{"id":1174,"date":"2010-09-02T22:21:45","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T03:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1174"},"modified":"2015-09-24T22:45:11","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T02:45:11","slug":"calcutta-by-heino-gaze-performed-by-lawrence-welk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1174","title":{"rendered":"A Kitschy Gilde"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

A Kitschy Glide<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Calcutta, by Heino Gaze, performed by Lawrence Welk<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Recorded 1960, Encountered 1961?<\/h3>\n

If you\u2019re going to be entirely honest about the \u201ctheme songs\u201d in your life, you\u2019re going to have to own up to some unsophisticated moments.\u00a0 Let\u2019s face it: none of us is born erudite.\u00a0 Things are likely to have thrilled you along the line that you might not want the world to know about now, because they make you look like exactly what you genuinely were, unsophisticated.\u00a0 This is my moment for owning up.<\/p>\n

Up to this point I\u2019ve been talking about music that may have been forged in popular idioms, but I\u2019ve been praising its perhaps unnoticed sophistication.\u00a0 Have I been defending my youthful tastes a little by portraying myself as a sophisticate-in-training with a yen for the challenging hidden within the mundane like a diamond in the rough?\u00a0 Probably.\u00a0 But with this next item, Lawrence Welk\u2019s version of Calcutta<\/em><\/a>, there is absolutely no making that argument.\u00a0 However intelligently constructed, it is musical kitsch, and one has to start with that.<\/p>\n

How kitschy?\u00a0 Try this video from Lawrence Welk\u2019s show<\/a> which incidentally gives you the complete performance of the song with the exact orchestration of the 1961 hit.[1]\u00a0 One\u2019s jaw hangs loose as one watches it, especially when one considers it was shot in 1971: the accordion-and-harpsichord orchestration, the dreadful clothing choices, the green jackets on the musicians, the female singers clapping in time adorned with the helmet-coifs and the matching puce dresses, the dancers, many of whom are unapologetically old and dowdy-looking, being watched by an even grayer audience \u2013 all of this captured in the same year that Jim Morrison died<\/em>.\u00a0 And I haven\u2019t even got to the music yet.<\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s acknowledge that some of the greatest composers in the world were German.\u00a0 The classical repertoire is stuffed with German names, men (well, mostly) of great musical profundity.\u00a0 But the converse is also true.\u00a0 There is also a very German kind of musical superficiality, honed by the polka and the drinking song, and this number is from that tradition.\u00a0 The melody, composed in 1958, is by Heino Gaze (1908-1967), a journeyman German film composer who also did a considerable business in drinking songs and cute little melodies.\u00a0 It pretty much defines Easy Listening, German Division.\u00a0 It conjures up a world of resolute cheeriness.<\/p>\n

Could it be that there was something slightly deeper under the surface?\u00a0 After all, it\u2019s not called Hamburg<\/em>.\u00a0 Is there any concession to any kind of exoticism \u2013 an exoticism that might cause a composer to break an imaginative sweat and dig a little deeper \u2013 suggested by the title?\u00a0 Well, there was a German lyric, irrelevant to the Welk rendering, which was presented as an orchestral number, that I\u2019ve not heard, but I have heard the English lyric, which was recorded by the Four Preps in a sort of cover of the Welk version,[2] and that charted in February 1961, two months after Welk\u2019s.\u00a0 Basically, it\u2019s all about how the lucky protagonist has kissed girls all around the world, and the ones in Calcutta kiss the best.\u00a0 The same idea as California Girls<\/em>, only coming down elsewhere as a choice for the promised land of dating.\u00a0 So no, when the listener hears no real hint of other musical idioms that might conjure up the Indian city of ideal kissers,[3] he or she is correctly not hearing what isn\u2019t there.\u00a0 The cheerfully propulsive rhythm and Western melody and chord structure are all the cosmopolitanism the protagonist needs.\u00a0 After all, per the lyric, he\u2019s kissed girls in Naples, Spain, and Par-ee. \u00a0One suspects that Calcutta was chosen as the final destination simply because it scanned properly.<\/p>\n

So what was my<\/em> connection with all of this?\u00a0 That may be the most embarrassing revelation of all, because, though I can\u2019t be quite certain, it appears that somewhere in the recesses of my mind I\u2019ve forged an association that has no real-life basis.<\/p>\n

Let me explain.<\/p>\n

My parochial school, St. Thomas the Apostle in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had, for at least one year of my youth, a summer recreation program.\u00a0 Now, I made a lot of good use of my summers as a kid, learning to type, learning to swim, learning how to play tennis, doing advanced studies in Math and German.\u00a0 But at least during the summer of 1959, I took part in that rec program.\u00a0 I think that was the most summer fun I ever had.\u00a0 And most of it was pretty basic.\u00a0 We piled into buses and went to lakes to swim.\u00a0 We took the buses to amusement parks. And we roller skated in the former school gym, which was now the auditorium when folding seats were lined up there.\u00a0 Of course they were\u00a0put away\u00a0in racks\u00a0when we skated.<\/p>\n

I loved the skating the best.\u00a0 And it was a remarkably unsophisticated pleasure.\u00a0 Just get yourself issued the old-fashioned 2X2 skates in your shoe size, strap them on, and go round and round on the green vinyl tiles.<\/p>\n

While listening to easy listening music.<\/p>\n

I know they were big on Mitch Miller.\u00a0 Calcutta<\/em> is very much the kind of thing Miller would have had his choristers sing.\u00a0 And I could have sworn, until I checked carefully through my mom\u2019s diary, that the most popular song of all that summer was Calcutta<\/em>.\u00a0 But here you hit an anachronism like a brick wall.\u00a0 Calcutta<\/em> hadn\u2019t even been recorded yet that summer.\u00a0 There was, I understand, a German version from 1958, but I can\u2019t imagine that we were playing that.<\/p>\n

So the bottom line is I have an impossible association here.\u00a0 My favorite association from the summer of 1959 is inextricably linked to a 1961 song.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, when presented with the impossible, you just have to go with it.\u00a0 It\u2019s my story and I\u2019m sticking to it.\u00a0 The song that always reminds me of those simple unsophisticated afternoons of skating lazily around in circles is a song I probably first heard two years later.\u00a0 The song is as square and kitschy, as reassuring that nothing will ever change for the worse, as the pleasure that will always come to mind when I hear it.\u00a0 In the song\u2019s lyrics, the singer\u2019s encounters with the women who kiss him all over the world don\u2019t entail any heartbreak or betrayal, any regrets, any chance of STDs.[4]\u00a0 Music with any shadows in it, any exoticism even, would be all wrong.\u00a0 It\u2019s all a charming game, just like roller-skating on a Sunday afternoon.\u00a0 And that connection, I guess, will have to be enough.<\/p>\n

\n

[1]. Well, actually it first charted as a single December 12, 1960 according to my trusty Billboard Top Pop Singles Guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[2]. Available on iTunes.<\/p>\n

[3]. A good comparison, if one wants to hear how Western light composers of that era would<\/em> suggest the musical palette of India, is the incidental music India Country Side <\/a><\/em>from 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days<\/em>, by Victor Young, that plays while the train carries the travelers into the heart of the country.\u00a0 This is actually wonderful composing, if perhaps a little patronizing to the sound of real Indian music.<\/p>\n

[4]. To modern, post-Women\u2019s Movement ears, the whole casual approach to the women he\u2019s experienced as not as individuals but as geographic categories, like regional varietal wines, seems so superficial and dismissive one nastily wonders whether the singer is romanticizing visits to brothels in various places.\u00a0 Maybe, if Calcutta was selected for more than its scansion, the subtext is that there was something really special about the way tricks were turned there.\u00a0 One hopes not.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 Jack L. B. Gohn, except for album art<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have I been defending my youthful tastes a little by portraying myself as a sophisticate-in-training with a yen for the challenging hidden within the mundane like a diamond in the rough? Probably. But with this next item, Lawrence Welk\u2019s version of Calcutta, there is absolutely no making that argument. However intelligently constructed, it is musical kitsch, and one has to start with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[968],"tags":[22,1185,1182,1172,1178,1106,1177,1186,1176,1173,1184,1175,1174,1181,1180,1179,1183],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theme-songs","tag-ann-arbor","tag-around-the-world-in-80-days","tag-billboard-top-pop-singles-guide","tag-calcutta","tag-california-girls","tag-easy-listening","tag-exoticism","tag-four-preps","tag-german-music","tag-heino-gaze","tag-india-country-side","tag-jim-morrison","tag-lawrence-welk","tag-mitch-miller","tag-roller-skating","tag-st-thomas-the-apostle-school","tag-victor-young"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5455,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/5455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}