Summary: On this day 58 years ago – August 6, 1960 – the 18 year-old singer and dancer Chubby Checker performed The Twist on American TV for the first time on the rock ‘n’ roll variety show American Bandstand.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Dick Clark in 1961, looking young<br> <br> For reasons we will discuss, American Bandstand was, both artistically and socially, one of the most important programs ever broadcast on television. It aired for an incredible 37 seasons, from October 7, 1952 (when Harry Truman was President of the United States) until October 7, 1989 (three years before the election of Bill Clinton).<br> <br> (In case you were wondering, the longest-running television show of any kind, anywhere, is NBC’s Meet the Press, which made its debut on November 6, 1947; it has run continuously for 70 years and 9 months!)<br> <br> In its 37-year run, some 3000 episodes of American Bandstand were produced. From 1952 until 1964, the showwasfilmed in Philadelphia at the studios of WFIL, the local ABC affiliate. (That would have been channel 6; having grown up in South Jersey watching Philadelphia TV, it was one of the three network channels we received, along with WCAU – channel 10, which was then the CBS affiliate – and KYW, channel 3, which was then the NBC affiliate. Three channels. Deciding what to watch in those days was rather easier than today!) <br> <br> The list of performers who appeared on American Bandstand over the years – rock, pop, soul, and country musicians – absolutely beggars our belief; you can look that list up on Wikipedia. We are left breathless as well by the list of musicians who made their national television debuts on the show, a list that includes Prince, Sonny and Cher, Ike and Tina Turner, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, the Talking Heads, the Jackson Five, the Beach Boys, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, Aerosmith, Simon and Garfunkel, Madonna, Iggy Pop (who was known to his parents Luella and James as James Newell Osterberg Jr.), and yes, Chubby Checker. American Bandstand became the prototype for a generation of musical TV shows, from Soul Train (which ran for 1117 episodes from 1971 to 2006) and Hee Haw (which ran for 655 episodes between 1969 and 1993), to such shorter running shows as Shindig (1964-1966) and Hullaballo (1965 to 1966). <br> <br> It has been argued that American Bandstand set the stage for Fox’s American Idol, (which first aired on June 11, 2002) and the cable channel MTV, which was launched on Saturday, August 1, 1981 at 12:01 am Eastern Time. (The first music video broadcast on MTV – available only to homes in New Jersey – was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. The video and the song – both popular in their day – are, respectively, magnificently dated and perfectly awful, and their presence in the homes of New Jersey on August 1, 1981 explains – to me, at least – many subsequent and unsavory events in that oft-beleaguered state. As a public service, a link to the The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star has been provided.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> For 33 years of it’s 37-year run, the host of American Bandstand was the seemingly ageless (though unfortunately not deathless) Richard Wagstaff Clark (1929-2012). “Dick” Clark was born and raised in Mount Vernon, New York. He attended Syracuse University, and in 1952, at the age of 24, he moved to Philadelphia and took a job as a disc jockey at WFIL radio. On July 9, 1956, after Bandstand’s host Bob Horn was arrested for drunk driving and consequently fired, the not-quite 27 year-old Clark became the show’s new host.<br> <br> From both a musical and social point of view, Clark’s ascension was a spectacularly important event, taken as widely as we please. Soon after he took over, Clark ended Bandstand’s segregated, all-white policy and began featuring black performers, starting with Chuck Berry.
