The fall of 1957 was a transition time for me.
For starters, I was changing schools. After seven years with pretty much the same kids at Franklin School on the west side of Council Bluffs, Iowa, I was joining kids from Walnut Grove, Avenue B and Edison at Edison Junior High for the next two years of our academic years.
Although the big transition to girls, Friday night dances and high school sporting events was a couple of years in our futures, I could already feel the tides turning.
Baseball, the mainstay of my youth to date, was fading fast. It was becoming obvious as I matured that my batting prowess, fielding range and lack of arm strength doomed me to years of bench duty should I continue. On the other hand, the music I was hearing was pretty cool.
My station of choice (and that of most of my friends) was KOIL in Omaha, “the mighty 1290.” On warm summer nights, you could usually find me lying on our living room floor in the only area of our small house that was cooled by a window air conditioner thanks to some nifty partitioning engineered by my ingenious mother using an old chenille bedspread, my ear pressed to my portable transistor radio listening to the mellifluous tones of announcer Don Hill as he shared the play-by-play antics of the Omaha Cardinals over the KOIL airwaves.
To be honest, the Cardinals were pretty average that summer of 1957, though pitcher Bob Gibson was in the first year of a mediocre minor league career that eventually blossomed into a Hall of Fame career with the parent St. Louis Cardinals. Indeed, the highlight of the year came on August 1 when veteran outfielder Glen Gorbous tossed a baseball 445 feet 10 inches in a promotional stunt from the right field corner of Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium to the left field corner for a distance record that still stands.
Sunday afternoons, however, were devoted to KOIL’s Top 50 countdown. Not content to follow the national trend to Top 40 radio (which originated in Omaha), KOIL went 10 tunes better, and I eagerly awaited the weekly countdown to learn how my favorite tunes were faring.
KOIL was pretty pretty much the fuel that was driving my move from baseball to music appreciation that fall of 1957 but, unbeknownst to me, another potent force was on the horizon.
Omaha, long promised a new TV station to compete with our CBS and NBC stations, was finally getting one. On Sept. 17, 1957 KETV, Channel 7, finally hit the airwaves, forcing adjustments to rabbit ears and hoity-toity rooftop antennas across the Omaha-Council Bluffs metroplex as the American Broadcasting Company finally arrived.
As a young boy, I was eager for the steady diet of westerns that ABC promised, shows like Maverick, Wyatt Earp, Tombstone Territory and Zorro. Ozzie and Harriet and The Real McCoys would be welcomed as well.
We were much less interested in the ABC daytime schedule, which, for all practical purposes didn’t really exist. We quickly outgrew The Mickey Mouse Club and the half-hour of reruns of kids shows that followed, before giving way to dinnertime news.
Most of us did arrive home in time, however, to catch the tail end of something that looked to be promising, a show called American Bandstand. It had a likable young host, featured dancing teenagers that looked a lot like what I saw in my neighborhood and school and, most of all, played the music I really liked.
The network thought enough of the show to launch its daytime schedule with it. Unlike the other networks, ABC had zilch on its schedule before American Bandstand came on at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. That was an hour earlier for us in the Midwest, when we were still in school. Still, we caught enough of the show to know we liked it. So, apparently, did others, It became one of ABC’s top attractions, holding its own financially even against the prime time offerings.
As much as I liked American Bandstand as a youngster, it’s not the reason I wrote this book.
I didn’t watch American Bandstand for the dancing, although the moves I saw on that black and white TV screen in my family living room were far superior to almost anything I saw in my admittedly limited exposure to actual live rock & roll dancing in my community.
I watched American Bandstand (and host Dick Clark’s follow-up Saturday Night Show) for the music and to actually see the artists that were performing it. Sure, I was disappointed that the singers were lip-syncing instead of actually singing, but at least I got to see them. That was a relative rarity in those days.
But, as my musical tastes evolved, I found myself less interested in what I was seeing on American Bandstand and more interested in what I was hearing on non-Top 40 radio. More to the point, I couldn’t figure out why a disc jockey like Alan Freed (who was connected to more of the music I liked) got tossed because of the federal government’s payola hearings and why a TV disc jockey like Dick Clark (who was connected to music I progressively liked less and less) seemed to come out of the same hearings unscathed, indeed, seemed to grow even more popular.
That was the basic question I sought to answer.
To answer that question, I delved deeply into the history of American Bandstand and its predecessor, the local Philadelphia show Bandstand. I learned a lot through my research and interviews —surprising facts, some shocking details but all leading to what was ultimately a simple answer to my basic question.
As Philadelphia record veteran Harold Lipsius put it, Alan Freed was the street hustler and Dick Clark was the altar boy. But, as the title of this book, suggests, there’s much more to how Dick Clark created a safe public space for teenagers while realizing his own personal business ambitions.
Bandstandland is not an actual place. It’s more a state of mind. Dick Clark did not create the show that became American Bandstand, but he did create Bandstandland. He took a popular Philadelphia TV dance program, scrubbed it up a bit and sold it to a national audience.
The two words that best describe American Bandstand’s Philadelphia years are “squeaky clean.” Clark set the tone with his neatly pressed dark suits, perfectly combed hair, Pepsodent smile and “Aw shucks” style of speaking. The kids who danced on the show mirrored the genial host’s conservative dress and displayed the same decorum one might expect at a Sunday morning church service.
Bandstandland was a safe haven, a place where good friends could gather and have a good time, free of school rules and parental interference. It all seemed so natural.
But Bandstandland was far from natural. It existed only within the walls of WFIL-TV’s Studio B — and in millions of living rooms across the land — for an hour or so every weekday afternoon. Bandstandland was, in reality, a contrivance, an alternate universe created and cultivated by Dick Clark.
That’s not to minimize its importance. From its humble beginnings to its last gasps, the show ran for more than 35 years, a tribute to Dick Clark’s business acumen, stubbornness and resilience. Even though it’s been gone from the airwaves for nearly as long as it was on, it still has a dedicated core of followers and fans. That’s impressive.
So, here it is, the results of thousands of hours of reading and research and hundreds of hours of conversations and interviews. Welcome to Bandstandland.
Did you know? When Bandstand debuted as a local show in Philadelphia, it had two hosts. And neither one was Dick Clark. Read more in this excerpt from Bandstandland or go here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.
Excerpted from Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll, now available from Sunbury Press. 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.
© 2019 Larry Lehmer
