I Give Him An Eighty-Two

We all make choices as teenagers that we look back on with some regret. Forgive me. I never got a chance to watch Dick Clark when it wasn't ironic. Or perhaps I don't deserve forgiveness, since the sardonic layer through which I viewed Dick's career was a choice I made a very long time ago.
When I was the focused demographic for American Bandstand, there wasn't a lot of music going on. In many ways, the mid-to-late seventies were a desert through which we all traveled to be delivered on the other side by the Sex Pistols. I blame the bell bottoms. I have company in this assertion. Denis Leary agrees with me. All those flared-out pants on boys and girls just proved that their priorities were in the wrong place, and over all this ambivalence, Dick Clark held sway. Oh sure, some scary moments slipped in there, like DEVO. And Joey Travolta. I still couldn't help feeling that it was Mister Clark's intent to steadily lower the standards of America's listening pleasure via his Bandstand.
Then he started branching out. Twenty-five-thousand dollars was a pretty good Pyramid, but to get the level of double-entendre that would bring in a discerning viewer after a hard day at work, you'd have to give away a hundred thousand dollars. And excuse me if I feel that Ed McMahon was slumming it a bit when he left his drunken position on the end of Johnny Carson's couch to pal around with Dick on his Bloopers shows.
But for me, the biggest challenge came when Dick promised to rock our New Year's Eve. They didn't rock. They mostly sat there and chatted things up, while giving us one more shot of that crystal ball hanging precipitously over Times Square. When I watched Dick Clark, I wasn't expecting to be rocked. I was expecting to be annoyed.
Now that he's gone, I can salute the man's accomplishments. He rose to the top of an industry that has an attention span of an eight-year-old, and he stayed there, more or less, for sixty years. Not bad for a kid from Philly. I mean that sincerely. Aloha, Dick.