Frankie Avalon proves he's still a large part of pop culture
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By L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star
As a kid I loved the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies even though I lived in western Nebraska — about as far from a beach as you can get.
That, however, didn’t surprise Avalon.
“The surfing was last,” Avalon said, citing a survey producers did more than four decades ago to find out what attracted audiences to the beach pictures. “It was the characters and the relationship of Frankie and Annette. It was those two kids who were attracted to each other. It was young love, and we brought it to the screen.”
What: Frankie Avalon
Where: Lied Center for Performing Arts, 12th and R streets
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Tickets: $40, $35, $30, at Lied box office or by calling 472-4747 or at www.liedcenter.org
But, contrary to what the young audiences imagined, Frankie and Annette were only a couple on screen, not off.
“It was all character,” Avalon said in a telephone interview from his California home. “I was married at the time, and we were starting our family. I’ve been married 46 years. We have eight children and 10 grandchildren. It’s quite a bunch. That was all character. It wasn’t my life.”
What was real about the beach party pictures was the fun that the cast clearly was having.
“We went out on the beach at Malibu and had fun,” he said. “The director had to say, ‘We’re making a motion picture here.’ We were all really friends. If you look at those beach movies, they all have about the same cast. We were together a lot, and we had so much fun.”
The seven beach movies weren’t taken seriously as films. But they made an impact at the box office, grossing an average of $15 million each when tickets cost 75 cents or $1.
“That would be a $90 million picture today,” Avalon said. “They’ve had their run. There’s still a cult with them. They represented a time, a more innocent time. Then in ’66-’67, you had the Vietnam War, the hippie generation, lots of drugs and all that, and our style was kind of old- fashioned.”
The beach party movies came after Avalon had established himself as a singing star.
One of the first teen idols, Avalon had a pair of No. 1 hits in 1959 with “Venus” and “Why” and had 31 singles on the Billboard charts from 1958 to1962.
While Avalon and fellow teen idols like Fabian aren’t given much credit or respect by rock historians and critics, he was there when rock ’n’ roll happened, appearing on legendary package shows put together by DJ Alan Freed that included the likes of Bobby Darin, Sam Cooke, the Big Bopper, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Dion.
“We had a rock ’n’ roll bus,” Avalon said. “It was an old school bus. We’d drive 12 to 14 hours, get a hotel every other night. We’d drive up to a high school gym, get off, get dressed, go sing, then get back on the bus and drive again. We loved it. We knew no better.”
The acts performed in a specific order. The singer with the fewest hits, usually just one, opened the show by doing that song, then was off the stage. Those with two or three hits did their songs in the middle of the bill while those with four or more headlined.
The rock ’n’ roll package tours were fun. But once the buses crossed the Mason Dixon line, they showed the young performers, most of them from the Northeast, an ugly side of America.
“It was a different, different world that we didn’t know about, except for guys who were from the South, like Buddy Holly,” Avalon said. “We didn’t know we had to stay in different hotels. We didn’t know we couldn’t drink at the same water fountains, that we couldn’t eat in the same restaurants. It was just terrible.”
But Avalon said, he believed, as many others do, that the integrated music tours of the late ’50s and early ’60s helped break down segregation and change America’s racial attitudes.
One thing is certain. There are thousands who still remember Frankie Avalon the teen idol.
“There is a definite connection with a certain age group that started in the mid-’50s,” Avalon said. “They’re all grandmas now. But they come to the shows. There’s a connection that goes on through time. It’s lasted a long time, thank God. I’m still doing what I’ve done the last 50 years.”
Avalon, 69, now plays 30 to 40 shows a year that feature his ’50s/’60s hits, clips from the beach movies and songs from “Grease,” the picture that provided a career renaissance for Avalon, when he decided to take the role of “Teen Angel,” in the 1978 film.
“For me, the biggest successes I’ve ever had were the ones I never counted on,” Avalon said. “I never thought my first big record would be a hit. I thought it was an average song. I never thought that ‘Grease’ would be a smash. I turned it down at first. Now it’s the highest grossing musical of all time — to this day.”
Playing venues like the Lied Center for Performing Arts, where he’ll be Tuesday, is far different from the shows Avalon played when he was getting started.
“When I first came out with Bobby Darin, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, we were playing drive-in movies on top of the snack stand, and we were happy to have the job,” he said. “You had a big old microphone and speakers in the ceiling where they made announcements if you were inside, and that was it. To me, now it’s a luxury.”
The concerts also let Avalon connect with fans from across the country, which makes him feel as if he has left his mark on music, popular culture and, to some measure, America.
“The longer I’ve stayed in this business, the more I get that feeling,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing to be stopped by people, to be recognized, to have somebody come up at say, ‘Thank you for all the wonderful memories, for everything …’ Those are compliments you can’t imagine.”
As I was preparing to talk to Avalon, one of my female co-workers told me that Avalon was her “boyfriend” when she was a little girl watching the beach movies and asked me to relay that to him. I did and his response was pure Frankie.
“Tell her I’m still her boyfriend,” he said. “And give her a kiss for me.”
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.
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