It is difficult to describe how profoundly influential Dick Clark's American Bandstand was to many teenagers (like me) in the early 1960's. In those days before PCs, Internet, cell phones, IM, Facebook, MTV, etc. American Bandstand was what you did to see what new artists and what kinds of music the "cool" people were listening and dancing to, what they were wearing, how they did their hair, and what they thought about stuff. It was part of the vast technological impact that TV had on our lives visually improving the experience over radio DJ music programs by an order of magnitude. The impact of TV back then, now taken almost for granted and morphing again with nearly limitless new sources of online video, was not just a shift but a complete phase change from audio to video. It was amazing. In the late 1950's and early 1960's I happened to live near Philly. When we first heard about this American Bandstand thing we thought it would be like "The Hit Para
"Anything you can't spell will never work." --Will Rogers