`American Bandstand' Got That Rock Music Rolling

PHILADELPHIA - In the late 1950s, John Jackson rushed home from school every day to watch fellow teens boogie on "American Bandstand" to new songs picked by Dick Clark.

"I don't know a teenager from the 1950s or early '60s who didn't watch Dick Clark," said Jackson, now 54, of Amity Harbor, N.Y. " `Bandstand' came from this magical world called Philadelphia, and every teenager in the country had that same experience at the same time."

It was Aug. 5, 1957, when ABC, sagging behind the other networks, reluctantly aired Clark's local TV show nationally. Clark and others will mark the 40th anniversary on Tuesday at the West Philadelphia studio where the show began its 30-year national run.

"It was a phenomenal thing. It could never happen again," Clark said from his office in Burbank, Calif.

Coming into American living rooms on weekday afternoons, Clark served as a smooth-talking, tie-wearing ambassador for rock 'n' roll to mothers watching with their teens.

"`American Bandstand' was a prime factor in making rock the popular music of America during the late '50s and the 1960s," said James Smith, a professor of English and American Studies at Pennsylvania State University-Abington.

The show became a reference point for the nation's youth, giving star status to regulars like Justine Carrelli and Bob Clayton who could start a trend with a simple clothing choice or a new dance step.

"That sort of defining what was hip and what it meant to be young and how you should look . . . there weren't really other sources of that information at that point," said Joe Gow, associate editor of Popular Music and Society, an academic journal.

" `American Bandstand' showed that you could have a television show that was targeted to younger people - the only audience that hadn't been targeted fully," Gow said.

To Clark, the show functioned as a national "corner drugstore" where rock 'n' roll was protected from assaults by the older generation. And more significantly to its host, where blacks and whites could dance together.

"It was the first time when white kids and black kids were seen in a social occasion, on a dance floor. Happened without protest. Happened in front of millions of people. That seems like a simple thing in the '90s, but it was a pretty daring thing in the '50s," Clark said.

Jackson, author of the upcoming book "American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire," said integration on the show was seamless but not immediate.

"In the '50s, there were very, very few blacks on `Bandstand,' " Jackson said. "As a white teenager, you could turn on `Bandstand' and it looked like there were no blacks in Philadelphia. To see two blacks or maybe none is just about segregated.

" `Bandstand' didn't have its first black regulars until 1965. It did happen, but it didn't happen overnight," he said.

Jackson offers the story of Chubby Checker's "The Twist" to illustrate the show's toning down of rock 'n' roll and its racial compromises.

Hank Ballard first put out "The Twist" as a B-side and it went nowhere. Clark heard the record and sensed its potential as a huge dance hit, Jackson said.

But Ballard, a black performer with a wild stage reputation, did not fit the button-down image of "American Bandstand," and Clark didn't want him on the show, Jackson said.

Instead, Clark turned to a friend with a record label that was about to dump Checker, whose career was foundering. Checker, another black, was considered a sanitized version of Ballard.

"They gave him this record to record," Jackson said.

That came around 1960, the height of the show's ability to catapult a song or a performer to the top of the charts, and the song took off.

"The `Bandstand' image had an impact on him," Jackson said.

After 1963, ABC cut the show from weekday afternoons to Saturdays. About the same time, Clark moved the show to Hollywood and began taping instead of broadcasting live as he focused more of his efforts on other projects.

The British invasion of the '60s and counter-culture music that decade didn't help "Bandstand," but the resurgence of dance music in the '70s gave the show a boost that carried it into the '80s.

The network dropped the show in 1987, though Clark kept it alive in syndication.