During the middle and late 1950s, Dick Clark was one of the major figures pioneering rock music. An early career in radio enabled Clark to attain his position as disc jockey and host of television's American Bandstand, which propelled him to national fame and influence. The ever-boyish Clark-surely more than almost any other figure-symbolized the inescapable intersection between popular music styles, radio airplay, and television exposure used to create a new style of music and its new stars.

     If rock music seemed to combine the big beat of rhythm and blues with the hick aspects of hillbilly music (indeed, Elvis Presley was originally known as the "Hillbilly Cat"), it was Clark who cleaned rock up, urbanizing it with clean-cut male talents who always appeared in suits and who kept themselves far from the scandal pages. In the 1950s, Clark signed talent to record labels that he owned and then promoted his stars on American Bandstand-Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and Bobby Rydell. He carefully watched over the careers of "his boys." Indeed, Clark marketed the clean-cut image throughout his career, as a glance at his published books reveals; he continually sold good behavior as well as music with a beat.

     Through the late 1950s into the 1960s, Clark was a hot property. American Bandstand seemed to define what good young teens should listen to as acceptable rock music, certainly before the British invasion by the Beatles. His half-hour-long Saturday Night Beechnut Show defined what "good" teenaged baby boomers should be listening to-from Annette Funicello to Connie Francis, from Fabian to Frankie Avalon, all lip-syncing their records.

     Thus, within the larger context of radio broadcasting, Clark boosted Top 40 as a radio format exclusively through his work on television. Radio broadcasting also proved to be Clark's means of becoming a TV star and later a producer. His radio work during the expanding postwar years in small-town and small-city radio in upstate New York prepared him to move to a major market, Philadelphia. But once the American Broadcasting Companies (ABC) picked up American Bandstand in 1957, it was television that served as Clark's major vehicle, with radio falling into the category of "other interests."

Clark's other significant link to radio and music recording came as a result of his ownership of several minor music labels in the late r95os, whose artists he shamelessly plugged on American Bandstand. He was then accused of paying radio stations to play his star's records, and in 1959 the U.S. government began to scrutinize this high-profile figure for payola, the practice of bribing disc jockeys and later radio program directors to play certain songs. Pressured by Leonard Goldenson, head of ABC-TV, to choose between American Bandstand and his music recording business, Clark went the way of television after he was forced to humiliate himself by testifying in front of a Congressional committee. He moved to Hollywood and became a mainstay on television and behind its cameras through the last third of the 20th century.