From:   "Dik de Heer" 
Date:  Sat Nov 30, 2002  7:14 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Dick Clark
 
DICK CLARK

Born Richard Wagstaff Clark, 30 November 1929, Mt. Vernon, New York

With a career spanning fifty years, Dick Clark is one of television's most
successful entrepreneurs of program production.
As a teenager, Clark began his career in broadcasting in 1945 in the
mailroom of station WRUN in Utica, New York, working his way up to
weatherman and then newsman. After graduating from Syracuse University
in 1951, Clark moved from radio into television broadcasting at station
WKTV in Utica. Here, Clark hosted Cactus Dick and the Santa Fe Riders,
a country music program which became the training ground for his later
television hosting persona. In 1952, Clark moved to Philadelphia and radio
station WFIL as a disc jockey for Dick Clark's Caravan of Music. At that
time, WFIL was affiliated with a television station which carried Bandstand,
an afternoon teen dance show. Clark often substituted for Bob Horn, the
show's regular host. When Horn was jailed for drunken driving in 1956,
Clark took over as permanent host, boosting Bandstand into Philadelphia's
best-known afternoon show. From that point on, he became a fixture in the
American television broadcasting arena.
In 1957, the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) picked up the program
for its daytime schedule, changing the name to American Bandstand. As a
cornerstone of the afternoon lineup through 1963, the program was a boon for
ABC, an inexpensively produced success for the network's target audience of
youthful demographics. From 1963 through 1987, American Bandstand ran on
a weekly basis to become one of the longest running shows in broadcast
television.
In addition to Clark's hosting and producing duties for American Bandstand,
he began to diversify in the 1950s by moving into the music publishing and
recording industries. However, by the end of 1959, the federal government
began to scrutinize Clark for a possible conflict between his broadcasting
interests and his publishing and recording interests. At that time, payola,
the practice of music industry companies paying disc jockeys to play new
records, was widespread throughout radio broadcasting. Clark, with the
cultural scope of his network television program, became the prime target
(along with Alan Freed) of the Congressional investigation into this illegal
activity. Pressured by ABC to make a choice between broadcast and music
industry interests, Clark opted for the former, divesting himself of his
interests
in publishing and recording companies. Even though Clark was cleared of any
illegal behavior, he had to testify before the Congressional Committee on payola
practices in 1960.
A somewhat tarnished reputation did not hinder Clark's further success in
the area of broadcast programming and film production with Dick Clark
Productions. DCP produced Where the Action Is, another daily teenage
music show, during the late 1960s, as well as feature exploitation films
such as Psych-Out, The Savage Seven and Killers Three. At this time,
Clark also moved into the game show arena with Missing Links and The
Object Is, culminating in the late 1970s with The $25,000 Pyramid.
Often criticized for the lack of quality in DCP programs, Clark points to
the networks and the audiences as the index of that quality. He gives them
what they want. In an interview in Newsweek magazine in 1986, Clark points
out, "If I were given the assignment of doing a classical-music hour for
PBS, it would be exquisite and beautifully done." Despite the boyish good
looks and charm that are the identifying characteristics of this American
icon, it is Clark's economically efficient business savvy and his uncanny
ability to measure the American public's cultural mood that have been his
most important assets in television broadcasting.
As a rock & roll figure, Clark played a major role in pushing the music
toward respectability - for better and worse. The clean-cut production
values of American Bandstand, supported by Clark's own persona, made
rock 'n' roll (not to mention racially integrated dancing) seem less threatening
to many adults, and provided significant national exposure for countless
artists. On the other hand, Dick Clark - never a tremendous rock & roll fan
himself - also helped tame the wildness of early rock & roll by favouring
more straight pop and teen-idol fare, sending the music into a doldrums
only salvaged by the British Invasion.

More info: http://www.fiftiesweb.com/bandstnd.htm
Book: John A. Jackson, American Bandstand : Dick Clark and the making
of a rock 'n' roll empire. New York : Oxford University Press, 1997.
Also recommended is Jim Dawson's "The Twist" (1995), which has already
been mentioned in the bios of Kal Mann, Chubby Checker and Hank Ballard,
and in which Clark plays a central (not very positive) role.