rock songs even appearing on
television, especially during Welk's squeaky-clean song and dance
show. And since The Lawrence Welk Show ran for three decades, these
videos suggest the ultimate long, strange trip. They're a window in
time, capturing a bizarre never-world where the hour-long show
actually surrendered happily to the coming onslaught of rock.

1. Stop the Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmSv2WFDrs

In a historic telecast, five men in yellow blazers and five women in
matching blouses were confronted by "Hippie Welk."

The smiley man who played polkas on his accordion suddenly appeared
with long hair and Beatle spectacles, flashing a peace sign and
barking "Don't you cats know this polka jazz is strictly from Squares-
ville? I can't stand that kind of music."

The audience actually gasps...

Backed by a Day-Glo drum, Welk then launches his singers into Wilson
Pickett's "She's Looking Good." (Joking about bands with animal names,
Welk says "I just opened the cages, and look what I released... The
Babbling Baboons.") It rocks. Even if Welk's cast isn't quite sure how
to dance to it.

It's a seismic shift in America's cultural landscape, as the song's
driving beat fries the minds of America for exactly forty seconds. But
then Welk's two white "soul sisters" are interrupted by some very
unconvincing acting, as two female cast-members complain "Mr. Welk...
This isn't like you at all."

Returning to their pre-liberated state of near-infantalism, they ask
Welk about his trademark champagne music. "Whatever happened to the
music that went doodly doodly doodly doodly doot?" They give him a
raspberry, the audience applauds loudly, and Welk smilingly says "Of
course, by now you folks know we were only kidding."

"We wouldn't do that to you nice people."

2. Sucking on a Ding-dong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i48BP1PUoFI

Welk's heroin habit eventually caught up with him, and he was
swallowed whole by a voracious counterculture. In a shocking
turnaround, he brought in Lou Reed to jam with the show's banjo
player, organist, drummer, and orchestra, citing a song which was
"high" in popularity.

A remarkable video shows the squares in Welk's audience bobbing in a
slow waltz as The Velvet Underground rips through "Sister Ray." ("I'm
searching for my mainer, I said I couldn't hit it sideways...")

"Wonderful!" Welk declares at the end.

"Mr. Welk... This isn't like you at all," you can imagine his singers
saying. Though of course, by now you folks know we were only kidding
about that heroin habit...

3. Sweet Jesus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye3ecDYxOkg

Yes, "Dale and Gail" are actually singing about the excessive use of
marijuana: the devil's weed, the great satanic corrupter of our youth
-- and the counterculture's intellectual lubricant. While the Velvet
Underground video was a mashup, Welk really did trot out a 23-year-old
rejected Miss Oklahoma contestant to croon a shockingly wholesome
rendition of "One Toke Over the Line." Maybe he was trying to tell us
something.

Nearly 40 years later, the clip ignited a new controversy. Tom
Shipley, one of the drug-friendly song's original singers, uploaded
Welk's version onto YouTube -- and nearly immediately, it drew over 160
comments.

Do these two know what a "toke" even is?
"This fails so hard it approaches win from the other side."
"I think I'm about to stab pencils into my eyes and ears."

Welk was famous again, but for all the wrong reasons, as this
forgotten moment in time "sparked" a very 21st-century enthusiasm.

"I want to make physical love to this clip."
"Way to go, Light-em-up Larry!"
"a priceless moment in television history"
"Champagne...the gateway drug!"

Though perhaps inevitably, some commenters also searched for a hidden
message in the couple's giddy vocal delivery.

"look at their eyes!!, their baked!!"
"oh. my. god. becky, look at her blunt."
"She has to be baked to wear that outfit."

There's no evidence that Dale and Gail actually toked up before
singing the song. But when accordionist Myron Floren introduces them --
there's obviously something that's making him cough.

4. Meet the Beatles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf2kbBinvI4

Drugs influenced the Beatles too, but when they broke up, it was
Lawrence Welk who picked up their countercultural cred, turning "Hey
Jude" into one of "ten big songs" on his ground-breaking concept
album, Galveston. But where the Beatles released "Hey Jude" together
with "Revolution," Welk paired it up with a softer song -- Glen
Campbell's "Gentle on My Mind."

Its graceful trumpet solo inspired audiences to waltz and vote for
Nixon, shortly before a startling full-orchestra crescendo into the
chorus, and one brief flourish of funk from an unappreciated bass
player.

In a surreal moment, the string section saws away underneath a giant
golden sign which says: "Geritol."

It was nobody's Woodstock.

5. Smoke on the Water?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pag45E_ihwY

It was almost heroic the way Welk clung to his kitschy schtick in the
face of a changing world -- his own personal freak flag, flown
gloriously high.

Welk was nearly 90 when he died in 1989, but he lived long enough to
see another accordion player make the big time, possibly channeling
his spirit. In the early '80s, Weird Al Yankovic offered up the
ultimate tribute, mixing Welk's "Bubbles in the Wine" into an
accordion medley of 14 ridiculously inappropriate songs, from Devo to
Jimi Hendrix, the Clash and the Who.

Later footage of Welk's show was even spliced into a video for the
hyperactive medley (which also included "Hey Jude"), creating a
montage that's oddly reminiscent of the surreal bandleader himself. It
ultimately proves that given enough accordions, any song can become
soul-crushingly square.

Even "Smoke on the Water."

100 Years After

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Re-wSAhEuM

It's been 105 years since Lawrence Welk was born. (Tuesday would've
been his birthday.) But this November saw an interesting coda.

A video was uploaded to YouTube showing an audience of high school
students baffled by a vinyl record of Welk's polka band performing
"Minnie the Mermaid." Their heads bob as Welk's deep-voiced singer
croons about the time he'd spent down in her seaweed bungalow...

But it turns out it was a time capsule within a time capsule, since
the video came from a public access TV show they'd recorded for their
local cable outlet in the 1980s. (An earlier episode featured a video
by GWAR.) The two teenaged mid-80s hipsters are playing a song from
the 1957, just a pit stop on the song's journey to YouTube exactly 50
years later.

The video has been watched just 87 times, but it drew one comment that
puts the whole thing in perspective. "Now your show seems as ancient
here as the Lawrence Welk record did..." In the future, maybe everyone
will be Lawrence Welk for 15 minutes.

He'd learned to play the accordion before he'd learned to speak
English at the age of 21, and rose from a poor immigrant family to
becoming one of the richest men in Hollywood. But it was his earnest
commitment to hokey friendliness that made him a kind of legend. Even
if Welk never grokked the emergence of rock music, one YouTube comment
suggested Welk had earned some respect simply for the role he'd played
for the generations that came before.

"He made my grandparents -- whom I loved dearly -- happy during the
final years of their lives. For that, I respect him."

---------

namaste[
bodhi
http://psychedelictourist.blogspot.com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Lawrence Welk vs.The Hippies
    ... Lawrence Welk vs. ... Lawrence Welk was approaching his seventies when radical changes ... especially during Welk's squeaky-clean song and dance ... Underground video was a mashup, Welk really did trot out a 23-year-old ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Re: Lawrence Welk vs.The Hippies
    ... Lawrence Welk vs. ... Lawrence Welk was approaching his seventies when radical changes ... especially during Welk's squeaky-clean song and dance ... Underground video was a mashup, Welk really did trot out a 23-year-old ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Re: This is what happens.
    ... Lawrence Welk vs. ... especially during Welk's squeaky-clean song and dance ... Underground video was a mashup, Welk really did trot out a 23-year-old ... see another accordion player make the big time, ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Re: This is what happens.
    ... Lawrence Welk vs. ... especially during Welk's squeaky-clean song and dance ... Underground video was a mashup, Welk really did trot out a 23-year-old ... see another accordion player make the big time, ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
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