Bandstand Beat

Bandstand Bits: Dance good, dress good, act good (and where babies come from)

From its earliest moments as a national show, it was obvious that the teenagers dancing on American Bandstand would be copied by teens across the land who wanted not only to dance like the kids from Philadelphia, but to look like them, too.

Fortunately for parents across the country, Dick Clark enforced the same strict dress code initially imposed by Bandstand's original host, Bob Horn. Thus, the kids seen jitterbugging from the WFIL studio on TV every afternoon represented the cream of the teen crop, sartorially speaking.

For Clark, it was equally important that the lip-syncing artists on the show had the same well-scrubbed appeal. Since many of the most popular early male rockers were more comfortable in tight tee shirts, battered denim jeans and greasy DA haircuts, getting them ready for their moments in the TV spotlight was no easy task.

Enter Connie DeNave, a one-time ABC press agent who formed her own company, Image Makers, with the express purpose of cleaning up those scruffy rockers. Clark and DeNave worked closely together for years, with such Bandstand favorites as Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Connie Francis among her clients.

DeNave's starting hypothesis was that most people viewed rock 'n' roll singers as the lowest form of life. So, she concentrated her efforts on teaching them how to dress, how to talk, never to be photographed smoking or holding a drink in public and which fork to use at dinner. By all accounts, she was successful.

Whether in the studio or scattered around TV land, kids (and their parents) took many life cues from watching Bandstand. Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser published a column on June 21, 1998, where he wrote that he "learned to be a boy, from dancing along to the music" on American Bandstand.

"For me, watching those South Philadelphia kids slow-dance on TV was like a glimpse into Heaven. It looked so fabulously sinful, to hold a girl like that. When I was 12, if you'd asked me where babies came from, I'd have said: the Spotlight Dance."

Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --  Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.

Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.

 

Bandstand Bits: N.J. teen found that it was easy to dance to, if you didn't pass out

It was not easy to get into American Bandstand.

Once the show went national, long lines of eager teenage dancers formed outside the studio doors before showtime -- boys on one side, girls on the other. Although care was taken to admit roughly the same number from either gender, it was not unusual to see girls dancing with girls, especially in the early years.

While certified "regulars" had no trouble getting into the WFIL studio, the odds were stacked against anyone who just showed up. The show's producers recognized this potential problem early and held out at least a few spots for out-of-towners who had written ahead to reserve space on the show. Tony Mammarella, who produced the show for the first two years of its national run, said he had enough requests for the coveted spots to fill 20 school buses each day.

One American Bandstand visitor from 1962 later wrote about his special day trip to Philadelphia.

Tony Gabriele was a high schooler in Perth Amboy, N.J., when he and three fellow students won a trip to Bandstand as a reward for winning "some academic prize or another," Gabriele wrote in his role as a columnist for the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press in August 1997 after noting the 40th anniversary of American Bandstand's debut as a network show.

A condition of the trip was that the students be accompanied by a faculty member. "Since this was a Catholic high school," Gabriele wrote, "it was Sister Mary Someone-or-another. ... Sister Mary was, naturally, in her full-dress nun uniform ... and I was, naturally, in a white shirt, tie and my best Robert Hall tweed jacket and itchy wool dress trousers."

Gabriele wrote of his fondness for the music of the day and the thrill of being just 20 feet from that day's guest, Dion, as he lip-synced to Lovers Who Wander.

"I would like to report that I danced up a storm on the show, but it was hard to find space on the dance floor because of the Regulars," Gabriele wrote, adding, "The Regulars didn't exactly prevent the rest of us from getting to the center of the dance floor; it's just that if you got too close you risked  being overcome by hair-spray fumes."

Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --  Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.

Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.

 

Tony Verna, inventor of instant replay, briefly had a job on Bandstand years earlier

Tony Verna gained national fame as the creator of the instant sports replay but, if things had worked out a bit differently, he could have put his creative skills at work on Bandstand, where he worked briefly in the show's early days.

Verna, a bright-eyed 19-year-old Philadelphian was hoping for a career in show business in 1953 when he spotted an ad for a roustabout on The Big Top circus program at WCAU-TV.

"But somebody said Bandstand was hiring, so I went over to Bandstand," Verna said in a 2004 interview for the Archive of American Television. "I put my foot in the door at Bandstand and I met Bob Horn. I'm all ready to be in show business. He says 'I'm having a problem at the door. Can you go over there and help fight off the crowd waiting to get in here to get on camera?' So I spent the whole day as a policeman. I got my foot out of the door and went back and became a circus roustabout."

Verna spent just that one day at WFIL-TV, but learned a lot about crowd control for what was rapidly becoming one of Philadelphia's more popular TV programs.

"They were very selective," Verna recalled in the 2004 interview. "I think they wanted the better-looking people to come in. They were very conscious of the kind of crowd Bob Horn would have."

Verna went on to have a successful career, first at WCAU, then with CBS. It was while working with CBS in 1963 that Verna had his breakout moment.

It was at the end of the college football season and CBS was to broadcast the Army-Navy game from Philadelphia. The game had been delayed a week because of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Verna took the extra time to lobby for a pet project -- giving fans a broader game-watching experience by offering videotape replays of crucial plays.

His boss at the time, Bill McPhail, finally relented, allowing Verna to take one of the network's 1,300-pound videotape machines out of the CBS studios for  the first time. Verna rented a truck and headed down the road a few days ahead of the Dec. 7, 1963, game.

It was a somber time for America, which was in the midst of an official 30-day period of mourning, but First Lady Jackie Kennedy insisted the game be played. There were no bonfires, no pep rallies, little in the way of celebration of what was truly America's game. Navy, behind its star quarterback, Roger Staubach, was 8-1 and ranked second in the nation behind only Texas. Army had lost just twice. President Kennedy, a huge football fan and Navy veteran, was scheduled to flip the coin to begin the game and had planned to watch the game from the Navy side for one half, and the Army side for the other.

Verna, however, was focused on his quest, checking the dozens of tubes in the massive unit, some of which were shaken loose in transit. Alignment of the finicky recording heads that needed to be just so for the 2-inch wide videotape was another challenge. Verna kept the tape unit in the truck, running hundreds of yards of cable to the lone camera dedicated to the experimant inside Municipal Stadium, located about a mile from where Verna was raised.

In pre-planning, announcers Lindsay Nelson and Jim Simpson and analyst Terry Brennan weren't quite sure how to deal with the experiment. If it worked, they'd deal with it at the time, they decided.

At game time, Verna was still fine tuning things in the truck. Videotape was prohibitively expensive in the early 1960s so CBS stretched its budget by using the same tape over and over. While it saved the network money, it also cost them hundreds of hours of potential archival material. The tapes Verna was using in Philadelphia that day contained snippets of I Love Lucy and other programs.

The experiment was a failure in many respects. It was practically impossible to know what had been captured until playback, and marking sections for possible airing was a logistical nightmare. It took about 30 tries before they got usable footage, a quarterback sneak by Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh that resulted in a touchdown.

When it was replayed during the game, commentator Nelson was compelled to advise viewers that what they were seeing for the first time, was not actually happening at the time. "Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!" he said

By game's end, Verna was exhausted and wasn't sure his efforts were worth it. But Bill McPhail knew. By the start of the 1964 season, most games had replays of some sort. McPhail fondly refered to the new technique as "Tony's Baby."

Verna went on to establish himself as an innovator and top producer and director. Among his credits were producing and directing Pope John Paul II’s TV special, A Prayer for World Peace, and the  music special, Live Aid.

Which raises the question: What direction might Bandstand have gone if Verna had lasted more than that one day in 1953?

Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --  Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.

Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.

 

Bandstand Bits: Dick Clark was no comedian, but show had its light moments, too

Dick Clark was pretty much all business when he took over Bandstand in 1956 but, as time went on, he developed a laid-back personable style that allowed him to make light of situations that could have been catastrophic in the hands of a less-deft host.

Like when a record would get stuck in the control room and mess up the lip-syncing artist. Or like the time a set was designed in the form of a baseball field for the Impalas' Sorry (I Ran All the Way Home), a song it should be noted that had nothing to do with baseball.

Presumably, the kids in the studio had the same interests as the millions of young teens in the national TV audience. There was a time in American Bandstand's Philadelphia reign when kids all across the land were mad for "sick jokes," obnoxious in their day but tame by current standards. Although you never heard them on air, I'm sure they were shared in the bleachers of the WFIL-TV studio.

For those of you who are too young to have heard them directly (or for those of you who enjoy a brief trip to your crude, unsophisticated past), here are some examples:

But mommy, I don't want to go to Europe.
Shut up and keep swimming.

Daddy, can't I go out and play?
Shut up and deal.

Mommy, mommy, come quickly and bring the marshmallows; Daddy's on fire.

Mommy, mommy, why do I keep going in circles?
Shut up or I'll nail your other foot to the floor.

Mommy, can I go out and play with grandma?
No, you've already dug her up twice this week.

They don't call them the fabulous '50s for nothing.

Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --  Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.

Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.

 

Bandstand Bits: Not every dance became a hit on American Bandstand

One of American Bandstand's most enduring influences was how it sparked nationwide interest in dances (think the Stroll and the Twist). Teenagers from Miami to Seattle, Boston to Los Angeles and all points in between wanted to do those dances they saw their favorite Philadelphia teens doing on TV.

And the music industry was more than happy to oblige. Popular dances begat popular records, which begat profits for the record companies. One dance that failed to click, however, came early in American Bandstand's long national run on ABC-TV.

In the summer of 1958, Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Merlin of California's Wham-O toy company took the idea of Australian bamboo exercise hoops and gave it a decidedly American spin, casting fascimiles in plastic and started giving them away. Soon, however, they were going for a couple of bucks apiece and the Hula Hoop fad was born.

Some 25 million were sold in the first four months, sparking another creation, the "Hula Rock," by Betty Mae Harris, a ballroom dance teacher from Boone, Iowa. The dance borrowed moves from the traditional box step and the then-new Stroll, with a bit of hip swaying, similar to the Hawaiian hula.

The Hula Hoop continued to be a big seller for  couple of years, Georgia Gibbs even lip-synched to her Hula Hoop Song on Dick Clark's Saturday night show on Jan. 26, 1959 and Hawaii went on to be America's 50th state later that year, but the Hula Rock quickly faded into oblivion.

Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --  Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.

Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.