Dick Clark
Still rockin' after all these years

By Carl Marcucci
Published in Adbiz, June 2000

ABC's "Rockin' New Year's Eve" and "American Bandstand": two long-running TV features that made Dick Clark an American entertainment icon. Clark began in radio, and after a career that so far spans 53 years, is still on the mic with three United Stations Radio Networks shows: "Rock, Roll & Remember," "US Music Survey" and "Days to Remember," a daily 90-second vignette. Part owner of United Stations, he hooked up with CEO Nick Verbitsky in 1981 and helped form the world's largest independent network. We asked Dick about the state of the industry, his career, and at 70 years of age, of course we asked, "How do you remain the world's oldest teenager?"

How did you first get into the entertainment biz?

I saw my first radio broadcast when I was 13 years old. It was Garry Moore and Jimmy Durante, the "Rexall Comedy Hour" or whatever the devil they called it. It was done in an old theater in New York. I said to myself, "Boy this sure looks interesting!" I went home and told my dad that someday I'd like to be in the radio business. He was a little fed up with living in New York and he had been involved in the cosmetic business for most of his career. An opportunity came along when my uncle, who owned a newspaper in upstate New York in Rome, called and said to my father, "Dick, we're going to open a radio station. Do you want to come and run it? Be part of the team?" I guess that was the way he put it because he went up as the Sales Manager and ended up being the General Manager. He did it because he knew undoubtedly that would help me later on and he needed the change of pace. So my appeal of the radio was long before my days at WRUN [Utica, NY]. I got the job there as a mailroom boy working for my father while I was in college. In all honesty, he had no idea where it would take me.

You made your name doing American Bandstand. Tell us the history there.

I had been at WFIL in Philadelphia four years doing radio and television stuff. I didn't get the job on "Bandstand" until 1956 when they fired the guy that was doing it. So I did it for a year before it debuted nationally [as "American Bandstand"]. I was part of the sales team that convinced ABC to give it a seven-week trial. In four weeks, it went to number one in the daytime. It commanded over 60% of the Philadelphia audience, so I knew that when I got the opportunity to work on it, it was a chance of a lifetime.

How did you convince ABC on that? Was it hard?

I knew it was already big locally and it was my dream that it would work everywhere. Of course, everybody said to us, "Who in the heck would want to watch kids dancing to records in Philadelphia?" Apparently somebody did.

I went up with what was then a Kinescope. That is a 16-mm film in black and white taken off the screen. We didn't have videotape. I wrote (I still have the letter here) to Ted Fetter, Director of Programs. I went to see this guy and I said, "I'd like to come up and make a presentation." He wrote me back a letter which was "Don't call us, we'll call you."

My secretary read the letter to me and in my youthful enthusiasm, I thought that was a positive response instead of a kiss-off. So I came back from my vacation and immediately set up a meeting with the guy. I showed him the Kinescope. It must have impressed him. He sent some people down to look at it and one of them was a fellow named Dan Mellnick, who went on to become an extraordinarily successful movie producer. He reported back to ABC saying, "I don't know why in the hell I'm going to recommend this thing, but I think we ought to do this." So they gave us a seven-week trial and it did succeed.

Yes it did. I remember watching it in 1974 when I lived in Cleveland. I would imagine that was probably an ABC station.

WEWS. I knew every call letter of every ABC affiliate in those days, because we put them up on a board on a map and we did it in the early days when it was on five days a week. You saw it when it was on once a week.

I do remember the big hair and the big shoes and the bell-bottoms.

That was part of one of the many pieces that made it popular-what did they wear, what did they say, what did they look like, who was dancing with whom? It was a combination of ingredients.

Why isn't it being re-run? You've got TV Land, Nick at Night, a bunch of nostalgic channels out there.

It was rerun for two years on VH-1, "The 70s episodes" and will probably pop up on another cable channel very shortly. Plus I think you'll see, I'm hoping, AB2000, which is the updated version on an entirely different twist from the old days, but maintaining its roots in the old show.

When is that debuting?

As fast as I can sell it.

I know you've heard this a thousand times...You are the world's oldest teenager, not only because you can identify with multiple generations, but also the fact that you haven't aged in 40 years. What's the secret to both of those successes?

I think that probably it has to do with two things. One, I was forced to be in the midst of a lot of people who were younger than I. I was 27 years old when I first started working on Bandstand. I had to think young--that's a good inducement. The second most important thing is I found work that I loved. I've never had the desire to be anything else except to be involved in radio and television and entertainment and so forth. I've been living out a dream that has always been a carrot in front of my nose, some inducement to make me keep charging on. That will keep you young.

Tell us how you met Nick Verbitsky in '81 and how this relationship has gone on with friends and business partners even to this day?

As I recall, we met over dinner to talk about a countdown show for Mutual Broadcasting, which is where he was at the time. Marty Rubenstein was the head man and Nick worked for him. Whatever the pecking order was, Nick was high up there. He had come to me to talk about a countdown show--their version of the Casey Kasem thing. I said, "Yeah, fine. Let's give it a try."

We dreamed about, in the earliest days, formatting radio stations via satellite in every format and allowing management to virtually run the station with nobody but an engineer and salespeople. It was a great idea and we cobbled it all together. We got it ready to go, had all the satellite stuff all lined up and everything when we went to an NAB convention or something or other. One of our potential competitors got up and said, "And we are going to give it away." At which point we said, "Oops! that is going to die," which it did. We changed into a syndicated network where we have been doing the same thing for the past 25 years or so.

On the first incarnation of United Stations, it was very successful. And eventually we turned it over to Mel Karmazin and he took it beyond that. Nick and I were precluded from re-entering the radio business for a couple of years, but we were not precluded from recapturing the name United Stations. We started the company again; it turned out to be fortunately another success. It is the largest independently owned and operated radio network at this point.

Those are getting fewer and farther in between.

The amazing thing is that in spite of all the conglomerates, we still serve 2,600 rated radio stations across the nation, with every conceivable kind of format. We've got statistically 64 hours of long form programming weekly, 14 comedy prep or writing services daily. It's every conceivable kind of need that a radio station would need. I don't care whether you have one or 400 stations, everybody has got to have this stuff. We fill a niche.

Tell me a little bit about the other side--Dick Clark Productions. You were savvy enough to found that in 1957.

The quick thumbnail was, when I was 26, I was very busy, and I had the foresight to set up a production company because I realized someday I would be unhireable. I would get to be too old or demographically unappealing or whatever. I said that if I wanted to continue to do what I loved, I better have a production company, so that I could slide into the background. Well, that hasn't happened quite yet, but about 90% of what I do is background stuff. Every now and again they will throw me out front.

So what I did was take the income that I earned as a performer and reinvested it in the talents of other people, which grew to be a lot of people. Right now we have about 1,000 people under our employ. Most of them are in the restaurant business [American Bandstand Grills] and probably this week there are about 100-150 that are in the entertainment area. We do practically everything--all kinds of movies, theatrical and television, game shows, award shows, sporting events, we are a very strange little company. We serve a lot of masters and try to do a good job. What we pride ourselves on is that we do it right, we do productively so that it makes a profit for the company, and we do it on time, on budget.

What significant industry trends have you observed over the years?

In the old days we didn't have the competitive atmosphere that we have now or the fractionalization of not only the formatting of radio stations, but the fractionalization of music itself. There is something in there that appeals to every demographic group, every ethnic group. It is a little hard to keep track of. It wasn't computerized in my day. We did it by seat-of-the-pants knowledge. Nowadays you can pretty much predict where that music is going to fall and what kind of radio station wants to get it on. We are living with very rigid restrictions. Other than that, the only significant thing is that the world is turned upside down, history has repeated itself, and we have these teen baby bands and baby female vocalists swarming all over us like they did in the fifties. And the other thing, is the Latin thing, which is only an indication of the rise in the population mix where Spanish music has become hot for everybody.

How has the Internet changed the music industry and the relationship between the artists and the listeners?

We don't know what the impact will be, but eventually I've been saying for 25 years now, soon your music will be delivered to your house over some invisible means or wire over the air and will go into a machine. You will play it. You will never see a record or CD. By God, it's happened.

So what you've got now is a mess of record companies, five of whom are multi-national conglomerates trying to figure out what they are going to do with their pressing plants and how they are going to distribute this and how they treat their retailers that they've been so indebted to all these years; how to adapt radio into the mix. The artists really need their record companies still because, despite the fact that they can say, "Hey, I'm going on the Internet to sell my own records," nobody has done it yet real successfully.

I don't know how many hundreds of radio stations are up on the Internet now and how many will be affected by direct satellite to cars. That all has to take its measure. We are living in a period of tremendous change: change for not only the marketing people, but also the artists themselves and the people who listen to music and love it. And all of us involved in radio, we are going to have to adapt and live with all this competition. The trick is how to make a living.

You've done just about everything you can do with Dick Clark Productions and United Stations. Is there anything else that you'd like to do?

I'm working on a couple of Broadway projects. I've tried there before unsuccessfully twice and I want to beat that if I can. It's a feature motion picture. I'd like to have a big hit in that area someday and I haven't ever done that, though we've done 20-some odd motion pictures for television and theater.

Tell us about your three programs running on USRN: "Rock, Roll & Remember," "US Music Survey" and "Days To Remember."

"Rock, Roll and Remember" is now entering its twentieth season on 167 stations, which is pretty extraordinary. Our flagship station on "US Music Survey" is KOST-FM in Los Angeles, which is one of the always top-five rated radio stations. I'm real proud of that one.

"Days to Remember" started out as a Millennium sort of thing and the station said, "Oh my God, can you continue it?" So we just switched it from a Millennium countdown to this day in history. It used the audio archives and the BBC and the AP. It's on 93 stations now, which is unique because it's all over, in many different kinds of formats.

What I'm happy about is that they still have me working. I'm still doing radio, which I love!

More power to you--just keep on going.

It is still fun. That is the important thing. You find something you like and continue as long as it remains fun.