One person’s view: “It’s a lifeless tune by a horribly dated artist.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.64 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1961
“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” is generally regarded as one of the greatest girl group classics of all time. When 57-year-old bandleader Lawrence Welk knocked it out of #1 with a bland instrumental, he ensured that rock music historians would not look kindly upon him. He further secured his place in infamy by blocking Motown’s first major hit, “Shop Around”, from the top spot the following week. Neil Sedaka’s future cat food jingle “Calendar Girl” was also sent tumbling down-dooby-doo-down-down the Hot 100 when it couldn’t match Welk’s performance at the record store. And that’s the enduring gripe that earns “Calcutta” a spot in our museum of the worst #1 hits: it achieved commercial dominance despite there being far better products available.
As an industrious businessman, however, Welk had earned this success. His keen grasp of economics went back to his childhood, when he sensed that his life prospects as a German-speaking fourth-grade dropout in rural North Dakota were not good. His family’s ancient heirloom accordion seemed to offer him a way out. No, he didn’t pawn it and use the cash to pay for fifth grade at an elite prep school. Nor did he blow it up with fireworks like kids of today would do to earn likes on YouTube. Instead, he practiced playing it until he got to be pretty good, and then persuaded his dad to buy him a better accordion that he could perform professional gigs with. His father then made the teen work for him for four years until the instrument was paid off.
I can relate to this story, because I also asked my parents to buy me an accordion when I was a kid. I wasn’t forced to do farm labor afterwards like young Lawrence, but I did have to endure years of lessons to justify the extravagant purchase. I quickly learned that accordions are uncomfortably hot to wear in the summertime, and that using the clarinet reed setting on a poorly maintained second-hand accordion provokes dogs (and many humans) to howl in agony. I also learned that my musical talent was nonexistent, and that – unlike our friend from North Dakota – I would never ace out Smokey Robinson for the #1 position on a Billboard chart. It didn’t help that the arrangements in my accordion lesson books were usually of German folk tunes with titles like “Du Du”. I would eagerly page through each new book in search of a Bee Gees song, only to be disappointed every time.
My accordion has resided in a closet for the last four decades, but Welk eventually leveraged his into a popular national TV show with 27 years of first-run episodes. He prudently invested his paychecks in California real estate. Along with his fellow land mogul Bob Hope, he became one of the wealthiest show business personalities of his generation. He did quite well for a guy who couldn’t speak English until adulthood and didn’t break out as a huge star until middle age.
The Lawrence Welk Show was always airing on some channel or another during my childhood, but it was never on in our house. My parents deemed it uncool, having been forced to watch it by their parents. But one day I adventurously channel-surfed to the local PBS affiliate. I was hoping I might catch something edgy like a Sesame Street blooper reel in which Gordon uses a four-letter word that is brought to you by the letter “F”. Instead, the station was selling Lawrence Welk videotapes as part of its never-ending fund drive that seemed to take up 80% of its air time. It showed a clip of a 1974 episode in which Welk announced the marriage of his singer Mary Lou Metzger to his band member Richard Maloof. The young couple celebrated this happy occasion by performing a duet of “The Music Goes Round and Round”. While she sang and Maloof played the tuba, Metzger traced the music’s path through the horn as if she were diagramming the passage of a burrito through someone’s digestive tract. “The music goes round and round… and it comes out here!” Upon seeing this absurd yet captivating performance, I immediately understood the appeal of Welk’s show. I also understood why no one younger than my grandparents would admit to watching it.
Lawrence Welk was enough of a phenomenon that he deserved to have a #1 hit, but it’s hard to argue that “Calcutta” deserved to be the one. The instrumental was written by a German composer under the title “Tivoli Melody”, but then some other German guy decided that the tune was the perfect vehicle for an imprecise lesson about the geography of India. He added words to the music and renamed it “Kalkutta Liegt am Ganges”. The new lyrics suggested that Calcutta lies on the Ganges River, even though most of the water from the Ganges flows about 50 miles north of the city. It’s like saying that Boston is in Rhode Island: it isn’t that big of an error in the scheme of the universe, but it would make a fairly stupid title for a song.
When two American songwriters were tasked with writing English lyrics, they kept the word “Calcutta” without bothering to translate the rest from German. In their version, the narrator brags about the girls he has kissed in Naples, Paris, and Spain before observing that “the ladies of Calcutta do something to me.” So now it’s a song about sex tourism. It’s little wonder that Welk chose to replace the lyrics with “la-la-la”s and hand claps. But he still couldn’t fix the song’s biggest problem: it’s a pleasant melody that would work perfectly as a thirty-second interlude in a medley, but two minutes is a stretch. I keep expecting it to morph into the “Chicken Song”, and it’s frustrating that it never does.
Here’s what I find most fascinating about Lawrence Welk. He was one of the biggest musical success stories in U.S. history, and yet hardly anyone under 60 can name even one fact about him today. Ask any fourth-grader who Elvis Presley was, and he’ll tell you he was a man with sideburns and a white suit who was extremely grateful – that’s why he was always thanking people very much. The kid probably even knows an Elvis song or two. Welk outlived Elvis by fifteen years, but good luck getting a fourth-grader to hum “Calcutta” to you. And few children these days can explain the benefits of purchasing an accordion with indentured servitude rather than taking out a high-interest loan.
Aside from an occasional Saturday Night Live parody, Welk mostly vanished from pop culture thirty years ago. Things might have been different if he’d had just one big hit song that was more memorable than “Calcutta”.
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