DICK CLARK HAS FEW FRUSTRATIONS. But the man who's had things go his way for twenty years-who fell into the Bandstand job through other people's mistakes; who emerged from the central depths of the fifties payola scandal as the Clearasil-clean millionaire prince of rock and roll (while the King, Alan Freed, died penniless): who considers himself "just a bystander" in today's drugola mess; who's built an entertainment empire covering TV, radio, films, concert promotions and corporate consultant work in the field of youth-is upset.
Standing behind a bar in his Malibu beach house after barbecuing and eating a steak dinner, he gets mixed up with his Japanese dessert, and he dips his strawberry into the brown sugar instead of the sour cream first, and he makes a face. Wrinkles show around the eyes, and the 43-year-old who looks thirtyish suddenly looks fortyish.
The subject is a movie he badly wants to do, has spent four years trying to put together. Called The Years of Rock, it would be "the definitive study of what happened in twenty years of rock and roll." But more important, it would relieve Dick Clark of one of his other frustrations.
"I got to do this film," he said, "because I don't want to be remembered for doing a medley of my Clearasil commercials. My youngest kid says to me...`Tell me about the olden days.' And I want to be able to pull out a piece of film and say, 'That was what it was all about. That's why you are like you are today."' And right now, that film is nowhere, except for a thirteen-minute sampler financed by Warner Bros., which has since dropped out of the project. "They got discouraged with the failure of all the other music films."
Another problem is getting twenty years of stars to participate. "There are 1,200 clearances involved in that film, if we ever get it made. The damn thing's got to be a labor of love, because it's such a drainer. I mean, you sit for hours and hours and caress people's egos. You'll beg them to please let you have a little piece so you can represent them. It's really strange: you run into all sorts of reactions. Some people say, `How much time can I get?' Others say, 'How little can I give you?' I had four meetings with Mick Jagger about the footage that he wanted to see. Bob Dylan says, `Fine, just let me see the pieces and whatnot."'
But, of course, this episode in Dick Clark's career has an upbeat little twist. Even if the movie is in limbo, he's got this album out, timed with all the recent promotion of his televised celebration of American Bandstand's twentieth anniversary, an oldies package on Buddah Records called Dick Clark: 20 Years of Rock and Roll. It has just been certified gold-`A legitimate half-million seller," he said proudly.
It is not Clark's first big record, and, as for the word "legitimate"-well, he brought it up.
As the man running the most influential record show in America in the late fifties, young Dick Clark, as one disc jockey working in Philadelphia at that time put it, "had a piece of everything." In the fifties, payola was not illegal; you broke the law only if you failed to pay taxes on such income. Clark, the Philly DJ was saying, had a price. "He really put them up against the wall, and he was never reasonable about how much ...he always wanted half the publishing and three cents a record, and..."
And so, it is said, in the transcripts of the House Legislative Oversight Subcommittee hearings on payola in 1960, Dick Clark had some hits. He owned or part-owned thirty-three corporations in the music business-record companies, publishing firms, and record pressing plants. He got the copyright on the Crests' "Sixteen Candles" and played it heavily on Bandstand and earned $12,000 in royalties. All together, he got the copyrights to 160 songs, 143 of them as "gifts." Clark explained: "If you were a songwriter then and you had a song, you'd want me to own it because I could do the best by it. That's just good business."
Philadelphia, home of Bandstand, dictator of the dances, the fashions, and the record-buying habits of teenagers all over America, was riddled with payola. Dick Clark, professing his innocence from the beginning, weathered a seven-month investigation and then sailed through the hearings as calmly as if they were just ...TV shows. At the end of the sessions, the chairman of the committee called him "a fine young man."
How did he do it? Said Clark: "I had done nothing illegal or immoral. I had made a great deal of money and I was proud of it. I was a capitalist." No more, no less. Said the Philadelphia radio veteran: "Clark was no cleaner than anybody else. They never even got into half the shit that Clark did, because he was sitting before a committee that, when the cameras were shut off, all the Congressmen would rush up to ask for his autograph for their daughters. It was a total fucking joke." So how did he do it? "The same way that all the bastards that are testifying in the Watergate thing will all end up running large corporations, they look so good."
Dick Clark hoped that the payola issue wouldn't dominate a piece on his twenty years in the business. He could even see the headline: Old Payola King Talks About New Payola. And he didn't want that; didn't want to add to the gas.
"We're far removed from that mainstream of music commerce today," was about all he would say. The payola hearings of thirteen years ago followed government investigations of Jimmy Hoffa and TV quiz shows, and Clark has been quoted as calling the payola hearings "just politics. An election year and all; they were just looking for headlines." Did he feel the same about the "drugola" talk now getting senatorial attention? "I don't know if it was politically timed," he said, "but I know when it'll explode. When Watergate is over."
The story of how Dick Clark emerged out of those 1960 hearings looking so ific- as his finger-snapping, Beechnut-cracking, side-swaying teen galleries would have put it-is a large part of the story of Dick Clark.
Dick had wanted to be a disc jockey since age 13. after he saw Gary Moore and Jimmy Durante doing a radio program; he went to Syracuse University, and in his first year got a spot on the campus station. For his audition, he did an imitation of a radio announcer. He did impersonations in high school, he said, "to get over a terrible inferiority complex.. .1 was not physically terribly attractive. I was skinny and I had a lot of pimples like everybody else did, and I was going through that teenage thing of `I don't want to get involved with too many people."' His mimicry was apparently enough to cover up some of the blemishes, and Clark got elected class president in his senior year.
At Syracuse, he studied business administration, majoring in advertising and minoring in radio. After college, he bounced around in DJ and newscaster jobs at radio and TV stations in Syracuse and Utica, New York, where he earned $ 52.50 a week.
In late 1951, he moved to Philadelphia. Clark skipped right into the story of how he was actually the third man to stand behind the podium of what was then Philadelphia Bandstand; how the two original hosts started the show in 1952, and how he got tapped as the solo host in August 1957.
But first things first.
Another radio announcer who was there recalled Clark's beginnings. "He was hired onto WFIL radio as a summer replacement. I think the manager and Dick Clark's father co-owned a TV station in Utica or Syracuse. Anyway, he was the second of two guys hired, and after the summer, they had to drop one of them. Normally, the first one would have stayed, but he used to do a network feed from the Epiphany Church, and every time he did it, he'd mispronounce it as the 'Epi-fanny Church.' So they fired him for that, and Dick got to stay."
The star of the station, longtime nighttime DJ Bob Horn, was teamed up with a rotund television pitchman, Lee Stewart, on WFIL-TV, Clark recounted-"almost like a disc jockey comedy-oriented team, because they had nothing to fill in the afternoon on the station.
"I can remember those guys walking around the music library, practically saying, `What the hell are we going to do?' And they had old musical films of people like George Shearing, Peggy Lee, and Nat Cole. They determined they would play some of those. They would make calls to viewers at home, and interview guests that came to the studio. They asked to have a studio audience. The studio was at 46th and Market Street in Philadelphia. It was out of the way. The only people in the area were the girls who went to West Catholic High School.
So the only people that came by that first Monday or Tuesday were little girls in their Catholic school uniforms who sat in the studio bored to tears. And the music films came up, and they said, `Could we dance?' So the two girls would dance together. A bright-eyed cameraman turned the camera on the girls, and the director said, `That's interesting,' and punched it up. Couple of people called in and said, 'That's fun, let's watch the kids dance while the films or the records play.' By the end of the week, the response was overwhelming. And then they remembered that in the movies, people never really sang, they did a lip synchronization. So they brought artists in and they would mime their records. And the format never changed in twenty years.
"When I started, the big stars were Joni James, Patti Page. Eddie Fisher, the Four Aces. It had nothing to do with rock and roll music, because there wasn't any. There were also jazz and blues. Dizzy Gillespie had a song that played. LaVern Baker was there constantly. So, between Alan Freed in Cleveland and Bob Horn and Lee Stewart in Philadelphia and George `Hound Dog' Lorenz in Buffalo, they began to find out that white kids liked black music. It's a very significant period of time, before I got there."
Philadelphia Bandstand sometimes drew 60 percent of the daytime audience, and the dance party format began spreading around the country. Rock and roll was beginning to pay off, and Bob Horn was one of the first ones paid. As Tom Donahue said in the book, The Deejays. Horn was "the closest thing to a Roman Emperor I've ever known." Donahue worked at WIBG in Philadelphia through the fifties and saw a lot of payola money flying around. "Horn," he said, "was making a lot of money."
Horn was also forced to work with this skinny kid. "Bob Horn and I," said Clark, "did a radio DJ show in the afternoon the same time the TV show was on. He would come on and do the first fifteen or twenty minutes with me. He was the shill, the wellknown disc jockey the station used so that they could sell it, and hopefully draw an audience. Then he'd split and do a TV show, and I did the rest of the show, and he would occasionally come in and do a fifteen-minute thing at the end. It was a bad setup. He was being used, and he didn't like it. He didn't like me. He made it abundantly apparent that he hated every minute of it, and I can see why, in retrospect."
Horn, who didn't like Lee Stewart much, either, did not have to share a studio with Clark for long. In 19 5 6, as Donahue remembered, Horn was arrested for drunken driving. "He could not stop, getting busted driving a hundred miles an hour. Also, young girls..."
Horn was accused of statutory rape with a 14 year-old girl, herself alleged to be part of a teenage vice ring. Horn was also in trouble over charges of tax evasion on payola income. He was acquitted of rape, but the payola (he was the first DJ to be convicted) and the drunken driving did him in. WFIL's owners also owned the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the paper was conducting an anti-drunk driving campaign when Horn hit 100 on the speedometer. In July 1956, the station picked the clean cut 26 year-old Dick Clark to take over Bandstand.
Clark says he was still a naive young man. All he knew was that Horn didn't seem to like kids much, and so, if he were to succeed, he would have to get along with them. But not so well that he might be accused, as he so gingerly put it, of "jumping on one of those 13-year-olds in there." He eschewed the rocket-powered, rhythm `n' rhyming bebop talk prevalent among radio jocks in the fifties. He wore a coat and tie and kept his hair short and bear-greased. "Pretty much what you saw was Dick Clark according to the mores of the times," he says. "I was cast as an All-American boy, and although I smoked and drank and swore and all of that in private life, that was not presentable on television. That was the myth that was built up. But other than that, that was pretty much me."
Clark got rich quick. In his first year, he says, he combined his still-paltry WFIL salary with enough work at record hops to come out with "at least $ 50.000." When the station began plans to hook up as an affiliate of ABC-TV, and possibly replace Bandstand with whatever the network fed it, Clark scurried up to New York to pitch the network on his dance party. After much hounding, the heads of ABC began to serious ly consider the show. Clark snuck a friend, a record promoter who pretended to be a sponsor, into a meeting and who reported back to Clark: They thought he had droopy eyes, and the show had a lousy set, but network quality lighting and staging could make it-and him-work. They agreed to send Bandstand out to sixty-seven affiliated stations.
`And in order to show them that we had people watching, in the first three or four days we were on, we ran a contest on `Why I'd Like a Date with Sal Mineo.' It drew forty thousand pieces of mail."
Bandstand-American Bandstand-was on its way, and when the show hit teenaged America, they ...well, they caught the beat, and they could dance to it. Suddenly, along with Dig magazine, sock hops, soda shop jukeboxes, and drive-ins, they had their own TV show.
American Bandstand consistently presented the big artists, lip-synching them at the rate of two a day, ten a week. There inevitably arose the need for new artists, andinevitably-they came from Philly.
"Man, everybody sang in South Philadelphia," said Jerry Stevens, who joined WIBG in 1960, after the payola rumble and the subsequent departure of several "Wibbage" big guns. "It was a third-class, hang-around-the-drug-store scene. People like Jimmy Darren, Fabian and Frankie Avalon-they all lived in the same row of houses."
"Philadelphia," said Tom Donahue, "was always an incredibly good market in that you get a big record, you could sell a hundred thousand in town." And, of course, Bandstand attracted newly established artists for their first television appearances, and those included Johnny Mathis, Neil Diamond, Fats Domino, and a crew-cut duo called Tom and Jerry, who later changed their names to Simon and Garfunkel.
The other thing everyone watched for on Bandstand could have been called, As the I.D. Bracelet Turns, or The Regulars. Kenny Rossi and Arlene Sullivan, Bob Clayton and Justine Corelli, the blondes, Pat Molitierri, Franny Giordano and Carol Ann Scaleferri chief among them.
"They became the stars," said Clark. "Within a year they were drawing fifteen thousand pieces of mail a week. People would look in and fantasize about what was happening. Just the images and you'd say, `Oooh, look at the look she gave him.' `They're not holding hands today,' or whatever, and they'd do this whole mind trip. It became a national phenomenon."
In 19 5 8, Clark began commuting to New York. It was really the big time now, the Dick Clark Show, Saturday nights from the Little Theater. Here, pop stars performed to a seated, nondancing audience and to another audience: in six million homes around the country watching Clark, the Royal Teens, Dion and the Belmonts, and Connie Francis, while the girls snapped the sponsor's gum and wore big green and white buttons reading "IFIC"-a slang word coined by the company.
Saturday night lasted two years, and Clark became a millionaire. He was getting smarter all the time, but on the air, he maintained himself as a straight, bland MC, smoothly leaning towards the camera to start each show, mastering the short, inoffensive interview, never outright defending either teenagers or rock and roll. He was the understanding older brother, and only once, in the trade papers, did he speak out, against Mitch Miller, the pop head at Columbia Records who railed against rock and roll at a DJ convention in Kansas City in 1958 and chastised radio for abdicating to "the preshave crowd that makes up 12 percent of the country's population and zero percent of its buying power, once you eliminate the ponytail ribbons, Popsicles, and peanut brittle."
"He was grinding his ax that was going dull at the time," said Clark, "and that's sheer business, man. When somebody jeopardizes your way of living, then you've got to quick run in there and take care of business."
DICK CLARK SITS BACK ON HIS MALIBU FLOOR, against a fur-covered stool, and shakes his head. I am railing at a buddy of his, a record company president who purged "drug-oriented" groups off his label, then released Grateful Dead material months later, when the Dead were high on the charts. He rereleased ten R&B stiffs under the title The History of Soul when black music began to dominate pop charts. Clark reasons that,
in business, anything goes, "as long as you can sleep with yourself at night." I shake my head, slowly.
"The problem," says Clark, "is that you're an idealist, and I'm a fucking whore."
When they hauled Dick Clark before the House Subcommittee, he showed them just how much he slept, and how wide awake he could be. Accused of favoring records in which he had a financial interest, he hired Computek, a firm that did consulting for the U.S. government, to check his records.
"I'll show you how fucking innocent I was," said Clark. "They [the government] went to one of the biggest broadcasting chains in the world that was riddled with payola. They arrived on a Thursday night, said, 'We'll be back tomorrow to examine the logs.' When they went back on Friday, there weren't any logs. They had disappeared. . .and it all went, zappo, to Dick Clark, 2 7-year-old cat in Philadelphia. `You want the records? Here they are! Look at them!' I could've burned those motherfuckers in two minutes. I had them examined; the examiner said, `You're right, you're straight.' They thought, `How could a kid in Philadelphia make that much money?' They thought people came in with bag loads of cash and put it in my office. I found a better way to do it: to be in the music business. It was offensive to me, they thought I was that ignorant."
And the fact that one of his labels admitted paying people to play records-"that blew their minds, but that's not what they were after. They wanted to prove I was the taker of bribes."
Clark ended up dumping his corporations. "It was called `with a shotgun to your head.' Which would you like to be, in the music business or the television business?" Clark scratched lightly at his hair. "Do you have any idea what those would be worth now? Who could predict that in another dozen years the industry would be a $2 billion a year business? I made the wrong choice!"
In the end, said Clark, "the Chairman, Oren Harris, said something about the fact that you're a bright young man, and I hope we haven't inconvenienced you. `Inconvenienced'? Hell, they took my right testicle and almost my left!"
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 24