Frankie Avalon’s Venus hits #1
The business minds behind American Idol are not the first to try their hand at manufacturing pop stars.In fact the process of corporate idol-making is nearly as old as rock and roll itself.The first man-made idols were launched in the late 1950s from Philadelphia where a handful of enterprising businessmen applied a little creativity and a lot of cold hard cash to the task of capitalizing on the rock-and-roll phenomenon.
The Philadelphia teen idol machine hit full stride on March 15 1959 when local boy Frankie Avalon hit 1 on the pop charts with his hit song Venus.The commercial genius of the Philadelphia idol-makers was in looking at rock and roll and understanding it as an economic phenomenon rather than a musical one.Elvis Presley may have combined black rhythm and blues and white country music in a transformative way but on a dollars-and-cents level he also revealed the enormous untapped spending power of Americas teenage girls some of whom surely cared more about his dreamy good looks than his musical innovations.Enter a clean-cut brigade of pop singers hand-picked to appeal to this market.
The musicmuch of which bore no relationship to rock and rollwas almost an afterthought.As Greg Shaw writes in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll The machinery was so well constructed that a good-looking teenager could be spotted on the street cut a record and aided by a few bribed DJs within a few weeks have a hit on the national chartsno uncertainties no risks.Frankie Avalon wasnt the only made-in-Philadelphia idol to prove the success of this machineryFabian and Danny and the Juniors took the same route to stardombut he was the most successful.Transformed from a trumpet player into a crooner by Bob Marucci head of Chancellor Records Avalon scored two minor hits in 1958 before shooting to the top of the pop charts with Venus which reached 1 on this day in 1959.
