Richard Wagstaff "Dick" Clark was the most famous and important disc jockey of the twentieth century, particularly important in advancing and propagating rock and roll as a serious and vital form of modern music. He hosted the televised American Bandstand, first as a substitute for Bob Horn, and then alone from 1956 until 1988. American Bandstand was broadcast nationally beginning on August 5, 1957.
Dick Clark also served as a television character actor in the early 1960s, including the final episode of the original Perry Mason series, where his character was the villain. Clark also became an important television producer. He produced and hosted various game shows and collections of filmed highlights, especially bloopers. There is a patent rose named for him in his honor!
= = = = = from Wikipedia: = = = = =
Radio and Television
After graduating high school in 1947, Dick Clark started as an office worker at WRUN-AM in Rome, NY.
Almost immediately he was asked to fill in for the vacationing weatherman, and within a few months he was announcing station breaks. His quick rise may have been helped by the fact that his uncle owned the station and his father managed it.
Dick Clark received a degree from Syracuse University where he worked at WOLF, a country music station. He returned to WRUN for a short time where he used the name Dick Clay.
He went back to his given name and went to work for WFIL, a radio and affiliated television station in Philadelphia. The station decided to follow the trend of announcers playing records over the airwaves. The television station aired a show called Bandstand, an afternoon teen dance show. Clark was given the job as host and replaced Bob Horn.
Clark began his television career at station WKTV in Utica and was also subsequently a disc jockey on radio station WOLF in Syracuse. His first television-hosting job was on Cactus Dick and the Santa Fe Riders, a country-music program. He would later replace Robert Earle (who would later host the GE College Bowl) as a newscaster.
Clark was principal in radio 1440 KPRO in Riverside, California from 1962 to 1982. In the 1960s, he was owner of KGUD AM/FM (later KTYD AM/FM) in Santa Barbara, California.
American Bandstand
In 1952 Clark moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, more specifically to Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, and resided within the Drexelbrook Community where he was a neighbor with Ed McMahon. There he took a job as a disc jockey at radio station WFIL. WFIL had an affiliated television station (now WPVI) with the same call sign which began broadcasting a show called Bob Horn's Bandstand in 1952. Clark was a regular substitute host on the show and when Horn left, Clark became the full-time host on July 9, 1956. The show was picked up by the ABC television network, renamed American Bandstand, and was first aired nationally
on August 5, 1957. On that day, Clark interviewed Elvis Presley.
Clark also began investing in the music publishing and recording business in the 1950s. In 1959, the United States Senate opened investigations into payola, the practice of music-producing companies paying broadcasting companies to favor their product. Clark was a shareholder in the Jamie-Guyden Distributing Corporation, which nationally distributed Jamie and other non-owned labels. Clark sold his shares back to the corporation when ABC suggested that his participation might be considered as creating a conflict of interest. In 1960, when charges were levied against Clark by the Congressional Payola Investigations, he quietly divested himself of interests and signed an affidavit denying involvement. Clark was not charged with any illegal activities.
Unaffected by the investigation, American Bandstand was a major success, running daily Monday through Friday until 1963, then weekly on Saturdays until 1987. In 1964, the show moved from Philadelphia to Hollywood, California. Charlie O’Donnell, a close friend of Clark's and an up-and-coming fellow Philadelphia disc jockey, was chosen to be the announcer, a position he held for ten years. O'Donnell also announced on many 1980s versions of Clark's Pyramid game show; he continued to work with Clark on various specials and award shows until his death in November 2010.
Clark produced American Bandstand for syndicated television and later the USA Network, a cable-and-satellite-television channel, until 1989. Clark also hosted the program in 1987 and 1988; David Hirsch hosted in 1989, its final year. American Bandstand and Dick Clark himself were honored at the 2010 Daytime Emmy Awards.
Youthful appearance references
Before his stroke, Clark's perennial youthful appearance, despite his advancing years, was a subject of jokes and commentary in the popular culture, most notably his nickname of "America's Oldest Living Teenager".
One of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons has the caption, "Suddenly, on a national talk show in front of millions of viewers, Dick Clark ages 200 years in 30 seconds."
In Episode 320 of Mystery Science Theater 3000, John Carradine - playing a mad scientist in the movie The Unearthly - is trying to get another character to consider eternal life when he says, "Suppose you could wake up every morning and see your face untouched by time." Crow replies, "Like Dick Clark?"
In the Police Squad! episode "Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh)," Dick Clark, appearing as himself, purchases Secret Formula Youth Cream from street snitch Johnny the Shoeshine Boy.
In the film Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Kathleen Turner, who has time-traveled back to circa 1960, is watching Dick Clark on American Bandstand with her sister and says "That man never ages." Her sister doesn't seem
to understand what she means.
In The Simpsons 1999 Y2K episode, at midnight a computer glitch causes Dick Clark to melt and he is revealed to be a robot.
In an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Clark appears as himself. Carlton jokingly says "How come I got older and you stayed the same age."
Notable Awards
[There is a patent rose named for him -- the Dick Clark Grandiflora -- a 2011 All American Rose Selection winner (AARS -- a very prestigious designation) -- see http://www.weeksroses.com/rose_dick_clark.htm ]
Dick Clark rose
Clark has received the following awards:
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Positive Quiddity and Dick Clark
In Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show, Quiddity represents the greatest moments of life, a quick trip to the shore of creativity that occurs at birth, death and the first night with one’s true love. "Positive Quiddity" represents the highest level of human achievement as defined in this blog.
So why is a disc jockey turned game show producer and bloopers host like Dick Clark listed as an exemplar of positive quiddity?
It isn’t because of his hosting of the New Year’s Eve show for decades. It has to do with the first three years of the national television version of American Bandstand at the same time (1957 to 1960) as the payola scandal.
There’s an on-going heated argument about the origins of rock and roll. But if you know and grew up with boogie woogie (as I did) it is obvious that rock is boogie woogie with lyrics. The original boogie woogie lyrics were instructions to the dancers as can be heard in "Pinetop" Smith’s "Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie" [recorded in 1929 just before Smith died and still available as a cut on the Boogie Woogie Giants CD, ASIN B00004VMA6]. Boogie Woogie languished in the early 30s but this very song was picked up by the big bands in the late thirties. Boogie Woogie flourished, and Albert Ammons became the definitive boogie woogie piano player of the 1940s.
In 1949, a teenager with a perfect, smooth tenor voice and a boogie piano technique almost as good as Ammons, recorded a song, "The Fat Man," for an R&B label. The artist was Fats Domino, and his song was a hit on R&B stations. There were more hits. By 1954, some white bands were writing this kind of music, especially Bill Haley and the Comets with "Rock Around the Clock," a hit that was used a year later in the motion picture The Asphalt Jungle. This classic rock and roll of the 1950s was a combination of vocal singing with a boogie woogie beat was demonstrated by the appearances of Fats Domino on the program and by Doo Wop performers singing over a boogie woogie beat (not necessarily on the piano) as exemplified by The Platters, also a popular group that appeared on American Bandstand.
With R&B hits and motion picture inclusion, white teenagers were paying attention to rock and roll!
Mitch Miller, a trained classical oboist and executive with Columbia Records, hated rock and roll. He turned down Elvis Presley for a contract! Other industry heavyweights were on his side in stunting and killing off this new, snotty, fast growing form of jazz, which had a peculiar ability to attract and hypnotize young Americans.
And that wasn’t all. Southern evangelical and fundamentalist churches ranted about rock and roll from the pulpit. It was too sensual and too erotic. It caused young people to go out of control. Rock and roll was catching on with white teenagers! This satanic music must be stamped out. Public bonfires were lit into which congregations threw rock and roll vinyl records into the fire!
The music business was not a profoundly honest enterprise in those days. One way to promote a particular band was to pay a disc jockey to play it – "payola" -- and there was a lot of that going on in the mid-1950s.
Into this increasingly organized effort to mute or kill rock and roll at the beginning of a national scandal over crooked disc jockeys began, in August of 1957, a daily, nationwide, afternoon rock and roll television broadcast, American Bandstand with Dick Clark.
Dick Clark was young, handsome, great with a microphone and genuinely enthusiastic about rock and roll. He was more than peppy; he was respectful and impressed with the rhythm and blues artists that came on the program to lip-synch their hits.
Smear Dick Clark, knock him off the air, and rock and roll would have taken an enormous and potentially fatal hit. So that’s exactly what was done. He was accused of payola himself and dragged into a national scandal that included Congressional hearings and indictments.
The campaign against Dick Clark didn’t stick. Clark took over American Bandstand because the original host, Bob Horn, was picked up for drunk driving. Horn was also involved in a prostitution ring. The station couldn’t have someone with this record on television every afternoon with teenagers. Dick Clark was offered the job. All this happened a year before American Bandstand went national. By personal experience, Dick must have known that it was poison to develop a bad reputation and to cheat or engage in vice. Furthermore, he knew the business. He grew up with radio – his father was in the radio business since the 1920s.
On the air, Dick Clark’s respect and admiration for Fats Domino and the Doo Wop groups that came on American Bandstand were obvious to the television viewers. Clark steadily told interviewers that rock and roll was great art and a splendid way to bring music to the teenagers of America. He was calmly and consistently on the side of America’s young people.
Payola charges against Dick Clark weren’t any good and were dropped. American Bandstand stayed on the air. This made Clark, justifiably, a hero to teenagers and to young children like me. Here was a man who was "on our side" and stood by what he stubbornly and unconventionally regarded as high quality music.
Clark was never a musician himself. He was a great disc jockey – he knew what would catch on and what was a dud. He wanted his audience to have the best, the most interesting, the most memorable. And he couldn’t be pushed around about it.
Nor did he whine about being framed. Nor did he gloat when the false charges were dropped. So he had a future with the television industry. And he used his talent for spotting what the audience would like to bring to them the music they liked, the play they liked (game shows!) and some boisterous laughter (bloopers!).
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Footnote about the Theme Song
Charles Albertine, Les Elgart, Larry Elgart and Bob Horn (original host of the show in Philadelphia) wrote the American Bandstand theme, Bandstand Boogie. Albertine himself was the main arranger for Les and Larry Elgart (note the competition and hand-offs back and forth between the trumpet and saxophone in this instrumental). Dick Clark wisely retained this theme when he took over the program in 1956. Clark also frequently featured rock and roll instrumental music on American Bandstand.
Bandstand Boogie,which closed American Bandstand as the credits rolled, was an impossibly avante garde and modern piece of music for the early 1950s. It surely influenced Henry Mancini in writing the Peter Gunn theme and Pink Panther theme as well as Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme as arranged and conducted by John Barry.
Rock and roll still outsells the punk and hip-hop subgenera today. Rock is the most successful and universal form of jazz.
Dick Clark also served as a television character actor in the early 1960s, including the final episode of the original Perry Mason series, where his character was the villain. Clark also became an important television producer. He produced and hosted various game shows and collections of filmed highlights, especially bloopers. There is a patent rose named for him in his honor!
= = = = = from Wikipedia: = = = = =
Radio and Television
After graduating high school in 1947, Dick Clark started as an office worker at WRUN-AM in Rome, NY.
Almost immediately he was asked to fill in for the vacationing weatherman, and within a few months he was announcing station breaks. His quick rise may have been helped by the fact that his uncle owned the station and his father managed it.
Dick Clark received a degree from Syracuse University where he worked at WOLF, a country music station. He returned to WRUN for a short time where he used the name Dick Clay.
He went back to his given name and went to work for WFIL, a radio and affiliated television station in Philadelphia. The station decided to follow the trend of announcers playing records over the airwaves. The television station aired a show called Bandstand, an afternoon teen dance show. Clark was given the job as host and replaced Bob Horn.
Clark began his television career at station WKTV in Utica and was also subsequently a disc jockey on radio station WOLF in Syracuse. His first television-hosting job was on Cactus Dick and the Santa Fe Riders, a country-music program. He would later replace Robert Earle (who would later host the GE College Bowl) as a newscaster.
Clark was principal in radio 1440 KPRO in Riverside, California from 1962 to 1982. In the 1960s, he was owner of KGUD AM/FM (later KTYD AM/FM) in Santa Barbara, California.
American Bandstand
In 1952 Clark moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, more specifically to Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, and resided within the Drexelbrook Community where he was a neighbor with Ed McMahon. There he took a job as a disc jockey at radio station WFIL. WFIL had an affiliated television station (now WPVI) with the same call sign which began broadcasting a show called Bob Horn's Bandstand in 1952. Clark was a regular substitute host on the show and when Horn left, Clark became the full-time host on July 9, 1956. The show was picked up by the ABC television network, renamed American Bandstand, and was first aired nationally
on August 5, 1957. On that day, Clark interviewed Elvis Presley.
Clark also began investing in the music publishing and recording business in the 1950s. In 1959, the United States Senate opened investigations into payola, the practice of music-producing companies paying broadcasting companies to favor their product. Clark was a shareholder in the Jamie-Guyden Distributing Corporation, which nationally distributed Jamie and other non-owned labels. Clark sold his shares back to the corporation when ABC suggested that his participation might be considered as creating a conflict of interest. In 1960, when charges were levied against Clark by the Congressional Payola Investigations, he quietly divested himself of interests and signed an affidavit denying involvement. Clark was not charged with any illegal activities.
Unaffected by the investigation, American Bandstand was a major success, running daily Monday through Friday until 1963, then weekly on Saturdays until 1987. In 1964, the show moved from Philadelphia to Hollywood, California. Charlie O’Donnell, a close friend of Clark's and an up-and-coming fellow Philadelphia disc jockey, was chosen to be the announcer, a position he held for ten years. O'Donnell also announced on many 1980s versions of Clark's Pyramid game show; he continued to work with Clark on various specials and award shows until his death in November 2010.
Clark produced American Bandstand for syndicated television and later the USA Network, a cable-and-satellite-television channel, until 1989. Clark also hosted the program in 1987 and 1988; David Hirsch hosted in 1989, its final year. American Bandstand and Dick Clark himself were honored at the 2010 Daytime Emmy Awards.
Youthful appearance references
Before his stroke, Clark's perennial youthful appearance, despite his advancing years, was a subject of jokes and commentary in the popular culture, most notably his nickname of "America's Oldest Living Teenager".
One of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons has the caption, "Suddenly, on a national talk show in front of millions of viewers, Dick Clark ages 200 years in 30 seconds."
In Episode 320 of Mystery Science Theater 3000, John Carradine - playing a mad scientist in the movie The Unearthly - is trying to get another character to consider eternal life when he says, "Suppose you could wake up every morning and see your face untouched by time." Crow replies, "Like Dick Clark?"
In the Police Squad! episode "Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh)," Dick Clark, appearing as himself, purchases Secret Formula Youth Cream from street snitch Johnny the Shoeshine Boy.
In the film Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Kathleen Turner, who has time-traveled back to circa 1960, is watching Dick Clark on American Bandstand with her sister and says "That man never ages." Her sister doesn't seem
to understand what she means.
In The Simpsons 1999 Y2K episode, at midnight a computer glitch causes Dick Clark to melt and he is revealed to be a robot.
In an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Clark appears as himself. Carlton jokingly says "How come I got older and you stayed the same age."
Notable Awards
[There is a patent rose named for him -- the Dick Clark Grandiflora -- a 2011 All American Rose Selection winner (AARS -- a very prestigious designation) -- see http://www.weeksroses.com/rose_dick_clark.htm ]
Clark has received the following awards:
- Emmy Awards (1979, 1983, 1985, and 1986)
- Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award (1994)
- Peabody Award (1999)
- Hollywood Walk of Fame (1976)
- National Radio Hall of Fame (1990)
- Broadcasting Magazine Hall of Fame (1992)
- Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1993)
- Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame (1993)
Dick Clark, 1961
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Positive Quiddity and Dick Clark
In Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show, Quiddity represents the greatest moments of life, a quick trip to the shore of creativity that occurs at birth, death and the first night with one’s true love. "Positive Quiddity" represents the highest level of human achievement as defined in this blog.
So why is a disc jockey turned game show producer and bloopers host like Dick Clark listed as an exemplar of positive quiddity?
It isn’t because of his hosting of the New Year’s Eve show for decades. It has to do with the first three years of the national television version of American Bandstand at the same time (1957 to 1960) as the payola scandal.
There’s an on-going heated argument about the origins of rock and roll. But if you know and grew up with boogie woogie (as I did) it is obvious that rock is boogie woogie with lyrics. The original boogie woogie lyrics were instructions to the dancers as can be heard in "Pinetop" Smith’s "Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie" [recorded in 1929 just before Smith died and still available as a cut on the Boogie Woogie Giants CD, ASIN B00004VMA6]. Boogie Woogie languished in the early 30s but this very song was picked up by the big bands in the late thirties. Boogie Woogie flourished, and Albert Ammons became the definitive boogie woogie piano player of the 1940s.
In 1949, a teenager with a perfect, smooth tenor voice and a boogie piano technique almost as good as Ammons, recorded a song, "The Fat Man," for an R&B label. The artist was Fats Domino, and his song was a hit on R&B stations. There were more hits. By 1954, some white bands were writing this kind of music, especially Bill Haley and the Comets with "Rock Around the Clock," a hit that was used a year later in the motion picture The Asphalt Jungle. This classic rock and roll of the 1950s was a combination of vocal singing with a boogie woogie beat was demonstrated by the appearances of Fats Domino on the program and by Doo Wop performers singing over a boogie woogie beat (not necessarily on the piano) as exemplified by The Platters, also a popular group that appeared on American Bandstand.
With R&B hits and motion picture inclusion, white teenagers were paying attention to rock and roll!
Mitch Miller, a trained classical oboist and executive with Columbia Records, hated rock and roll. He turned down Elvis Presley for a contract! Other industry heavyweights were on his side in stunting and killing off this new, snotty, fast growing form of jazz, which had a peculiar ability to attract and hypnotize young Americans.
And that wasn’t all. Southern evangelical and fundamentalist churches ranted about rock and roll from the pulpit. It was too sensual and too erotic. It caused young people to go out of control. Rock and roll was catching on with white teenagers! This satanic music must be stamped out. Public bonfires were lit into which congregations threw rock and roll vinyl records into the fire!
The music business was not a profoundly honest enterprise in those days. One way to promote a particular band was to pay a disc jockey to play it – "payola" -- and there was a lot of that going on in the mid-1950s.
Into this increasingly organized effort to mute or kill rock and roll at the beginning of a national scandal over crooked disc jockeys began, in August of 1957, a daily, nationwide, afternoon rock and roll television broadcast, American Bandstand with Dick Clark.
Dick Clark was young, handsome, great with a microphone and genuinely enthusiastic about rock and roll. He was more than peppy; he was respectful and impressed with the rhythm and blues artists that came on the program to lip-synch their hits.
Smear Dick Clark, knock him off the air, and rock and roll would have taken an enormous and potentially fatal hit. So that’s exactly what was done. He was accused of payola himself and dragged into a national scandal that included Congressional hearings and indictments.
The campaign against Dick Clark didn’t stick. Clark took over American Bandstand because the original host, Bob Horn, was picked up for drunk driving. Horn was also involved in a prostitution ring. The station couldn’t have someone with this record on television every afternoon with teenagers. Dick Clark was offered the job. All this happened a year before American Bandstand went national. By personal experience, Dick must have known that it was poison to develop a bad reputation and to cheat or engage in vice. Furthermore, he knew the business. He grew up with radio – his father was in the radio business since the 1920s.
On the air, Dick Clark’s respect and admiration for Fats Domino and the Doo Wop groups that came on American Bandstand were obvious to the television viewers. Clark steadily told interviewers that rock and roll was great art and a splendid way to bring music to the teenagers of America. He was calmly and consistently on the side of America’s young people.
Payola charges against Dick Clark weren’t any good and were dropped. American Bandstand stayed on the air. This made Clark, justifiably, a hero to teenagers and to young children like me. Here was a man who was "on our side" and stood by what he stubbornly and unconventionally regarded as high quality music.
Clark was never a musician himself. He was a great disc jockey – he knew what would catch on and what was a dud. He wanted his audience to have the best, the most interesting, the most memorable. And he couldn’t be pushed around about it.
Nor did he whine about being framed. Nor did he gloat when the false charges were dropped. So he had a future with the television industry. And he used his talent for spotting what the audience would like to bring to them the music they liked, the play they liked (game shows!) and some boisterous laughter (bloopers!).
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Footnote about the Theme Song
Charles Albertine, Les Elgart, Larry Elgart and Bob Horn (original host of the show in Philadelphia) wrote the American Bandstand theme, Bandstand Boogie. Albertine himself was the main arranger for Les and Larry Elgart (note the competition and hand-offs back and forth between the trumpet and saxophone in this instrumental). Dick Clark wisely retained this theme when he took over the program in 1956. Clark also frequently featured rock and roll instrumental music on American Bandstand.
Bandstand Boogie,which closed American Bandstand as the credits rolled, was an impossibly avante garde and modern piece of music for the early 1950s. It surely influenced Henry Mancini in writing the Peter Gunn theme and Pink Panther theme as well as Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme as arranged and conducted by John Barry.
Rock and roll still outsells the punk and hip-hop subgenera today. Rock is the most successful and universal form of jazz.
No comments:
Post a Comment