Dick Clark sits there on the set of American Bandstand looking as smooth as ever, his neat tie and slim pocket square just visible from the breast pocket of his well-tailored suit. His hair neatly combed and slick, he presents just a slightly older version of the teenagers that surround him. “Teenagers” – even the word is new. Did it come in with the arrival of James Dean, Elvis Presley, or Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”? Maybe it wasn’t even quite a thing yet. Sure, it was an identity desperately hard-shouldering its way into the mainstream. For now, the adults were still not convinced. Unbeknownst to them, a teen named Danny Rapp thought otherwise.
This was an era in America when kids still dressed like their parents. In front of Clark sits a boy in thick glasses, a sports coat, and slacks. Behind him, a gaggle of girls in respectable dresses that could have been lifted straight from their mothers’ wardrobes. It’s interesting to look back at this old black-and-white footage and still see them as the high school kids they are. Their clothes disguise them as something else, but only when you look closely into their faces do you really see them as the teenage kids they are.
All the familiar gawky teenage angst is there, along with a bubbling excitement eagerly waiting to be unleashed. For them, the quickfire, well-trodden path of immediate transition from childhood to adulthood isn’t for them; for now, at least, they want a brief chance at something else. Rock ’n’ roll music – the maverick kids that play it, and the opulent record and TV companies that oversee it in this show – are determined to give it to them.
This is Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on a January afternoon in 1958. Presented live from the rock ’n’ roll hothouse of Philadelphia, it had gone nationwide a year earlier, beaming into eight million American homes every school day and reaching an audience that mirrored the studio’s characteristics. By the end of the decade, it would become the most-watched television show in the country. To be invited to perform on American Bandstand was a golden ticket to chart success and stardom.
Danny Rapp Steps into Teenage Stardom
The 17-year-old boy, sitting immediately to the left of Clark, knows the importance of this occasion all too well. He looks much like the rest of the teens in the audience, but there is something slightly different about him. Perhaps his suit is a little better cut, his hair professionally coiffed, or maybe it is the steely confidence he portrays to the camera. In this slightly cheesy segment – American Bandstand was big on cheesy intros between performances – Dick Clark sits amidst the audience, delivering his usual patter to the camera. The teenager next to him is Danny Rapp.
Danny Rapp? You might stare blankly at the name. Sixty-seven years is a long time, and Rapp never really had a surname. The audience would have known him simply as “Danny”, and the three other members of his group, who filled the aisle seats immediately below him, as “The Juniors”.
It didn’t matter that Danny was the youngest on the stage; he was still their self-appointed leader. As a kid in junior high, he recruited the band members and then drilled them through dance routines and appearances at school dances and local sock hops. There was no doubt that this was his dream, and he was determined to wring every last drop out of it.
Just a couple of weeks earlier, these kids (Danny Rapp, Dave White, Frank Maffei, and Joe Terranova) had, from virtually nowhere, hit the number-one spot on the American Billboard charts. The boys from Philadelphia’s John Bartram High School had achieved a minor local hit with their debut single “At the Hop”, following their coming to the notice of local record producer John Madara.
Originally titled Do the Bop, the song was written by Madara and White. At that time the group was known as the Juvenaires, but following an introduction from Madara to Dick Clark, it was suggested that they change their name to Danny & the Juniors and the song to “At the Hop” – the rationale being that “the Bop” dance craze was steadily going out of fashion, but that sock hops and high school hops would never get old.
The song initially did well locally before hitting the skids, but after a late cancellation on American Bandstand – legend has it, it was Little Anthony and the Imperials – Danny Rapp and his crew got the invitation to perform. Its inimitable thumping piano opening, followed by a unison of “Bah-bah-bah-bah, bah-bah-bah-bah” from the boys, suddenly careered its way into comfortable living rooms across America. By the time the opening chorus was belted out, they had the audience in the palm of their hands.
“Let’s go to the hop
Let’s go to the hop (oh baby)
Let’s go to the hop (oh baby)
Let’s go to the hop
Come on, let’s go to the hop.”
The lyrics aren’t exactly Shakespeare, but then they didn’t need to be. They spoke to all the kids at home who, just like them, were going to school, buying records, and living for hanging out with their friends and going to parties; this was a song they could all get up and dance to. Teenagers went crazy for it, sending it to the top of the US charts (number three in the UK), and making it one of the biggest-selling singles of the year, with an astonishing two million in sales.
Fast forward a matter of weeks, and Danny & the Juniors are back on American Bandstand again and we pick up the story from where we left off above. They have a new single to promote, and Dick Clark invites them up to sing it. Rapp lets out a thin smile as he climbs to his feet, and the band mimes the song as they work their way through the excited audience to the stage in front of them. The song is called “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”. It is tempting to think that it could have been titled ‘Danny & the Juniors Are Here to Stay’, as its tune and intro are a virtual copy of their earlier hit.
No doubt, they had a formula, and they were keen to wrestle all they could out of it. It’s easy to be cynical, but if you search for this clip on YouTube, you will be hit by many comments from people now in their late 70s and 80s who remember this performance as it played out in real time. Several of them recollect it as a rallying cry for the permanency of rock ’n’ roll; still something that their parents and others in authority saw merely as a disreputable passing fad. It’s difficult to think of these clean-cut boys in suits as edgy, but maybe for the 148-second duration of this track, they were in some way the voices of their generation. For its part, the song reached number 19 on the charts.
“Rock and roll will always be
I dig it to the end
It’ll go down in history
Just you watch, my friend.”
Dick Clark ends the segment by handing Danny Rapp a framed gold disc for “At the Hop”. “Many recording artists strive their whole life for one of these,” he says. “But you boys did it with your very first record.”
Did life ever get any better than this?
Danny Rap Just Couldn’t Step Down
The Pointe Tapatio Resort overlooking Phoenix, Arizona, had only just opened. Its owners were looking for an act to perform there, and they settled on Danny & the Juniors. It was now the spring of 1983, and Danny Rapp hadn’t had a bona fide hit since “Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Stay” some 25 years earlier. Sure, he and the Juniors had flirted with the charts and got some minor successes with songs like “Dottie”, “Twisting U.S.A.”, and “The Pony Express”, but the advent of the 1960s, and then the British Invasion, had finally killed them off as a sought-after act.
The group went their separate ways. Like most rock ’n’ roll stars of that era, the record companies saw most of the money and left the boys with their fleeting fame and not much else. Only Dave White, who had co-written “At the Hop” and had the full writing credit on “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”, had some permanent security to fall back on. He later wrote hits for Lesley Gore and Len Barry, but even he suffered his share of trailer-park penury between hits and royalty cheques, before living out a comfortable retirement in Las Vegas.
When Rapp married in 1962, he was still clinging to a career as a recording artist, but by the time the second of his two children came along, he was reduced to driving a cab. He later took a job as an assistant manager at a toy factory. This was the guy who had a gold record hanging in his living room, had once dominated radio playlists, and whose face had beamed out from television sets across the nation.
Ironically, it was the 1973, 1950s-inspired coming-of-age movie American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, that brought the band members back together. The film prominently featured “At the Hop” in a live school dance segment. However – and rather painfully for Danny & the Juniors – their hit song was performed by Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids as the fictional band Herbie & the Heartbeats. Yet its evocative glimpse back into a world of cruising and high school hops lit the fuse for a feast of rock ’n’ roll-inspired nostalgia.
All the old acts combed over their thinning hair, sucked in their bellies, and hit the road again. Danny & the Juniors were back, initially performing together but later splitting into two factions, both carrying the old name. Joe Terranova, Frank Maffei, and his kid brother Bobby toured the group along the East Coast. Rapp and whoever he could hire took the South, Midwest, and West. It was an unglamorous grind of a life on the road, playing hotel lounges and small theatres; belting out the hits to patrons desperate to reclaim their high school years with the aid of cheap beer and cocktails.
By the time Danny Rapp began his stint at the Pointe Tapatio, he had become a virtual zombie. Sure, he could turn on the magic to perform the only two songs that the audience was interested in. He’d been performing them for years in a somnambulant state, and it is to be wondered whether he grew to hate them. Before his two evening performances, he was known to drink heavily: either in one of the hotel’s bars or quietly in his room.
Those endless roads to nowhere across the arterial highways of America had taken their toll and cost him his marriage. Not surprisingly, he took it badly. Maybe he should have stayed with driving that cab rather than choosing to continuously confront his past in an endless stream of unforgiving provincial venues.
When he stared blankly out at the audience, he no longer saw the unblemished, wide-eyed teenagers of yesteryear, but instead people like him, desperately fumbling to hang on to the past. The middle-aged women that these teen girl fans had grudgingly become would still cheer for him; sometimes he would even wake up next to them in his hotel room, but none of it was the same. “You can’t stay seventeen forever,” Ron Howard remarks of petrol-head Paul Le Mat in American Graffiti – he could have been talking about Rapp.
To top it all off, Danny Rapp had fallen for the woman singer they’d hired to perform with his current group. For a while, they dated; when she went cold on him, he brooded, causing fights around the hotel and drinking in ever greater quantities.
The owners soon became worried about Rapp’s ability to see the month-long gig through. Without his name, they’d lose the whole nostalgia hook. They talked to Rapp, but by now he was so addled that his responses made little sense to them. He tapped them up for a sub (advance pay), and they never saw him again.
He wound up 140 miles away in the little town of Quartzsite and checked into a motel. Somewhere along the way, he had bought a gun and then proceeded to drink his fill in one of the town’s bars. Drunkenly, he retired to his room, and the next morning the maid found him with his face splattered across his white linen sheets.
So clinical was the gunshot that the police had a tough time identifying the victim. Perhaps, in this act, Danny Rapp had finally expunged the face that had become irredeemably bloated and haggard from years on the booze and endless, red-eyed hours on the road. The uncomfortable mask he had worn for so long was at last removed in the grimmest way imaginable.
Perhaps underneath it all, beneath the blood and unreachable dreams, there was still something of the old Danny Rapp left there. Somewhere in that room, the lingering aura of a smiling boy in the audience of American Bandstand, secure in the knowledge that everybody was going to love him.
Did life ever get any better than this?