Rolling Stone (1973) Article on Dick Clark

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http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dick-clark-20-years-of-clearasil-rock-20120418

Los Angeles – Dick Clark has few frustrations. But the man who's had things go his way for 20 years – who fell into the Bandstand job through other people's mistakes; who emerged from the central depths of the Fifties payola scandal as the Clearasil-clean millionaire Prince of Rock and Roll (while the King, Alan Freed, died penniless); who considers himself "just a bystander" in today's drugola mess; who's built an entertainment empire covering TV, radio, films, concert promotions and, of course, corporate consultant work in the field of youth – is upset. …

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As the man running the most influential record show in America in the late Fifties, young Dick Clark, as one disk jockey working in Philadelphia at that time put it, "had a piece of everything." In the Fifties, payola was not illegal; you broke the law only if you failed to pay taxes on such income. Clark, the Philly DJ was saying, had a price. "He really put them up against the wall, and he was never reasonable about how much... he always wanted half the publishing and three cents a record and..."

And so, it is said, in the transcripts of the House Legislative Oversight Subcommittee hearings on payola in 1960, Dick Clark had some hits. He owned or part-owned 33 corporations in the music business – record companies, publishing firms and record pressing plants. He got the copyright on the Crests' "Sixteen Candles" and played it heavily on Bandstand and earned $12,000 in royalties. All together, he got the copyrights to 160 songs, 143 of them as "gifts." Clark explained: "If you were a song-writer then and you had a song, you'd want me to own it because I could do the best by it. That's just good business."

Philadelphia, home of Bandstand, dictator of the dances, the fashions, the record-buying habits of teenagers all over America, was riddled with payola. Dick Clark, professing his innocence from the beginning, weathered a seven-month investigation and then sailed through the hearings as calmly as if they were just... TV shows. At the end of the sessions, the chairman of the committee called him "a fine young man." How did he do it? Said Clark: "I had done nothing illegal or immoral. I had made a great deal of money and I was proud of it. I was a capitalist." No more, no less. Said the Philadelphia radio veteran: "Clark was no cleaner than anybody else. They never even got into half the shit that Clark did, because he was sitting before a Congressional investigating committee that when the cameras were shut off, all the Congressmen would rush up to ask for his autograph for their daughters. It was a total fucking joke." So how did he do it? "The same way that all the bastards that are testifying in the Watergate thing will all end up running large corporations, they look so good."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dick-clark-20-years-of-clearasil-rock-20120418#ixzz1sS7Urg7j

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dick-clark-20-years-of-clearasil-rock-20120418#ixzz1sS72v5kG