Tall, That's All

Television's newest rage consists of a jukebox full of rock V roll records, a studio full of dancing teenagers, and Dick Clark, a suave young (28) disk jockey full of money. For his go-minute American Bandstand, which is carried by 90 ABC stations each weekday (3 p.m., E.S.T.), Clark draws one of the biggest audiences in daytime TV, some 8,000,000 (half of them adults), 20,000 to 45,000 fan letters a week, and an income approaching $500,000 a year. Admits Clark: "It's all a little frightening."

Many viewers find it more than a little frightening. American Bandstand assaults the ear with rock 'n' roll interrupted only by mournful ballads. This is bad enough, but the show is even more dismaying to the eye: furrow-browed teen-agers jolting to the jangling beat of lyrics like "Skinny Minnie, she ain't skinny, she's tall, that's all." Worse yet is the sagging, zombie-eyed shuffle brought on by a ballad like Oh, Oh, Falling in Love. Some adult squares get the feeling that they are peeking at a hotbed of juvenile delinquency. But Bandstand gets its eager volunteers from both sides of the tracks and all parts of the nation, and a committee of youngsters enforces good manners, e.g., jackets and ties for boys, no shorts for girls. Says Clark woncleringly: "We've never had an incident."

Pull Up Some Wood. Amid his bouncing and shuffling teenagers, ex-Harmonica Player Clark is right at home. Personable and polite, he manages to sound as if he really means such glib disk-jockey patter as, "Let me pull up a hunk of wood and sit down with you." This air of sincerity is Clark's biggest attraction. Though ABC has mailed out 300.000 of his photographs since last summer, boyishly handsome Clark believes that most teen-agers see him less as a romantic idol than as the ideal big brother who understands their problems. On the problem of rock 'n' roll, Clark says: "Teenagers have always liked stuff their parents couldn't stand."

The son of a radio-station owner in Utica, N.Y., Teen-Age Spokesman Clark won his spurs as a disk jockey while attending Syracuse University, caught on with ABC's WFIL-TV in Philadelphia after graduating in 1951. At first his youthful appearance counted against him. He looked unauthoritative as a newscaster, and the wrong man to be plugging beer when he seemed hardly old enough to drink it. He got his big chance in July 1956, when he took over Bandstand, a jukebox-and-dance show that had been playing locally for four years.

Pied Piper. So successful were Clark and his teen-agers that in August 1957, ABC put them on the network. To get on the show, teen-agers have hitchhiked from as far away as Texas, and one Buffalo family did not notice a son was missing until he rock 'n' rolled onto the screen. Last month American Bandstand's Trendex rating nearly equaled the combined totals of the two rival networks.

Clark's daytime showing prompted ABC to hustle him into a Saturday night program called the Dick Clark Show. Since it went on the air in February, minus his dancing couples and with nothing more than recorded and live music, it has doubled the network's rating between 7:30 and 8 p.m., E.S.T.

Such teen-age adulation has brought Disk Jockey Clark offers to make a dozen movies. But to date, Clark's rugged round of rock 'n' roll for TV has left him no time for Hollywood. In fact, he is so busy rolling in the money as the Pied Piper of the teen-agers that when his wife Barbara and their year-old son move this summer into a new beach house that Clark's jack has built on the Maryland shore, he simply won't have time to join them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.