I was flabbergasted. You would be too. I met a great man, a statesman, one of the fathers of the counterculture. Dick Clark has been dishing up a leggily acceptable euphemism of the teenage experience on ABC-TV’s American Bandstand for twenty years now, and recently celebrated that achievement by airing a twentieth anniversary show featuring everything from dredged regulars out of the show’s acne heydays (now looking very staid indeed) to Cheech and Chong rating records (they gave one a nothing, and broke it). The show managed to Joll a 42 share of the viewing audience, unprecendented for the time it was aired, and now Buddah has marketed a companion album, 20 Years of Rock ’n ' Roll, a perfect assemblage including Dick’s mug up front, a 24 page souvenir yearbook, a cardboard bonus record of Dick’s “inside stories,” and 30 original hits running all the way from “Cryin’ in the Chapel” by the Orioles to Gallery’s “Nice To Be With You” (a hefty portion of it old Buddahowned noise, of course).

So in spite of hipcult accusations of galloping obsolescence, Dick Clark is currently riding higher than ever, and obviously deserves to be heard in thetfe sargasso times of youthful post-unrest nebbishhood which some have even sworn are like the Fifties all over again. They’re not, of course, but Dick Clark may well have come full circle.

It was a quick walk from the offices of Buddah Records on 7th Avenue to the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Dick was busy taping the next several months of The $10,000 Pyramid, the weekdaymorning game show he now hosts as well as holding down his institutional spot on the Saturday afternoon American Bandstand. He’s a busy institution, taping a week's worth of Pyramids every day, but we’ll be able to squeeze ip an interview over lunch in the Chinese restaurant next door. I’ve got planty of Mandrax and cigars, and I’m ready.

We watch the monitors as the credits roll on a just-finished Pyramid and guests Jack Klugman and Tony Randall engage in some last-minute horseplay for the cameras. Then they’re off, and I’m shaking hands with Dick, momentarily distracted by the sight of an even greater celebrity, Tony Randall, bustling by with three little old ladies in tow. He holds han^ls with them, bills and coos. Jeesuz, I think, He’s Felix Unger offstage too. Wodda froot. Then we go up to the virtual broom closet that is Dick’s dressing room, he gets into his civvies and I observe the antedeluvian thickness of Dick’s pancake makeup. Remarkably well-preserved, this boyo is — you’d have to go to Pat Boone, I think, to find a comparable case. You can see the wrinkles under the makeup, but he don’t wear no toupee — he really has hair that he combs like that. Also, he speaks to you in a public sort of voice that’s very similar to the one heard on TV. Not without a sense of humor, he nevertheless is very serious in his comments on the music business — and all his references' to it are geared to a dollars-anfi-sense level of somehow homespun entrepreneurial pragmatism. He pronounces words like “sociological” with a careful precision that lends them a tone of solemn import and suggests he may feel obliged by his generational daddy role to come on more oracular than is his natural inclination. Nevertheless, he’s a pro, and while occasionally embarrassingly pat his answers come tumbling out in a magnificently organized torrent of anecdotes, Clarkian aphorisms, and the odd ironic “frank” admission.

How wired would you have to get, for instance, to compete with this natural life stylin’ poppa’s rap: “There was a lady the other day that gave a fascinating speech in acceptance of an honorary degree she got at some college somewhere. ., Dolly Cole, she’s the wife of chairman of the board of General Motors, so you know obviously where her politics lie and where her thinking goes, but she came up with a great line, she’s a self-educated lady and very charming, I did five television shows with her once I got to know her reasonably well, she said to the graduating class, she. apologized for her truckdriver language in front, she said ‘All of you here attending this school who are complaining of the materialistic world can be assured that there are a couple of parents home working their ass off to keep you here.’ Which is an interesting thought. The other great line I read, and this is fabulous, is that in this generation of young people who all wanta be individualistic, the line is ‘Look, I wanna be different, just like everybody else!,’ we are really coming into a carbon copy generation. It’s really unique. As a student of young people, I’ve never seen such a one-dimensional group of people in all my life — in thinking, in dress, even in music habits.”

I mean, did you ever! What I wouldn’t give to talk, hell, write like that — what incredible organization, what lucidity. But I suspected the facile flash of the superficial, generalised savant, so I lammed into him: Just why are you so interested in young people, Dick?

“Sheer unadulterated greed. That’s a facetious answer; it’s mostly true. It’s been a very good livelihood secondarily, and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t excerpt it and just publish that part. I enjoy it. If I didn’t, thete’s no amount of money in the world could make me do what I do. And let’s face it, it’s a hell of an interesting way to make a living. You never know from day to day what young people are gonna do next.”

That reminds me, Dick: whadda you think of fag-rock?

He gets a worried look. “Do you think this is going to be widespread?”

Sure! David Bowie, Lou Reed, all those guys at the top of the charts, the queers are taking over the country!

He chews on that one a minute, and comes back typically unruffled, reflective: “Anything that’s new takes awhile before it gets disseminated across the country. You get the J.C. Penny versions of fashions of what the style leaders are wearing. There’s an interesting premise in all of this, in the youth world, you take the lunatic fringe, the avant-garde, the style leaders, the riuts. And if you are careful enough to deter-, mine what they come up with that’s a legitimate trend, then you’ll be able to figure out eventually what the people in the middle, I don’t mean necessarily geographically but in the case of our country it is pretty much the middle, will be doing in the next number of months.

“Bisexual... what’s the other word, AC/DC? I think it’s partially fad and partially goldfish swallowing, as protest was. A lot of kids got into protest because it was ‘the thing.’ It was not popular to criticise legitimate protest at the time, but I used to make the joke about the kid who had the sign in the bedroom closet that said ‘SHAME,’ and would at any given moment take the sign and go out and march. The sign was appropos to anything. That may be what’s happening with the fag-drag crazy transsexual rock scene. I think that’s a quickie. I think more importantly that’s an indication of the desire to have show business return to music. That’s why you have an Elton John, a Liberace, an Alice Cooper. That’s showbiz. We all know Alice is a put-on, a shuck. But what’s funny is when you read the sociological commentators and how torn up the whole straight world is over this craziness. I can’t attach any significance to that.”

Does he then see the hope of rock’s future in relatively wholesome groups like Slade, or the bubblegum androgeny of Marc Bolan? Nope. “I don’t think Slade will make it in the States for the same reason T. Rex didn’t make it: he thought he was Mick Jagger. He was Donny Osmond. Print it. Schmuck. 1 went over there at the time that there was a necessity to fill our subteen gap of idols, to try to convince [Bolan’s] people that it would be a good time to move on the American market in that area. The trouble was, the poor fellow believed his own publicity, when you had Ringo Starr running around taking pictures of him with an 8-millimeter camera. He believed he was going to be Mick Jagger, which he is not. He’s been so many things in his career" I don’t guess he knows who he is. And he has been so ill-advised — this happens with so many artistic people — a man of obviously great talents, but no business acumen. And so therefore never the twain shall cross and he went into the sewer.

“I’m always distressed by the supposedly bright people who don’t know what they are. Take the Monkees, who thought they were the Beatles. They could have had a very nice thing going in their area for another couple of years, despite the fact that it was a shuck. If was a commercially built commodity for which there was an audience from which they could have made a great deal of money, and retired and passed it on to their children. Instead they began, Mickey Dolenz thought he was Paul McCartney. He went up to Monterey and they laughed at him.

“Again statistically, look at the record books and you’ll see that every ten years in the middle of the decade some sort of freak superstar arises. You can take it back to Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby, through Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, then you had Bill Haley and Elvis, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, so now you’re upon it again. Some time in the next two years there’ll be an individual who will be a white, male, single performing artist. Probably American.... ”

Changing the subject to his show, I wondered if he consciously strived to put forth a certain image of American youth in the kids that appeared on American Bandstand.

“Well, I dunno. They’re kind of middle of the road kids, I guess. It wouldn’t be a typical concert audience because they’re dressed differently. The only dress requirements we have are that the girls can’t wear pantsuits. It’s only because of the .visual thing, because it’s a hell of a lot more interesting to watch a girl in a skirt. And with long hair in closeups it’s very difficult to distinguish male from female, and so you use that attractive element. That’s only a matter of practicality,” he adds. “It’s not a prejudice on my part; I’m not a big leg man or anything.”

For some reason, Dick, hippies and counterculturites seem to think you’re stodgy. I asked him if he had a clue and he came back with both barrels. “That was very predominant about three of four years ago, but it’s become passe now. It was a good institution to play games off of. Then it suddenly dawned on $ lot of them that I’d been around for twenty years and was carrying the ball for them and that’s the reason they were in business. I’m very cynical toward the underground press, of which you are one. (Amerikan Bandstand? -'Ed.) I’ll be here longer than you will, is my attitude. I will be very happy to have you make fun of me or do whatever you want, I really don’t care.

“They have found now that there must be some semblance of order to stay alive. That’s why FM underground freeform radio died. Because you can’t turn seven crazy freaky guys loose on the air to do whatever they wanta do whenever they wanta do it, play the same cut 17 times or play some obtuse album, ’cause who cares?

“A lot of the whole world that kids don’t understand is politics and money. When you learn politics, money, the advertising world, where the skeletons are buried, you have then matured enough to stay alive. It’s part of the game. And a lot of kids don’t learp until they’re out wandering around saying, ‘Hey, I wonder why the place I was working at went out of business.’ They told too many people to shove it. That’s what happened to the Smothers Brothers. What a wonderful tool they had, except they painted one of the three major netwbrks info a corner, said ‘There’s no way for you to get out and we’ll win.’ They’re winning minor dollars, but it won’t amount to much by the time they pay the lawyers. So one must learn to screw the system from within.”

Okay Dick, but just for the record, what did you do when you were a kid? “I was a student of the black arts. I was a hypnotist at 13. I lived all the way through that, my whole life I had bookshelves full of this stuff. And then when it got to be very big in the late Sixties I said I better get out of this, I can’t stand listening to all of this again. I was a big hit at all the parties, reading palms, putting people out... ”

So now how do you see yourself, the adult Dick Clark? As a moral leader for youth?'

“I’m just the storekeeper. The shelves are empty, I put the stock on. Make no comment pro or con. Irving Berlin said, ‘Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.’ That doesn’t mean it’s good or it’s bad that’s the equivalent of arguing the merits of hot dogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?”