Dick Clark: He 'got America dancing'

A life as long, influential and bountiful as Dick Clark’s cannot be given the appropriate amount of detail or put into the proper context in a dozen paragraphs or several hundred words.

Clark, who died of a heart attack Wednesday morning in California at age 82, was a shrewd businessman, a savvy trendsetter and a keen arbiter and peddler of fashion, entertainment and music in mainstream America. One of his most famous quotes: “I don’t make culture, I sell it.”

And sell it he did, like some combination of Pat Boone and P.T. Barnum. Clark has been one of our pop culture’s most recognizable and enduring faces and personalities since the mid-1950s, when he took over “Bandstand” from a colleague and fellow Philadelphia DJ named Bob Horn and turned it into a TV juggernaut and his own cash cow.

In his book “TV-A Go-Go: Rock on TV from American Bandstand to American Idol,” Jake Austen wrote of Clark: “If Clark is guilty of anything, it’s being a serial capitalist. It just so happened that the tool that best suited his dollar-bills-in-the-eyes ambitions also happened to be the show that got America dancing.”

Clark, a native of Mount Vernon, N.Y., was a sleek but warm combination of youthful good looks, impeccable manners and squeaky-clean personality that abided by his nickname: America’s oldest teenager. He also had a smooth, sonorous voice. His image was the antithesis to personas like the riotous Alan “Moondog” Freed. Once Clark hit the national airwaves, parents trusted him. Teenagers submitted to his innocuous charm.

He was also deep into the play-for-pay game that was standard in the recording industry before “payola” became a dirty word and Congress went after guys like Freed, Clark and others.

Clark emerged unscathed, except at his TV network, ABC, which told him to pick either “American Bandstand” or his music industry holdings. He picked the show.

In the ensuing decades, he built a vast entertainment empire via Dick Clark Productions. His resume includes various roles as producer or host of game shows such as “$10,000 Pyramid” and award shows such as the American Music Awards.

For three decades, he was the face of “Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve,” an annual Times Square countdown tradition for millions of Americans. He missed only one year — 2004, after he’d suffered a stroke.

He also started his own chain of restaurants, Dick Clark American Bandstand Grill, for which he was a target of filmmaker Michael Moore in the 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine” over pay and working conditions in one of the restaurants.

But it is “American Bandstand” for which Clark will be best-known and most revered — a show that ran from 1957 to ’87 and was memorialized in the 1958 Chuck Berry hit “Sweet Little Sixteen”: “They’ll be rockin’ on ‘Bandstand,’ Philadelphia, P.A.”

Clark has been chastised in some corners for initially favoring white, pretty-boy crooners, like Fabian, Gene Vincent and Frankie Avalon. The show was also slow to integrate its field of young dancers.

It wasn’t until 1965 that “Bandstand” featured its first prominent African-American dancer, Famous Hooks. In 1991, Hooks told the Los Angeles Times, “It was the most fun of my life. I met so many people and did so many things. Because of my image, I couldn’t have been bad if I tried.”

By 1965, according to Austen, about 35 percent of the music on “Bandstand” was by African-American artists. Clark has admitted he tried to keep things wholesome, away from the more rebellious side of rock ’n’ roll and acceptable to parents and adults, but the list of bands and artists who have performed on “Bandstand” is vast and impressive.

Clark never indulged Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, the Who or the Beatles, but his guest list included legends such as Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys, the Miracles, Ike and Tina Turner, the Four Tops, Jackie Wilson and Simon and Garfunkel.

He also hosted latter-day stars including Madonna and Prince. There’s a great YouTube video out of a 1966 episode of “Bandstand” featuring an interview with Don Van Vliet and then the show’s dancers bouncing along politely to Captain Beefheart’s “Diddy Wah Diddy.”

Rock critic Lester Bangs once called the show “a leggily acceptable euphemism of the teenage experience” — a fair and fitting description.

But even to those of us who would move on to other more progressive music showcases like “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert,” “The Midnight Special,” “Soul Train” and then MTV, “Bandstand” was an initial gathering point, a place to hear new music or connect with bands and performers we’d already heard, a safe place where teenage abandon showed up well-dressed and was expressed orderly and in good manners.

In his own very businesslike way, Clark made what he was selling — what he had cast in his own image — appetizing, hard to resist and memorable.

| Timothy Finn, The Star

Comments

[pellboy]

Good meter and I can nod my head to it. I'll give your DC writeup a solid 75!

[Ron]

RIP Dick Clark
Thank you for all of the great memories.

ps
Have fun up there entertaining heaven with Don Cornelius, it should be a blast. I wonder, will it be dual stages or every other night?

pps
and if I am wrong about which direction, well Angus says it aint a bad place to be.

[omni]

Safe, dull, boring - everything that's wrong with the mainstream music industry.

[slashnburn]

thank you omni

[Gramps]

Ah to be young, illiterate, rude and classless. Stupid children, learn your history, dont stomp around in grave yards and have some respect for the dead and their obits.

If Dick Clark does not play it cool to start with back in the 1960s, then rock and roll never gets past Network censors and rock and roll never gets put on TV, then what else never happens?

[wadkc]

While on the show in the early 80's, I got to see "live" Oingo Boingo, Jeffrey Osbourne, X and Billy Idol and a few more I don't recall. That's a pretty good diverse group for a safe show. I remembered the anticipation of him walking to the podium and talking for the first take. They tell you to keep dancing and not stare or they won't shoot you but I couldn't help myself!

[Dancing On TV]

Check out a recent video by a band that played at the Riot Room a couple of weeks ago that honors old TV shows featuring people dancing on TV. Appropriately titled, Dancing On TV
http://youtu.be/C4nZfjQYgEs