Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up by Victor D. Brooks Page A

Hour
(full shot) and the Ed Sullivan Show (waist up), Presley became the focal point of teen music and a demon to some elements of adult society. The singer’s slightly snarling demeanor, tight pants, leather jacket, and long sideburns produced a legion of teenage followers and alternately attracted and repelled everyone else. “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” and “All Shook Up” were almost impossible to ignore as background music for the mid-decade soundtrack, and for every adult who decried Presley’s “sexually suggestive” gyrations, another would emphasize his nonsmoking, nondrinking, churchgoing demeanor.
    A number of contemporary and more recent narratives of the 1950s have emphasized the generational conflict between teenagers and their new music and a relatively conservative adult society that allegedly looked upon this subculture as a major threat. The real situation was considerably more complex, as both rock-and-roll music and the teens who listened to it formed a complicated entity. Much of adult derision of the new music focused on a relatively few high-profile acts such as the very loud and strange-looking Little Richard (the African American Richard Wayne Pennimay), and the equally loud, equally strange-looking Jerry Lee Lewis, who followed early divorces with a marriage to his early-teencousin. These twin (yet racially diverse) threats to adult propriety were often coupled with lower-profile, subversion-of-authority songs such as “Get a Job,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Summertime Blues,” which provided detractors with ammunition to emphasize the danger of the new music.
    But several contradictory forces seemed to keep the adult protest from reaching a critical mass. First, some of the most popular acts, such as crooner Pat Boone, had an appearance and demeanor that would make them welcome in most adult homes; second, Elvis Presley’s army induction and exemplary service dispelled much of the “rebel” myth; and third, the young but incredibly clean-cut Dick Clark quickly emerged as an arbitrator between teen and adult society. Rather symbolically, Clark’s Philadelphia-based
American Bandstand
television show was paired in the ABC schedule with the
Mickey Mouse Club
as each program became a fixture for one of the age groups that constituted 1950s childhood.
    Clark was neither quite peer nor parent to the teen dancers on
Bandstand
. Rather, he was a responsible older sibling who imposed a strict dress code, inspected report cards, and banned anyone who dropped out of school. The few fifties kinescopes of
Bandstand
still available reveal that the more “rocking” songs and guests were interspersed with a surprisingly large number of ballads by Nat “King” Cole, Perry Como, and other performers who attracted young mothers as well as many teens. The combination of parental viewership and anticipation of the forthcoming Mousketeers activities also meant that a large number of Boomers were at least passively involved in the
Bandstand
experience, even if they were difficult to measure in demographic studies.
    The reality of teen music in the fifties, one part Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, another part Pat Boone and Dick Clark, is perhaps a microcosm of the relationship between adults and adolescents in the period. Religious groups and parental organizations decried the sexual content, violence, and anarchism of many teen films, yet virtually every situation comedy had a Mary Stone or Wally Cleaver, whom most adults would have been glad to have in their own home. Newsreels from the era show ministers condemning rock and roll from the pulpit as “jungle music” and adults enthusiastically (with teens less enthusiastically) burning piles of 45 rpm records as if to erase all memory of the awful genre. Yet newspapers and magazines are filled with articles only gently poking fun at teens’ activities or