Dayton Daily News du lieu suivant : Dayton, Ohio • 37

FRIDAY. OCTOBER 15, 1999 LIFE DAYTON DAILY NEWS 3C Story of Alan Freed will rock sets Sunday What's the Rock got (l I V- i i IS. is at DANCIN' TO ROCK 'N' ROLL are Katherine Gidwell and LeRoy Brazile as singer How to watch What: Mr. Rock 'n' Roll: The Alan Freed Story, starring Judd Nelson as the Cleveland radio jock who gave the music its start. When: 9 p.m.

Sunday. TV: NBC, Channels 5 and 22. wanted to be a star. I just had that look they wanted in those days, I guess." The look dark and sensual, confident but not threatening was just about all he had, he freely admits. Fabian had never imagined himself a musician; when he dreamed of making it, it was as an architect.

Singing and performing lessons followed, but music wasn't the half of it. Hair care, including an industrial-strength gel called Dep, was a significant part of his image as were immaculate white bucks, skinny mohair pants and boyish pullover sweaters. The result was stardom at 15. Rydell, though also seriously pompadoured, cultivated a more fresh-scrubbed, boy-next-door image. He still cherishes the compliment a reviewer gave him 40 years ago.

.4 "He said I had class," Rydell recalls proudly. "He wrote that even when I sang Wild One, I made it sound like a very dry martini." A Sinatra fan from birth, Rydell wanted nothing more than to be a big-band singer, which was how his hero had started. But when the musical tide turned in the '50s, the young vocalist had no choice but to swim with it. Fabian has nearly 100 movie and 'Mr. Rock 'n' Roll' takes boomers back to their musical roots By Joanne Weintraub Milwaukee Journal Sentinel There's a scene in Mr.

Rock Roll: The Alan Freed Story (9 p.m. Sunday, NBC) that going to make baby boomers feel about 500 years old. The era is the early 1950s, the place is a country club some where near Cleveland, and the music in the air which will turn out, of course, to be nothing less than the anthem of a revolution is making two graying guys in baggy suits very, very unhappy. "Turn that music off!" Graying Guy No. 1 demands of Freed, the white disc jockey who helped bring rhythm and blues into the mainstream.

"That's colored music!" "Good music is what we want here!" snarls Graying Guy No. 2. "If you don't want to play it, then take your records, Mr. Freed, and go home!" All right, boomers, guess who plays the graying guys? Fifty-six-year-old Fabian and 57-year-old Bobby Rydell. To anyone who was young when rock 'n' roll was, those names are as evocative as poodle skirts, and mohair suits.

Fabian his last name is Forte, but he doesn't use it professionally made his reputation as a teen idol with such gold records as Tiger and Turn Me Loose, Rydell with Wild One and Kissin'Time. For much of the late '50s and early '60s, their comings and goings were accompanied by the ultimate sign of fan devotion, the hysterical screams of girls between 12 and 20. The era they represent is the focus of two network projects in the coming weeks. Sunday's NBC movie stars Judd Nelson as Freed, the Cleveland radio jock who, by giving airplay to scores of black performers and their white imitators, helped put the soul in rock 'n' roll. CBS' two- part Shake, Rattle Roll (Nov.

7 and 10) features a host of contemporary musicians impersonating famous forebears, including Dicky Barrett as Bill Haley and Terence Trent D'Arby as Jackie Wilson. Rydell and Fabian came on the scene at about the same time, starting from the same place- the" South Philadelphia streets that also gave' the world Frankie Avalon but their routes couldn't have been more different One was the classic show-biz prodigy, singing and doing impressions from the time he was old enough to find the microphone. The other had fame walk up and crook a finger while he was sitting on his family's front steps in Philly. "I was 14," Fabian says from Pennsylvania, where he still lives part of the year, "and this guy comes up to me and asks me if I 'Caulfield' This series doesn't follow the usual police beat By Tfm Goodman San Francisco Examiner Conventional wisdom says the television cop genre is dead. After all, what show is going to top the gallows humor and intelligence of Homicide: Life on the Street, and how do you create a better character than Dennis Franz's Sipowicz on NYPDBluel Yet cynics who said no one would improve on the groundbreaking Hill Street Blues also were well, sort of proven wrong.

Instead of launching a bunch of new cop shows, recent trends have taken to mixing them with firefighters and paramedics or, more successfully, with lawyers. Writers if JOHN HEDLANDNBC Frankie Lymon. JOHN MEDLAN0NBC 'Mr. Rock 'n' Roll: The Alan Freed gave airplay to early rock 'n' roll. 4 fans still gather and, yes, occasionally shriek.

Each has two grown children. Only Rydell will admit to having given any of them a hard time about his or her taste in music. "When my son was 14 or 15 and starting playing rap music," he says, "I ran down to where he was playing it and said, 'Get that crap off my Thank goodness, Rydell adds, for headphones. beyond trite Instead, on his first day at work, he rolls up on a crime scene where six people are dead, including an undercover cop. Ryan Caulfield: Year One uses a lot of voice-overs from Maher.

Although that conceit usually grows tiring, it works for this series because it is essential to know what is going on in the mind of a guy who is getting one serious life lesson and growing up faster than he had ever thought. Some of the people responsible for The Negotiator are behind this series, and that keeps it from becoming a really bad Fox attempt to make a cop show and, more importantly, just the usual blues-on-a-beat formula. What helps this show immensely is the wonderful acting by Michael Rispoli as Caulfield's veteran partner. Although Ryan Caulfield: Year One probably won't stretch the genre, it did find a new path on which to build stories. A 1 1 i 1 7 3 7 tVTVFstar has eyes on Hollywood when career ends By John Allen Cox News Service ATLANTA The climb to the top of the World Wrestling Federation has been brisk and a little bumpy for The Rock, a third-generation wrestler who played on a national championship college football team.

The wrestler, formerly known as Rocky Maiva, is the son of WWF star Rocky Johnson and the grandson of longtime wrestling star High Chief Peter Maiva. So Duane Johnson took a natural step when his professional football career did not pan out. He turned to the family business. "That helped me because I was always kept very close to the industry. Sometimes more than I ujhould've been, getting involved in some things that I shouldn't have been as a kid," Rock said.

"I was very familar with the intricacy of the business, which made the jump from football to wrestling a lot easier." What wasn't easy was giving up football Rock was a USA Today high school All-American and signed with the most powerful college football team at the time, the Miami Hurricanes. After four seasons as a part-time starter, he was not drafted by the NFL. Rock signed with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League and was gone before the year was over. So he turned his back on football ''and signed a development deal with the WWF, working for a smaller organization until he debuted in the big-time in 1996 against the Brooklyn Brawler. When he started with the WWF, he was Rocky Maiva a baby-face rising star.

A knee injury in 1997 left him on the shelf for months, but it also opened a door. J.R. was the first one to come to vme and ask me how I felt about turning heel," Rock said, referring WWF announcer and dealmaker Jim Ross. "I said I loved that idea I always felt I was bora to fling Si tie COX NEWS SERVICE J4EW WRITERS MAY CAUSE 4HOGAN TO LEAVE WCW The biggest rumor this week is that Hulk Hogan is quitting WCW. All week leading up to Monday's Ni-tro in Biloxi, rumors circulated that Hogan had exercised his 90-day release clause.

After the 'show, WCW Live reporters Bob Ryder and Mark Madden said Hogan gave his notice two weeks iago. The reason for Hogan's decision could stem from WCW's decision to hire the main creative team behind the WWF's raunchy story lines I'Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara. The -('duo joined the struggling WCW and have been given free rein to set the organization on its ear, which presumably means more of the younger wrestlers like Chris Benoit, Kidman, Disco Inferno, Eddy Guerrero and Buff Bagwell. That could change the product and leave less of a role for headed-over-the-hill stars such as Hogan, Ric Flair, Bret Hart and Macho Man Randy Savage. The duo will take over creative t'-'control the day after the Oct.

24 "Halloween Havoc" pay-per-view. "CALENDAR WWF Saturday: Dayton. Sunday: Cleveland (No Mercy pay per view). Monday: Columbus (Raw Is War). Tuesday: Louisville, Ky.

(Smackdown taping). Oct. 23: Chicago. Oct. 24: St.

Louis. Oct. 25: Providence, R.I. (Raw Is War). Oct.

26: Springfield, Mass. (Smackdown taping). A STAR IS BORN? Duane Johnson, aka The Rock, is a third-generation wrestler. be that anyway. So from there, the character kind of exploded on the scene, and they gave me a lot of freedom creatively to say things that they didn't necessarily like." It's the Rock's long list of catch-phrases that separates him from other wrestlers.

'Do you smell what the Rock is came from an interview snap, it took off." Rock's catch-phrases even led to the naming of the newest WWF television show, Smackdown, a term the Rock regularly uses. "You get so caught up in your life and everything is moving a hundred miles an hour it's like being in the eye of the hurricane," Rock said. "But it's great to have a show like Smackdown." As for the future, the Rock, who's on the short list of People magazine's sexiest people of 1999, wouldn't mind being an actor. "I'd like to one day. I've had a lot of offers, but who knows," Rock said.

"Right now I want to do my thing in the WWF and hopefully go down as one of, if not the best ever. Who knows where the road of life will take me, but sure I'd like to do that and maybe someday I'll be thanking the Academy for the Oscar." The Rock's not on this weekend's WWF card at the Ervin J. Nutter Center, but check Saturday's Life section to see who Is. Meet Psycho Sid Real namt: Sidney Eudy. Height, weight: 6-foot-8, 318 pounds.

Hometown: West Memphis, Ark. Debut: 1988. AKA: Psycho Sid, Sid Finishing move: Power-bomb. Did you know? He was a professional Softball player before becoming a wrestler. Discovered by Randy Savage.

Was a member of the Four Horsemen until an October 1993 hotel fight with Am Anderson in which Anderson took 20 stab wounds from the scissors-wielding Sid. WCW Monday: Philadelphia (Nitro). Oct. 22: Oakland. Oct.

24: Las Vegas (Halloween Havoc PPV). Oct. 25: Phoenix (Nitro). Oct. 26: San Bernardino, Calif.

Oct. 28: San Diego (Thunder live and taping). ECW Sunday: Boston. Oct. 21: Schenectady, N.Y.

Oct. 22: Pough-keepsie, N.Y. Oct. 23: Philadelphia. 6- fHf i 1 JUDD NELSON stars as Alan Freed in Freed was a Cleveland disc jockey who TV appearances oh his: resume, from his early- days' ovtAmerkan Bandstand to a cameo in the last season of Murphy Brown.

Rydell, who lives in Philadelphia suburb with the childhood sweetheart he married, starred in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie in the '60s and still does solo concerts. In 1985, they joined old Philly homeboy Avalon to form the Golden Boys, a rock nostalgia act that plays Las Vegas, Atlantic City, cruise ships and other places where How to watch What: Premiere of Ryan Caulfield: Year One, starring Sean Maher as a rookie cop In Philadelphia. When: 8 tonight. TV: Fox, Channels 19 and 45. point, is it not? To revive a dead genre, you have to be a little different.

The premise is that Ryan (Sean Maher) is a 19-year-old kid who forgoes the college experience to become a rookie cop in Philly. His friends don't get it. After all, when things get ugly at a frat house party, he pulls his badge. Yet that is the kind of conflict the producers are adept at tapping in the pilot This guy should be doing Jell-0 shots and skipping classes. a new cop show that steps drifted away from uniformed cops after several attempts failed miserably.

So lawyers bloomed and doctors came to life in the minds of those people responsible for keeping us entertained. Nobody wanted to mess with NYPDBlue. But Fox, which either loves to go against the grain or just doesn't have much common sense, is launching a new police show called Ryan CauUleld: Year One (8 tonight, Channels 19 and 45). Given the state of Fox's new fall shows, perhaps a better title might have been, Ryan Caulfield: Week One. In fact, this show has changed titles regularly.

It started as Ryan Then it was switched to The Badland singular because it's about a rookie cop in Philadelphia's Badlands plural. At the last minute, Fox gave it the current hopeful title. The network may be on to something. This show is no NYPD Blue, it's no Homicide. But that's the For Horn Delivery Call (937) 222-5700 or Toll-Free (888) 397-6397 or Fax us at (937) 332-1146.