Rock ‘n’ roll may be here to stay, but the impresarios who brought it to us are only human. Bill Graham of Fillmore fame was killed in a helicopter crash in 1991. The two Dons, Kirshner of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and Cornelius of Soul Train, died recently in their mid-seventies. Now, the “World’s Oldest Teenager,” Dick Clark, has ceased being the world’s oldest teenager, aged 82.
In the annals of Baby Boom nostalgia, it would be difficult to think of a more ubiquitous figure than the slight, grinning Syracuse graduate with the microphone in hand and carefully Brylcreemed hair. Dick Clark was one of those show business entrepreneurs whose good luck coincided with the pop-culture zeitgeist: The host of a mid-1950s afternoon dance program in Philadelphia, he found himself unexpectedly positioned at the intersection of the origins of rock music and American teenage culture. By 1957 American Bandstand was on network television, and Dick Clark had become the honorary intermediary between rock ‘n’ roll and the rest of America, interviewing future inductees into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and rewarding pimply jitterbuggers with national exposure.
