HISTORY’s Moment in Media: A New Tradition is Born: Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
On December 31, 1972, a young television host and producer reported live from Times Square in New York City as an excited crowd counted down till midnight and the ball dropped to ring in 1973. Across the country near Los Angeles, some of the year’s top bands performed their hits for the TV audience. Fifty-two years ago this month, American viewers saw the first annual installment of the tradition that would become known as Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, although in that first year the broadcast hadn’t yet landed on its now-familiar name.
Clark was already well established as a television maestro and a very resourceful and successful entrepreneur by the time his New Year’s Eve show debuted. He’d made his reputation starting in 1956 with an after-school music TV show called Bandstand that, once it went national the next year, was rebranded as American Bandstand. It was the dawn of the age of the teenager, and Dick Clark was their impresario. He both introduced kids to new music and reflected their tastes and passions back to the broader culture. Bandstand helped create the idea of Top 40 radio, proved that the audio format of rock ’n’ roll could succeed in the visual medium and was instrumental in spreading fad dances like the pony and the Watusi.
“At that moment in time, the world realized that kids might rule the world,” Clark once said. “Their own music, their own fashion, their own money.”
Notably, Bandstand invited Black artists to perform their music (rather than having white artists cover those hits, as had been the practice) and became one of the few places in popular culture that depicted young white and Black people dancing and socializing together.
But Clark had ambitions bigger than being a genial master of ceremonies. From the earliest days of his career, he was a businessman with a hand in artist management and music production. “I get enormous pleasure and excitement sitting in on conferences with accountants, tax experts and lawyers,” he once told The New York Times. As he became a bigger TV presence, he started producing more shows.
And he saw an opportunity on New Year’s Eve. For decades, the default broadcast celebration for Americans was Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, who played big band classics for a black-tie crowd at the Waldorf-Astoria and was carried live on CBS, first on the radio and then on television in 1955. Clark, who’d embraced the nickname “America’s Oldest Teenager,” knew that old-school celebration wasn’t what the young generation wanted.
He put together a cooler, fresher -- one might say more rockin’ -- celebration for NBC. The “Joy to the World” rockers Three Dog Night hosted that first installment from the Queen Mary Ballroom in Long Beach, California. The show, Three Dog Night’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” featured performances from Al Green, Helen Reddy and Earth, Wind & Fire. The next year, George Carlin hosted, and musical guests included Linda Ronstadt and the Pointer Sisters. For 1975, the show moved to ABC -- where it has remained ever since -- and Clark became the official host.
Over the years, Clark kept bringing on the hottest young bands, and he kept hosting from Times Square. One trick to getting the big-name musical acts that could command big fees by playing public gigs on New Year’s Eve: According to reports, many were filmed on a soundstage over the summer.
Clark also developed other traditions, like kissing his wife, Kari Wigton Clark, live on TV each year as the clock struck midnight. And, of course, he kept producing the show via his Dick Clark Productions, which also owns and makes such television extravaganzas as The Golden Globes, the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards and So You Think You Can Dance.
But the New Year’s show stood out. Clark and the big night became so entwined in the popular imagination that even at the end of 1999, when ABC News produced ABC 2000 -- a full day of programming from around the world to mark the turn of the millennium and anchored by Peter Jennings -- Clark was still there, reporting for the network from Times Square.
In December 2004, Clark suffered a stroke. The show went on, but Regis Philbin replaced him as host. Starting in 2005, Ryan Seacrest joined as cohost, but Clark continued to host some segments and did the countdown. December 31, 2011, marked Clark’s final New Year’s Rockin’ Eve appearance; he died on April 18, 2012.
The show lives on. Still owned and produced by Dick Clark Productions, it’s known these days as Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest. And this year, it will kick off at 8PM on your local ABC station with, in classic Dick Clark form, musical guests including the Jonas Brothers, TLC and Carrie Underwood.
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