Spring 1973. Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, the Shirelles, Bill Haley, and other acts popular in the 1950s and early 1960s are playing to big crowds on Richard Nader’s wildly successful “Rock & Roll Revival” tours. Nader, a former radio deejay, had pined for the earlier, less complicated days of popular music, and, a born promoter, he sensed that the average American was, too. A feature on Nader in an October 1970 issue of Record World reports that in the late 1960s, he’d faced an uphill climb, enduring “scant success in convincing anyone that the revival would occur. But today, niteries around the country are offering oldies nights, the major record labels have been purchasing old catalogs and radio stations are programming more oldies shows than ever.”
Nostalgia’s in the breeze. “When people bumped up against the nineteen seventies there were many things that made them very uncomfortable,” Nader remarks to The New York Times in 1973. “Comfortable, secure, warm, accepted—that’s all nostalgia is.” He adds, “All I did was give them the key, music of the fifties that made guys my age in the seventies comfortable and secure. They were running to my show, not to applaud The Five Satins or Bill Haley or Chuck Berry, but their own memories and associations. They were getting back into the irresponsibility, the carefreeness, the fun they had before they got married. They were crawling back into the womb of Madison Square Garden.”
At Nader’s Rock ‘n Roll Spectacular Volume VII show at the Garden in October of 1971 Ricky Nelson, the former “teen idol” who’d played a popular character on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in the 1950s and who’d scored many Top 40 hits, dutifully performs a scattering of his oldies. He’s warmly received until he moves across the stage to the piano to play his take on the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” a song that was then only a couple of years old. “When he sang his hits, everybody loved him,” Nader tells Gary James. “I tell you, there were standing ovations, one after another.” He adds that the 20,000 people who were at Madison Square Garden that evening, however, “were not there to hear contemporary music. They were there to escape it, the Vietnam War and the ‘70s. They were seeking to slip back to the euphoria and comfort of oldies Rock 'n' Roll.”
When he started to sing “Honky Tonk Woman” [sic], that disrupted the ambiance of the evening. The euphoric sort of cloud that was in the Garden became disrupted because here was a current song that jarred people from the ‘50s to the ‘70s and back to reality. They booed him because of that.
The boos begin softly, first “a ripple,” and then “louder and louder to the point where Rick was just bewildered. He’s in the center stage of 20,000 people, sold-out, and he’s being booed. So he went back, put his guitar on and sang his signature song and left the stage. So we continued on with the show.”
Nelson, a writer-performer looking backward and forward simultaneously, finding his way, will write the song “Garden Party” in response to these boos. (In it he’ll croon, “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.”) “After the people have heard [“Garden Party”] a few times, they begin to listen more to the words and discover what it’s about,” Nelson will remark to ZigZag magazine a couple of years later. “Some people, though, think that the song is about some desire I might have to return to the Fifties. It’s really just the opposite, of course—I’m trying to put a stop to all that.” Meanwhile, in the summer of 1973 David Bowie records Pin Ups, an album of covers of 1960s U.K. songs, and a few months later in Los Angeles John Lennon commences sessions for his ill-destined Rock 'n' Roll, an album of covers of 1950s songs, co-produced with Phil Spector.
On February 25, 1972, an episode of Love, American Style titled “Love and the Television Set” premieres, which, we’ll learn later, was the unsold pilot episode for Happy Days. (In the episode, an American family in the 1950s purchases their first television set.) Film director George Lucas is inspired by the episode to cast young Ron Howard as Steve Bolander in his film American Graffiti, set in Modesto, California in the summer of ’62. The movie’s a massive success, encouraging ABC to revisit and to ultimately greenlight Happy Days, which will run for eleven seasons and two hundred and fifty-plus episodes, never moving beyond its 1950s and ‘60s plotlines. Production of the first season begins in 1973 as American Graffiti’s becoming a sleeper hit, while Chuck Berry’s duckwalking his way across stages from the past to the present and back again.
On June 1, 1973 eight OPEC countries raise the price of petroleum by 11.9 percent. Two days later, John Dean informs members of the House Judiciary Committee that he’d discussed the cover-up with President Nixon at least 35 times. Back to reality, boooooooo go the boos. So the national mood is complicated. Executives at Buddah Records wonder if Americans over the age of thirty want to hear the songs from their collective childhood and adolescence, songs that scored long afternoons and gentle twilights, songs that didn’t call attention to the darkly complex currents in the air.
By the 1970s Dick Clark has been “America’s Oldest Teenager” for quite some time, having hosted American Bandstand for many years, helping to create and exploit the youth market that gladly opened their collective allowance-fed wallets. In 1972 he produces the first of his New Year's Rockin' Eve countdowns in Times Square, assuming hosting duties two years later, and in 1973 he begins hosting The $10,000 Pyramid game show, assuring that his genial face and well-scrubbed demeanor will charm households on a regular basis for decades to come.
Buddah Records, meanwhile, is facing some rough times. Having ridden high on the charts only a few years before with innocuous bubblegum singles like “Simon Says” and “1-2-3 Red Light” (by the 1910 Fruitgum Company) and “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy” (the Ohio Express), the label’s now reckoning with rapidly changing album and radio markets, foreboding changes in the weather as the teens who smacked gum at the local public pool and devoured disposable 45s are growing up, following their daring friends and older siblings into the murky waves of progressive music and hard rock. By 1973, though Buddah’s still delivering singles and albums in the charts, the writing’s on the wall; head honcho and hits-creator Neil Bogart will depart the following year to found Casablanca Records—the name of which conjures disco, KISS, and piles of blow, indelible markers of the end of the tumultuous decade far removed from the innocent sunniness of bubblegum.
One of the last records Buddah will release during their glory years is Dick Clark/20 Years of Rock n’ Roll, a gathering of thirty “original hits” aimed at those eager to turn away from the amped din of acid rock and power trios, Nixon, and fuel shortages. An image of a smiling Dick Clark (is that redundant?) is splashed on the album cover, his toothy grin saying, It’s ok. Just over his shoulder looms an image of Clark from the 1950s that says, Look, good things can last.
20 Years of Rock n’ Roll arrived at my family’s house in Wheaton, Maryland shortly after its release. I recall sitting with the double album down in our rec room—in other memories I’m in the basement—poring over the images on the sleeve, and yet my siblings assure me that we never had the LPs, rather we had the 8-track tape, and we probably selected it from the Columbia Record Club, that mail-order bonanza that delivered many an album to our home. However it arrived, and in whatever format, 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll became a formative album for me as a kid.
As I look closely at the album now I recognize that Buddah packaged it with a slightly more complex approach than Clark’s beaming face suggests. Bookending Clark on the left are newspapers clippings about early rock and roll and Beatlemania, on the right about Woodstock and biker gangs—a lot of history between those images remains untold, but Clark’s face is the real news here, the reason we bought the record (or the tape or the 8-track), his smile papering over darker, more unsettling news. Open the gatefold sleeve and the narrative told by the headlines gets a bit more complicated. Clark’s face pops up several more times (Dick’s the album’s emcee, the guiding spirit, he’s what holds the center) as you read about the Jets and the Mets’ amazing wins and the moon landing, yet also stories about rock and roll as a “communicable disease,” The Pill, Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection. Watergate.
Flip over the album and we retreat again to mid-century quaintness with a montage of black and white images—sock-hopping teenagers, a Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour bus, a scene from the set of an American Bandstand episode, nearly everyone gleaming, buttoned-up, white. The present returns as your gaze drifts to the center of the sleeve where there’s Clark again, standing in what looks like a studio backlot. In an oddly meta move he’s holding a copy of the very album I’m holding, his collars, lapels, and pants legs ‘70s-wide, his face grinning the grin, offering a gift from the past that both celebrates and obscures that past.
“A good portrait ought to tell something of the subject's past and suggest something of his future.” That’s photographer Bill Brandt. I see little of the past in Clark’s face other than what he wants me to see, a made-for-TV version of history, his and the country’s, and you can dance to it. What does his face say about the future? I still have to remind myself that he died (in 2012, following a stroke), so permanent a fixture was he in my childhood, on TV, on album covers. If Clark’s preternaturally youthful, smiling face suggested anything about his future it was that that future might never come.
Record executive, journalist, and producer Richard Robinson enjoyed a long and rich journey through popular music. He ditched his studies at Yale a few months before he was to graduate to form a band, and by the end of the 1960s was writing a syndicated music column and spinning discs late at night on WNEW-FM in New York City. He married the music journalist and author Lisa Robinson, with whom he co-founded Rock Scene and edited Hit Parader. He later found work as a producer of the Flamin’ Groovies, Lou Reed, and David Johansen. A record executive at Buddah, he was involved in various design and production duties, such as composing the occasional liner notes which included the knocked-out Space Age copy on the back of Journey to the Moon, an of-the-era album celebrating the moon landing with “hip” music by Sound of Genesis.
And he co-wrote Dick Clark’s autobiography, Rock, Roll & Remember, and wrote the copy to the twenty-three page Yearbook booklet that came with 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll, stuffed with yet more promotional photos of artists and bands and even more headlines. Cartoon stars light up every page. The text is essentially a potted history of popular music from the Crew Cuts and Bill Haley to Alice Cooper and T. Rex, but because Robinson was an intuitive and knowledgeable music writer and cultural historian, he’s keen to weave in national and international events—television’s ascendency, the Korean War, Hollywood flicks, Sputnik, the Israeli/Arab conflicts, Vietnam War protests, the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, and the rest. But any attempt to add historical dimension to the sounds of Top 40 is flattened into a Wikipedia-like litany of events, history as bullet points. Dick Clark’s face appears on nearly every page: he’s interviewing and posing with musicians, he’s a smiling floating-head the high wattage of which bleaches away troublesome news, conflicting narratives of racism, sexism, and payola. Robinson clearly understood his remit from the Buddah execs, as American Bandstand’s history and Clark’s role in it are offered as a kind of origin story of popular music, our host’s pleased countenance a through-line from start to finish. Richard Wagstaff Clark, without whom….
Dick Clark’s face revolving, revolving. This is no fever dream. 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll came packaged with a “special bonus record,” a cardboard flexi disc emblazoned with, naturally, Clark’s cheery face. (The record plays at 33 1/3 rpm, and in an unnerving design bug the spindle hole nailed Clark right between his eyes.) On the record, he shares a handful of memories. “You know, I got to thinking,” he begins in his impossibly relaxed, amiable manner, “there isn’t any way I’m going to be able to ramble about the past twenty years of my life in and around rock n’ roll and get it done in any reasonable length of time.” He chuckles. “Too much has happened, I’ve had so many great memories I’d like to share with you.”
So he focusses his lens, talks about “close personal friends” in the music business, that one “girl singer” (Connie Francis), the fabled “Fabian shot,” a close-up on the heartthrob singer employed to capitalize on his “sensual good looks”—Clark remarks with fatherly pride that the Fabian shot is still being used “on Donny Osmond, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Alice Cooper” (Alice Cooper??),—the time his talent coordinator hesitated in booking The Mamas & the Papas because “they don’t look like our kind of people, they’re just not right.” Ever the even-tempered, cool-headed host, Clark urged her to book them anyway. “And she did,” he chuckles.
Listening now conjures an image of a group of long-haired teens, a captive audience sitting at Clark’s feet, one kid clutching a Led Zeppelin album, another an Isley Brothers album, a little bored with the old guy as he reveals star after star who made their debut on American Bandstand. Stoned eyerolls all around. Clark’s monologue’s more than corny, to be sure, with more than a hint of self-aggrandizement, yet Clark pulls it off completely, so disarmingly lured are we into cottony complacency and feel-good vibes by the folksiness of his voice, his gee-whizz enthusiasm, his earnest eagerness to please. Dick Clark’s face rotates and a spell is cast.
20 Years of Rock N’ Roll did big business on its release. “With the nostalgia craze at full storm, this album is a natural,” gushed Billboard in its “Top Album Picks” column in the June 30, 1973 issue, adding that “the worldwide name value of Dick Clark is also a winner.” The verdict? “Best cuts: All of them.” Two months later, Buddah took out a full-page ad in Billboard congratulating Clark (and themselves) for selling more than a million copies of the double album.
If you’re reading this in, say, your twenties, your conception of a half century is wildly different from a person who’s reading this in their sixties—the absurd weight and surreal pull of time. If a day is a microcosm of a life, I think of the decades I spent during any given afternoon of my childhood listening to 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll, an album that we’re as far away from now as the album itself was from 1923.
I loved 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll as much as any other record when I was a kid. The thirty songs have lodged in my musical DNA, as essential to my genetic identity as my height and handedness. The record’s my internal Big Bang, and I’ve carried the songs inside of me for decades, the first years of which especially intensely, as they essentially soundtracked my childhood, the complicated moments in the classrooms and hallways and on the school playground at St. Andrew the Apostle, during my long solo allowance walks or bike rides, with my family around the dinner table or down in the basement, alone upstairs in my room. This music was the weather I walked through. Along with the Beatles’ “Red” and “Blue” albums, 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll laid the foundation. A half century later I still know the sequencing by heart, the expectations in the clicks-and-pops between tracks, the next song beginning before this one ends. 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll stuck by me, stuck inside me, coloring everything I did.
Within a few years of the album’s release, St. Andrew’s introduced a late-morning “folk mass” on Sundays where young parishioners with (amplified!) acoustic guitars and a piano sang up-tempo hymns, dragging the grave solemnity of the ten o’clock mass into the present with singalong pop. Such transformations were in the air in dioceses across the country; it was the era of declining interest among youth, The Cross and the Switchblade, the “common language” Good News bible translations, missalettes and sermons with secular shadings, the arrival of female altar servers. The folk masses, with their smiling singers and occasional eighth-notes punctuating the churchy air, added a lively, upbeat charge to Mass, and were not well-received by the more conservative parishioners at St. Andrew’s. I didn’t care much; I was pre-teen cool to the whole controversy. Yet I couldn’t help noticing the boundaries softening among the family stereo, the church, and the radio. The songs on 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll felt heavenly, too, and I secretly enjoyed hearing pop changes and lively melodies at Mass. I couldn’t tell whether the Sunday music at St. Andrew’s was infusing the Saturday Top 40 countdown with sacredness, or whether it was the other way around.
I see now that over the years I internally grouped the songs on 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll into emotional clusters. Buddah sourced the songs across genres, eras, and publishers, pulling off a mammoth licensing ask in the process. There’s great rock and roll on the album, songs that, grinning, drew me right into the party where I’ve stayed my whole life: Bill Haley’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock,” Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line,” Fats Domino’s “I'm Walkin’,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie,” Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs’ “Wooly Bully,” the McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy,” Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’.” The joys of Fats and Duane and the thrill of the guitar break in the pre-chorus in “Good Lovin’” were immediate and eternal. Dion’s “Runaround Sue” may have raised some issues I wasn’t quite ready for, but then Joey Dee’s “Peppermint Twist” would arrive, an early lesson in dancing away what you don’t yet understand (or collapsing into giggles, same thing when you’re a kid). Bliss arrived with Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay,” Tommy James’s “Crimson & Clover,” Lovin' Spoonful’s “Do You Believe In Magic,” the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” It’s a wonder I didn’t collapse in ecstasy on the rec room floor.
There was some corny stuff, for sure. I didn’t connect with Gallery’s “Nice To Be With You” or the Crew Cuts’ “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream),” and though I loved the melody Paul Anka crooned in “Put Your Head On My Shoulder,” the song was too easy to goof on, to deflect as silly, florid, as kinda gross. And Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” as bad ass as it was (and is) was a bit beyond my ken at age ten or so. I’d have to catch up to that one (not to mention the way-out orgasmic middle of “Hang On Sloopy.”)
Yet there were also songs the mystery and emotional complexities of which spoke to me in language different, and so much more vital, than everyday speech. Sometimes a melody would be so moving in its lilt and changes I felt as if I were on the outside peering in at the world of grown-ups, where loss mingled with joy, where I felt the pull toward something weighty, and not altogether welcome, that I couldn’t yet name. The Orioles’ transcendent “Crying In The Chapel” and Frankie Avalon’s “Why” were, and in some ways remain, just out of my reach, stirring me so profoundly with their exquisite melodies and with vocals that feel as if in they’re in touch with something beyond the men who are singing them. The Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” and the Shangri-Las’ “Leader Of The Pack” were theatrical and performative, stuffed with drama and melodrama, camp before I knew the word, and I fell hard for the songs’ longings and griefs (and the women who were singing them).
These songs built dioramas, dimensional tableaus where kids like me collided, sure, but also where older people—my siblings and their appealing, and alluring, friends, my parents and their ancient parent-friends who’d sag with dejected sighs at the block party in the summer as the sun set, or, tipsy on gin, exchange meaningful glances that remained in code—enacted lives I could only imagine. Melanie’s “Lay Down (Candles In The Rain)” and Edwin Hawkins’ “Oh Happy Day” scored especially graphic terrain for me. I wouldn’t know for years that the sublime Edwin Hawkins Singers performed on both cuts, but as a kid I dug the spirit cousin grooves between them, the gospel-like fervor, the performances moving between control and release, the rapturous dynamics, the early lessons in the sublime power of a chord or a key change, of massed, wailed vocals or the command of one singing alone.
“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.” Henri Bergson. In recent centuries nostalgia has come to mean a sentimental craving for the past, for so-called innocent times, but further back nostalgia meant something more urgent: an intense, nearly feverish desire to return home, in all of the ways that we define that word. Nostalgia’s Greek origins are nostos, or homecoming, and, algos, or pain, grief, distress. Those suffering from this perceived condition were treated, if at all, as very sick patients. That version of home no longer exists, if it ever really did, and the ache of that paradox runs deep. If we’ve tamed the word, a consequence of a fuller understanding of human psychology, the anguish is still present, faint, like a vocal that’s been wiped off of a sound recording but is ghostly there.
Time is engraved on the four sides and thirty cuts of 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll yet, as in a magic trick, time is suspended, also. I’m nostalgic for those long afternoons listening to songs that were themselves packaged as nostalgia, signed, sealed, and delivered by Dick Clark. When I listen to this album what I feel isn’t mired in the past, it’s here still, in the present, further proof that great songs transcend their origins, the tiny kitchens or large studios where they were created, in time, and out of time.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.