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Welk himself, however, was as unpretentious as his music. somebody please turn off the bubble machine"). His wooden presentation and heavily accented English (his parents had emigrated from Alsace and he grew up speaking German), his "ah one and ah two and ah three" tune kickoff and "wunnerful, wunnerful" appreciation of every number became the staple of comedic satire, most memorably for humorist Stan Freberg ("the bubble machine. Welk may have been the least likely success on television since Richard Nixon.
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He penned a musically carbonated theme song called "Bubbles in the Wine," and turned the champagne idea into a frothy packaging motif, complete with on-screen bubbles once the Welk band made it to national TV in 1955. This he dubbed "champagne music," he said, after radio listeners wrote that dancing to his music was "like sipping champagne." One might wonder at the quality of the champagne those fans had experienced, but in any case the teetotaling accordionist turned bandleader took the effervescent ball and ran with it. From his origin in a polka band called L.W.'s Hotsy Totsy Boys, he gradually stapled the choppy syncopation of Wayne King and others onto the warbling, muted saxophones popularized by Guy Lombardo and produced a saccharine, bouncy sound vaguely reminiscent of the turkey trots of World War I. Beginning in the '30s and '40s, when hundreds of big bands were searching for a unique and identifiable sound and pushing American music in new and exciting directions, Welk went the other way. Even in the pre-Muzak era you knew that you'd heard it all before. Musically, it bore the comfort of familiarity. In the late 1950s and 1960s, when music, like so much else in life was becoming fragmented and more complex, Welk's band and its relentless simplicity represented an almost desperate reassertion of traditional values - home-grown, cornfed and peppy. This is a pity, for Welk and his music, however derivative and predictable, represented a sort of last cultural toehold for Norman Rockwell's America - an America of small towns and family farms where music reassured people and helped hold them together instead of driving them apart. While wont to ascribe profound sociological import to the rhythmic obscenity of every gum-headed rap group, they rarely consider the significance of the humorless North Dakotan whose ricky-tick dance tunes helped a musically embattled generation circle its wagons against rock-and-roll.
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Not everyone mourned last week when God turned off the bubble machine and bandleader Lawrence Welk went to that great accordion festival in the sky.Ĭultural critics and their enthusiasms tend to be youthful these days.