[2] Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Paylola and Sponsorship Identification, Federal Communications Act, Amendments, 1960. There were occasional shows that were not hosted by Clark, in which case a substitute host (among them Rick Azar) was brought in.[6]. Not only was it extremely intelligent, but there was something moving about the mans story. Kelly said he avoided Rittenhouse Square, knowing if he were seen there, theyd be banished, but it was an open secret that most of the boys on the show were gay. The Saturday show would run until 1960. In the meantime, have a wonderful week or two. "I kissed a girl, and I liked it!. Clark looked like one of the kids." (Horn was 40 when he left Bandstand and Clark was a babyfaced 27.) I'm David Hirsch and, on behalf of American Bandstand, I bid you, for the last time, goodbye. Bob retired after being in the shoe business and the chemical business, where he often worked 18 hour days. I went to coffee shops, but I also hung out in Rittenhouse Square and so did many of the dancers. Variety Shows Very sadly, Bob passed away 2 . "He was the commander," Colanero said. Click here to see some of your favorites back in action. Dick Clark never played either song on American Bandstand. NEW PAGE! John Lithgow filmed a mockumentary episode before it was c 11-year-old reads aloud from 'pornographic' book he checked out from library at school board meeting, Influencer refuses to switch business class seats so family can sit together, Ousted Chicago mayor blames loss on racism, gender but not her tepid response to crime, Chaka Khan blasts Rolling Stone, Adele, Mariah Carey in podcast talk, Disgraceful Meghan, Harry provoked King Charles to evict them: royal expert, Kanye West and wife Bianca Censori look surprisingly happy on dinner date, Sunny Hostin Points Finger at China for COVID Crisis: Did Not Cooperate With the International Community, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle confirm they were asked to 'vacate' Frogmore Cottage. . If it wasnt assaults from outside haters, some of the Bandstand kids suffered in their own homes. Squeaky clean commercial pitchman and deejay Dick Clark inherited Bob Horns locally broadcastBandstandin July 1956 and revamped it for a national audience of teenage consumers as ABCsAmerican Bandstand, which first aired in August 1957. As the books highlight, Ray Smith and Arlene Sullivan provided two thoughtful and unadornedBandstandmemoirs. Dick Clark died on April 18, 2012, at the age of 82. Unlike Smith, she expresses no animosity toward Clark. Other performers including Brandy, members of KISS, Dennis Quaid and his band The Sharks, Cher, and Stevie Wonder also performed to remember the iconic program.[41]. In their new self-published memoirs Bandstand Diaries, series regulars Arlene Sullivan, Ray Smith, and Sharon Sultan Cutler reveal that though fans loved to gossip and fantasize about the shows heterosexual pairings, many of their favorites were young gay men and women putting on a show for the cameras. "If you got in front of the camera too much, he'd call you back and tell you to circulate. This incarnation was an early version of the music video shows that became popular in the 1980s, featuring films that were the ancestors of music videos. Jerry Oppenheimer is a best-selling author. . The "ab" logo was replaced with the iconic stylized "AB" logo (shown at the top of this page) used for the remainder of the show's run. June Bouche on November 20, 2018 at 9:12 pm . He practiced dancing with his niece, Robin, but when he went down to the show, they wouldnt let him in because he was over the age of 18. "This man had the strongest personality that I had ever seen as a young boy," he said. As she puts it, being a Regular entailed holding a WFIL-TV Bandstand Club membership card and dancing every day on the show. We have lived in NJ ever since. To many of you, it was about the music and the artists. Her husband, Richard Spada, said Mrs. Spada was recovering from a minor stroke she had suffered earlier when she became ill on the way to church. Black music and black dances originating in Philadelphia neighborhoods contributed substantially to the success ofAmerican Bandstand; yetAmerican Bandstandsdancefloor and bleachers were racially segregated, and some of the shows most popular dances were adapted without attribution from black neighborhoods. I tried my best to fill your shoes and I hope I have lived up to what you were expecting of me. As WFIL grew financially and the account became less important, Stewart wasn't needed and was eventually dropped from the program. Dancing was a major feature of Bandstand. One market not telecasting Bandstand was Baltimore, Maryland, as local affiliate WAAM (now WJZ-TV) elected to produce a local dance show in the same afternoon time slot. Clark "was very all-American, handsome, and nice, a father figure to us," she recalled. Race and American Bandstand, The Seven-Year Itch: West Philly Loses American Bandstand, Report accessibility issues and request help. It got me out of my shell, but I learned I was a regular teenager who happened to dance on a show that unexpectedly became very popular. . On July 9, 1956, Horn was fired after a drunk-driving arrest, as WFIL and dual owner Walter Annenberg's The Philadelphia Inquirer were then Sullivan, 74, wrote Diaries with Ray Smith, another dancer who was closeted during his Bandstand years. e9 = new Object(); The reality behind the scenes ofAmerican Bandstandwas quite different than what viewers saw on national television. In an online page marking her 68th birthday on Nov. 23, 2011, Bandstand "documentarian" Charles W. Amann III posted: "The name Scaldeferri and American Bandstand go hand-in-hand. They were real kids from Philly, and if you watched every day, you could tell who was breaking up and who was making up. One young performer was dangled down an elevator shaft. My husband and I met on a blind date and six months later on April 12, 1964 we were married. On December 27 Bunny Gibson, American Bandstand Regular from 1959-1962, married Duke Tirschel in Chattanooga , Tennessee. Don married Bunny. Dick Clark 1929 2012, Dick Clark with Johnny Crawford. To the left youll find original pictures of some of the Regulars. Many factors were involved in this, particularly the launch and rise of MTV and other music programs on television, and along with that, the number of ABC affiliates opting to pre-empt or delay the program. He needed a group to show up every day, she says, and nobody got paid. One show from this first season (December 18, 1957, identified as the "Second National Telecast") is preserved in the archives of Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications. Interracial couples were not allowed on camera, so they sat on the sidelines. Well, it's our last show here on Bandstand and I really want to thank the viewers who have kept American Bandstand on the air all these years. This site does not collect any information from you. e9.size = "300x250"; You eventually get cancelled.. She was now working at Neiman Marcus, and couldn't take off to join the Regulars and their fans at the Philadelphia American Bandstand studio. you could do in half time - the hop, the bop, and the stomp," she wrote. Of Clarks behind-the-scenes behavior at Studio B, Ray Smith writes unsparingly: The irony about Clark is that he was not the goody-two-shoes he projected: he smoked, cursed, and for a while teetered on the edge of alcoholism. Ray Smith says he was upset when Dick Clark claimed only one of the dancers had died from AIDS when asked about it in an interview. Its original host was fired after a DWI arrest and in July 1956 a young radio DJ took over. Norman had a very, very unique sense of humor, which made him so popular with all that knew him. On the other hand, they had each other. AMERICAN BANDSTAND BLOG. The combined impact of Bandstand's move to California and the Beatles' arrival devastated Cameo-Parkway and inflicted permanent damage to the artists signed to the label.[9]. Like Smith, she believes that if her true sexual preference and that of others on the show had become public in the days before Stonewall and todays LGBT power, Bandstand would have been taken off the air. Mickey Mouse Club American Bandstand premiered locally in late March 1952 as Bandstand on Philadelphia television station WFIL-TV Channel 6 (now WPVI-TV), as a replacement for a weekday movie that had shown predominantly British films. Once a week, she goes to a hop thrown by another Bandstand original, 76-year-old Philadelphia radio and TV personality Jerry Blavat, who bills himself as The Geator with the Heater and The Boss with the Hot Sauce.. In 1989, Clark, aged 59, retired fromAmerica Bandstand, and the show ended that year. ", California residents do not sell my data request. His latest book, The Kardashians: An American Drama, will be published in September. Wed stay up all night talking about boys, she said. Dick Clark, in full Richard Wagstaff Clark, (born November 30, 1929, Bronxville, New York, U.S.died April 18, 2012, Santa Monica, California), American television personality and businessman, best known for hosting American Bandstand. Reply. The most memorable day for Norman and me was April 13, 1961, the day we won second place in the Pony Dance Contest. Out filmmaker Christopher Landon spills the spooky tea on his new movie and working with the 'White Lotus' star. It preceded The Guy Mitchell Show. And the one thing that really shocked me was that those boys who were 14 and 15 and 16 were sleeping with each other.. . But to his credit and diligence, he brilliantly created his own myth, and he stuck to it for the rest of his life. Delmont, Matthew F. (September 30, 2014). Wed stay up all night talking about boys, said Sullivan. Sullivan was most frequently paired with a boy named Kenny Rossi, who was straight, but still subject to attacks for appearing on the show: One time, Kenny and I went to visit one of the other regulars up in North Philadelphia, and we were leaving her apartment and were headed to the El, and I heard car doors slamming, and I looked back, and all these guys were coming up the steps, and they started beating up on Kenny, Sullivan says. Black & White/Color (9/9/1967), Dick Clarks first day as host: 7/9/1956 The previous theme was retained as bumper music. ", Songs she liked to dance to, Mrs. Spada wrote online in June 2010, included "Little Darlin'," "Sixteen Candles," "Tears on my Pillow," "Splish Splash," "Never on Sunday," and "Let's Do The Stroll.". ". They were hurting him. But he feared that if the shows secret ever came out, Middle America would change the channel. It became a staple in homes and heavily influenced American society culturally, musically, and socially. Dick Clark later stated that he knew the prime-time edition would fail because its core audience teenagers and housewives was occupied with other interests in the evenings. . "He wasn't no Bob Horn," Fiorentino said. On all the music they play On the Bandstand.! we were like a little family together, and we all had something in common, and we all stuck together, and that made it easier for us.. Where things are poppin'(Pop!) The dancers, as Teen wrote, were the "most famous unknowns on TV today. My mother thought I was nuts. He was 21 and she was 16. Charlette Russo danced on American Bandstand from 1955-1959. A half-hour evening version of American Bandstand aired on Monday nights from 7:30p.m. to 8:00p.m. (ET), beginning on October 7, 1957. She is a Marco Polo member of the Society of American Travel Writers, a past president of Virginia Professional Communicators and a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. ", "I was shaking like a leaf," Colanero recalled. Finally, we got away and jumped over the turnstile. Horn, however, was disenchanted with the program, and wanted to change the show to a dance program with teenagers dancing along on camera as records played, based on an idea that came from a radio show on WPEN, The 950 Club, hosted by Joe Grady and Ed Hurst. This version was canceled after 26 weeks, and its final show (with The Cover Girls performing "My Heart Skips a Beat" and "We Can't Go Wrong") aired on October 7, 1989,[37] thus ending the show's 37-year run.[38][39]. The 1960 amendments to the 1934 Federal Communications Act put heavy constraints on payola, requiring full public disclosure when a record company or its agent pays a broadcaster to play records on the air. The 1960 amendments criminalized any action that breached the disclosure rule. I think [the shows success] even surprised Dick Clark.. But this one was different. Arlene Sullivan and Kenny Rossi on the cover of Teen magazine in 1959. It was a local show Philadelphia, Jersey, the Lehigh Valley [Pennsylvania]. Known for her perky personality, Pat Moliterri is credited with inventing the dance, the Hop, by combining elements of the Slop and the Bop.Sadly, Pat died in in the mid-seventies of a heart attack. The use of videotape allowed Clark to produce and host a series of concert tours around the success of American Bandstand and to pursue other broadcast interests. [3] Horn was temporarily replaced by producer Tony Mammarella before the job went to Dick Clark permanently. Those "American Bandstand" days were the best for all of us teenagers who followed the program, the regulars, the dances, the performers, etc. We sent some 15,000 fan letters each week. This kit packs $431 worth of premium skincare and haircare into a small packageand it's only $80 with the promo code. Bandstand originally used "High Society" by Artie Shaw as its theme song, but by the time the show went national, it had been replaced by various arrangements of Charles Albertine's "Bandstand Boogie", including Les Elgart's big-band recording remembered by viewers of the daily version. Unsure and fearful about her true sexual identity, Sullivan tried passing as straight. But back in the Bandstand days, Smith was one of the shows secretly gay dancers. Prior to the move, Bandstand had sourced many of its up-and-coming acts from Philadelphia's Cameo-Parkway Records. "Dangerous". They were hurting him. My parents were always there for me. As previously mentioned, during the 1978 season of Bandstand, Donna Summer became the only music artist in Bandstand's history to co-host the program. Dick Clark was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, in 1993 as a non-performer. Numerous black and white performers who appeared on American Bandstand during its seven-year heyday in West Philadelphia are also memorialized in this building. Tony Mammarella was the original producer with Ed Yates as director. American Bandstand, abbreviated AB, is an American music-performance and dance television program that aired in various versions that aired regularly from 1952 to 1989, [1] and was hosted from 1956 until its final season by Dick Clark, who also served as the program's producer. From the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, Clark's on-camera sidekick was announcer Charlie O'Donnell, who later went on to announce Wheel of Fortune and other programs hosted or produced by Clark, such as The $100,000 Pyramid. In August 1963, ABC reassignedAmerican Bandstandto Saturday afternoon. She wasnt immediately successful, but with the help of a new southwest Philly friend, she eventually got in. The followed the trend of solo (open) dancing started by Chubby Checker and The Twist. Some solo dances had animal names, for example, The Pony and The Monkey; others were named for motions, for example, The Mashed Potato and The Loco-Motion. Two of the biggest record hits of the early 1960s, both of which received a huge boost from airtime onAmerican Bandstand, were Dee Dee Sharps Mashed Potato Time and Freddy Cannons Palisades Park.8, YetAmerican Bandstandsseven-year stint in West Philadelphia was about to end. I was a preteen, which is to say, I was a teenage wannabe. But we were like a little family together, and we all had something in common, and we all stuck together, and that made it easier for us.. He promoted the couples on the show to mask the fact that so many guys were gay.5. [42] American Bandstand was a daily ritual for many teenagers throughout the nation. 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