Dick Clark

You might think it wouldn’t be difficult to find a hook for an article about Dick Clark. However, the thing with him is that he was always there. He got started on TV when my mother was young, and he just kept doing the same things over and over until my firstborn was a child. Mom was older when Dick Clark got started than my firstborn was when Dick Clark stopped going on TV—after a stroke that made it difficult for him to speak—but that’s still three generations of my family who could have watched Dick Clark live.

In fact, like many of his generation, he got started in radio. The year after my mother was born, he started working for a station in Utica, New York, owned by his uncle and managed by his father. By 1952, he was on TV. He was a DJ for WFIL in Philadelphia, now a Christian station but at the time popular music. The station had a show called Bob Horn’s Bandstand, and when Bob Horn was fired for drunk driving, Dick Clark got the job. That was it. That was where he launched.

That was back in the days when rock and roll was evil. Kids loved it, but the adults were horrified. And here was a TV show that hosted a couple of live rock performances every single episode. What helped was that Dick Clark was the most wholesome-looking white dude you’ve ever seen. He wasn’t going to get arrested for drunk driving; he very seldom drank, even while hosting New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. He was pure and wholesome and still associated with Satan apparently because of The Devil’s Music.

And my goodness was he involved in it. There were over ten thousand live performances on American Bandstand. I assume it’s different now, but in the ‘90s, some two-thirds of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had made their TV debut on the show. Weird Al performed on the show. Clark introduced wider American audiences to surf music—and black people, desegregating the show in about 1964 with the move to Los Angeles from Philadelphia. Everyone from Johnny Cash to Simon and Garfunkel to Prince made their debut on the show.

We should take a minute to pay tribute to the producing, too. Sure, that involves a lot of the American Music Awards and, sigh, the Golden Globes. There are gems buried in there, though. Executive producer of The Weird Al Show. An assortment of truly bonkers made-for-TV movies. A bizarre trilogy of AIP exploitation flicks from 1968, one of which he acted in and another of which has, like, Bruce Dern, Dean Stockwell, and Jack Nicholson. And, as if all that weren’t enough, he executive produced forty-five episodes of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.