Weaponizing Innocence

The other day, Dear Husband told me something that I couldn’t believe was true. No way! So he had to show me. We tracked down the following video on YouTube, and sure enough…

But let’s back up a bit. For you young people who were never forced to sit through an episode of the Lawrence Welk Show, let me give you a little background. It aired from 1951 to 1982, and it was the last bastion for elderly people longing for a world that never existed. To the bitter end, it was for old people who found the modern world incomprehensible, and who did not want to engage with it in any way. They wanted to pour amber over their rose-colored memories of 1951, and crawl in there for the rest of their lives.

The Lawrence Welk Show was a musical variety show. It had a cheesy set that looked like a big band dance floor, and it started off with bubbles floating by, and the sound of a champagne cork. Each episode would have a theme, and their regular cast of singers and musicians would perform songs related to that theme. The songs were often old standards, country songs, polkas, patriotic songs, big band songs, Christian songs… basically any kind of song a young person would hate to have to sit through. Sometimes a young couple would float onto the stage and dance in outfits their contemporaries wouldn’t be caught dead in.

The show was supposed to make you feel like you were young again, and out on the town, seeing your favorite big band, dancing with your sweetheart, without being morally challenged in any way. It was also the perfect place to see someone play Lady of Spain on the accordion, if the spirit moved you, or see the token black cast member tap dance.

You can find clips of the performances all over YouTube, and if you think they’re old fashioned and quaint, you’re absolutely right. But the really weird thing is that they seemed that way even then. And yet the show managed to hang on for 31 years.

Every once in a while, the show would make an effort to become more relevant. And when it did so, the results were hilarious. By far the most mind-blowing effort was this one, which Dear Husband told me about, that I refused to believe until I saw it with my own eyes. It’s two of the Lawrence Welk family of singers performing “One Toke Over the Line” by Brewer & Shipley.

No matter how many times I watch that clip, I can’t believe it. A song that’s riddled with marijuana references, introduced as a modern spiritual on the most wholesome TV show to have ever hit the airwaves. It doesn’t appear that the show got into any trouble for doing it, even though it aired in “early” 1971, at around the same time the FCC issued an edict telling program directors that they needed to take responsibility for knowing the lyrics of the songs they broadcast, because there was a growing worry that songs were sending coded drug-related messages. That FCC edict certainly made “One Toke Over the Line” drop way down the record charts, and the edict surely must have been a topic of discussion on the Lawrence Welk Show set.

The question, which (spoiler alert) has never been answered as far as I can tell, is whether anyone on the show realized what that song was really about.

I have no doubt that Lawrence Welk was clueless. If there was ever someone who was out of touch with the times, this was the man. And the producers must have been clueless, too, because I doubt they’d want to put the show at risk. They probably heard the words Jesus and Mary in the lyrics and that was enough to convince them that it was a perfect way to please the old folks, and yet draw in a younger crowd with a contemporary song. And maybe, possibly, Gail Ferrell, the singer in her sweet pinafore with the butterfly on its chest didn’t know, because it would have been a lot harder for her to find work if she got fired.

But as for the rest of them? Hmph. This show was filmed in Los Angeles. And they were in the music business. I’m sorry, but you can’t convince me that they led such sheltered lives that musicians in LA in the 70’s, right in the midst of political paranoia about coded drug references in music, didn’t know what a “toke” was. You might argue that they thought the word was “toe”, but they worked off sheet music. C’mon.

I can tell you one person who definitely knew what a toke was. The accordionist Myron Floren, who announced the song. He probably wasn’t aware of which song was about to be sung, as he wasn’t performing in it. He probably hadn’t been present for those rehearsals. He just stepped out on stage and read the cue cards. And as you can see in the video, he choked. The man was a consummate professional. If he had a scratchy throat or something, he’d have dealt with it before walking on stage. No. He saw the song title, and he nearly died. He tried to disguise it as a cough, but it was the most, “Oh my God” cough that I’ve ever seen in my life. And if you have any doubt about that, you’ll note that when the camera goes to the singers, Dick Dale, the male half of the singing duo, glances over to his right in confusion, probably because Floren, once his camera and mic was off, was in the throes of a full ROFL by then.

Those musicians knew the marijuana references would fly right over their geriatric viewers’ heads. But they also knew that part of the song might have riled up the seniors, and so they skipped verse two:

"I sailed away a country mile
And now I'm returning and showing off my smile
I met all the girls and I loved myself a few, and to my surprise
Like everything else that I've been through, it opened up my eyes"

Yeah, I’m convinced they knew what they were doing. And somehow, that feels right. And it makes me happy. Back then, it was amusing when people got away with murder by playing innocent. Charming, even. You little devils, you!

It’s so disappointing that nowadays people have honed that skill to such a sharp edge that they’re practically weaponizing it. Deny, deny, deny. Or lie, and then pretend you didn’t realize you were lying. (Whaaaaat? I thought that I was portraying myself as a doctor!) (I had no idea what Jeffrey Epstein was into!) (They’re eating the dogs!)

Having said that, though, a cool back story about the One Toke controversy is that Gail Ferrell got to meet Brewer & Shipley in 2016. (You can read about it here.) Sadly, all three have passed away since then, and Dick Dale had already passed away by the time the three had met (as had Welk and Floren, for that matter).

Good grief, why am I feeling nostalgic for the Lawrence Welk show all of a sudden? It was awful! But then, I was never its target audience. But their loyal viewers weren’t going to last forever. Even when they tried to target me by covering contemporary songs, they watered them down so much that you could barely recognize them. That was a big part of the show’s ultimate demise. As evidence of that, here is some cringe-worthy bonus content for you: