Here is a claim that sounds like a trick question: the most widely heard Barry Manilow recording of the 1970s may be a song that was never released as one of his hit singles. For ten years, from 1977 to 1987, every episode of ABC’s American Bandstand — the Saturday ritual through which America watched its teenagers dance — opened and closed with Manilow’s voice, singing a set of lyrics he had written with Bruce Sussman to a big-band tune older than rock and roll itself. “Bandstand Boogie” began as track four on his album Tryin’ to Get the Feeling. It ended as the sound of American weekend afternoons.
A Tune From Before Rock and Roll
The melody was composed by Charles Albertine, a saxophonist and arranger in Les Elgart’s orchestra, and Elgart’s recording of it for Columbia became the theme of Bandstand when the Philadelphia dance show grew into a national institution. The programme had begun locally in 1952 on WFIL-TV, originally fronted by Bob Horn and first announced by Artie Shaw’s “High Society”; Clark took over as host in 1956, and in August 1957 the show went national on ABC. Thereafter, five afternoons a week and later every Saturday, Elgart’s bright, swinging “Bandstand Boogie” was the sound that announced it — though, by a nice historical irony, Elgart himself is not known ever to have appeared on the show his orchestra introduced every day.
To understand what the tune carried, remember what the show was. Bandstand moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964 without losing its essential transaction: ordinary teenagers, in their ordinary clothes, dancing on television to the week’s records while the nation watched to learn the steps, the clothes and the songs. Its rituals were liturgy to its audience — above all Rate-a-Record, in which a panel of teenagers scored new singles and delivered the segment’s immortal standard of judgment: it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. The theme was not decoration. It was the doorbell of that world, and for the show’s first national generation it was Albertine’s boogie.
Television, however, keeps nothing forever. From 1969 to 1974 the show opened with a new synthesized “Bandstand Theme” by Mike Curb, all contemporary electronics, and from 1974 an orchestral disco arrangement of Albertine’s tune by Joe Porter took over. The boogie had been demoted to raw material. One of the millions of teenagers who had grown up dancing in front of the television to the original theme took the demotion personally.
The Fan Who Fixed It
Barry Manilow had been exactly the viewer Bandstand existed for — a Brooklyn kid in the audience at home — and by 1975 he was, improbably, one of the biggest recording stars in the country, in the middle of the sessions for his third studio album. According to the story as Manilow has told it, he wondered why “Bandstand Boogie” had been replaced, and set out with his lyricist Bruce Sussman to bring it back the only way a songwriter can: by giving it words.
The words they wrote are a fan letter with perfect period detail. “We’re goin’ hoppin’, we’re goin’ hoppin’ today, where things are poppin’ the Philadelphia way” — the lyric salutes the show’s hometown, name-checks “Mr. Dick Clark,” and even works in the programme’s beloved Rate-a-Record segment, pleading of the host’s record ratings: “best in the east, give it at least a seventy-five!” The performing credit on the album tells its own story about the production: alongside Arif Mardin’s horn arrangement on the track, Manilow is credited with “32 voices” — a one-man crowd of backing singers, the studio craftsman amusing himself while rebuilding a big-band record in retro-swing style.
The song appeared on Tryin’ to Get the Feeling, released in October 1975, credited to Manilow, Albertine and Sussman. The album was a blockbuster — No. 5 on the Billboard 200, certified double platinum, powered by “I Write the Songs” and the title track — and “Bandstand Boogie” was, amid that company, a piece of deliberate nostalgia: two minutes and forty-nine seconds of a superstar pausing his ballad empire to tip his hat to the television show that had taught his generation to dance.
Ten Years of Saturdays
Then the hat-tip became the thing itself. In 1977 — the year of the show’s 25th anniversary celebrations, with Clark firmly established as American pop’s ringmaster — American Bandstand adopted Manilow’s recording as its theme, and there it stayed — opening and closing the show — until the end of the programme’s ABC run in 1987. The choice made a certain emotional sense for Clark, a host building an empire on the proposition that pop’s past and present were one continuous party: his new theme was simultaneously a quarter-century old and brand new, a swing standard carrying lyrics written by the biggest balladeer of the hour, who happened to be an alumnus of the show’s own living-room audience. Manilow, for his part, was by then no stranger to the Bandstand stage, having performed his hits there during his rise; the theme simply made the guest a permanent resident.
Consider what that residency meant in raw terms. A hit single burns for a season; a network theme plays on schedule. Week after week, year after year, in the slot American teenagers organized their Saturday around, the first and last music heard was Barry Manilow’s — not selling a record, not promoting an album, simply being the sound of the show itself. By the time the syndicated era replaced him with David Russo’s updated instrumental, Manilow’s “Bandstand Boogie” had enjoyed a decade of exposure that no single in his catalogue, not even “Mandy” or “Copacabana,” could match for sheer repetition. A full decade: through disco, punk, new wave and the early MTV years, the most youth-obsessed programme on American television introduced itself with a swing tune from the early 1950s, re-cut by a balladeer singing lyrics about how much he loved the show. Dick Clark, pop’s great survivor, had found in Manilow a fellow believer in show-business continuity, and the partnership suited them both.
When Bandstand left ABC for syndication in 1987, Manilow’s version was retired in favour of an updated instrumental arrangement by David Russo, and the programme itself ended in 1989, closing a 37-year run. But for anyone who was young in the decade the Manilow theme played, the association is permanent and involuntary: the horn riff, the “hop, hop” backing figures, a star in his thirties joyfully pretending to be a teenager who has just been spotted by his parents in the studio audience.
The Hit That Wasn’t
Measured by the charts, “Bandstand Boogie” is a footnote in Manilow’s catalogue — an album track, never a single, absent from his lists of Top 40 hits. Measured by exposure, it may have outperformed nearly all of them: a weekly network broadcast for ten years put it into more American homes, more reliably, than all but a handful of singles ever manage. It also captures something the ballads cannot. The standard Manilow story is the interpreter of other writers’ heartbreak, the man Clive Davis fed with songs; “Bandstand Boogie” is Manilow the fan and the craftsman, reaching back to the music of his own adolescence and performing an act of restoration — rescuing a theme tune from replacement, and incidentally writing himself into the opening credits of a television institution.
There is also a strangeness in the artefact itself that rewards a second listen. The lyrics are a documentary of the 1950s show — Philadelphia, phone calls home, parents watching, records rated on the spot — yet for a decade those words played over dancers in satin jackets, then in disco wear, then in the neon of the early MTV years, as the programme aged alongside its audience and refused, exactly like its theme, to concede that the party had moved. Manilow’s recording became a kind of palimpsest: Albertine’s 1954 arrangement beneath Sussman’s 1975 words beneath a 1980s dance floor. Few theme songs carry three eras at once. Fewer still were written as a thank-you note from a viewer who made good.
Nor did the song retire when the show did. Manilow has kept it in his concert repertoire as a set-piece of pure nostalgia — he was still performing it on arena stages decades later, as in his 2003 Houston Rodeo show — inviting audiences who once watched Bandstand through childhood television sets to hear, one more time, the sound of the door opening on their Saturday. Few album cuts are granted a second life as a television institution and a third as a concert ritual.
That is the real subject of the song, beneath the bop and the handclaps: gratitude as entertainment. A generation of Bandstand dancers got their Saturday soundtrack from a singer who had once been one of them, standing in the living room, waiting for the boogie to start. In 1975 he gave it back its words. Two years later, the show gave the words back to him — and played them, twice an episode, for ten years.