• Blue Notes

Sunday, February 8, 2009

The Polka King

posted by Rick Blue at 13h51

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The Polka King

Last week, I was in the States traveling with The Polka King. You haven’t heard of him?

I don’t know why. Even though he opened for me on the show, at the end of the tour, I flew back here to Montreal to piles of snow and unpaid bills and this guy went to Los Angeles to collect his Grammy award.

The Polka King lives in St. Catharines, Ont. He has already won three Grammy awards and been nominated for 13 others. He is on Canada’s Walk of Fame and has the Order of Canada.

Friends, it’s a whole subculture that you probably know nothing about.

The Polka King has discovered that he could put the word Polka after anything. On his records everything is a Polka. The Moon River Polka, the Come All Ye Faithful Polka, Ein Kliene Nacht Polka, the Bach Brandenburg Polka, Saurkraut Polka, Octoberfest Polka, October Crisis Polka, Stairway to Heaven Polka. If you can whistle the tune, he can turn it into a Polka.

And not only can you add Polka to anything, it’s like a Midas touch. Suddenly it is reborn and turns to gold. Now whenever he hears anything he says: “You know, it's OK, but what it needs is ... a little bit of - Polka!!

I discovered Polka years ago. It was a revelation. Previously I had hung around rock clubs and other gulags where people all thought they were “cool.” You see, I was a bohemian kind of guy. But an acquaintance steered me down to the corner of St. Denis and Dorchester (as it was known then) to The Old Munich beer hall.

This was the place to meet girls, he promised. So much better than going to the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Stanley Street and hitting on some neurotic bohemian girl because you think she is easy.

(And indeed I had been looking for a dark haired girl with too much mascara and bangs and a black sweater who read Silvia Plath and talked about Existentialism. I eventually found one but she turned out to be an alcoholic lesbian psychopath - but that’s another story.)

Things were so much sunnier at The Old Munich. People were all drinking beer and schnapps and there was Polka going on! Everybody there was happy. You could go to any table and ask any girl to dance and they were all blonde and healthy and they all had jobs. I had died and gone to musician’s heaven.

And if you think I am unfairly portraying the motivation of musicians, I can only answer – Hello? Once, when an old musician was asked what the most important thing in life was, he answered: “There are three and they all begin with an M.

There’s mmm…music,

mmm…money,

and mmm…girls!”

When a successful musician was asked by a car salesman if he was thinking of buying a Cadillac, he answered: “No. I AM going to buy a Cadillac. What I am thinking about is… girls!”

I realized that this represented a huge irony. Misguided music journalists continually parroted the idea that the guitar was the big phallic symbol of our age. Whereas in reality it was the accordion that was getting all the action!

In fact, the accordion must be one of the most misunderestimated (thank you, W) instruments of all time. There are hundreds of accordion jokes. (For instance: One guy left his accordion in an unlocked car. When he returned there were three more accordions.)

I know that you think Polka music is as square as you can get. It is. And that there is nothing cool or hip about an accordion. It is the anti-hip instrument.

This is music that makes you feel like invading Poland. That is why they call it the polka.

But here is the secret of the Polka, it's Da Vinci code, if you will. No, let’s call it the Polka code.

The Polka King can play one long song that winds its way through a hundred recognizable melodies that have all been Plolka-ed, slipping seamlessly from one to the other as the dance floor jumps up and down with happy, healthy people. And they stay on the floor because, like disco, the beat never changes. (Polka discovered that trick long before Studio 54.)

In their puffy shirts the guys in his band make out better than any of the bands in the so-called hip clubs and especially better than any of the musicians on endless tours tied to the corporate treadmill called Rock'n Roll.

I expect that it won’t be long into the future until kids figure this out and start picking up accordions and playing in small clubs. Their parents will be outraged. What’s wrong with the youth of today? They are all polka-ing.

On Facebook there is an expression which means “to get your attention.” It is: “I'm poking you.” This will soon be the title of a Grammy winning album: “The Poking Polka.”

The only other thing I noticed about the Polka King is that he doesn’t yodel. I guess once you cross that line, you leave music behind and enter Just for Laughs territory.