There's a scene in "Mr. Rock 'n' Roll: The Alan Freed Story" (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC/Ch. 5) that's going to make baby boomers feel about 500 years old.
The era is the early 1950s, the place is a country club somewhere 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 in a telephone interview from Pennsylvania, where he still lives part of the year, "and this guy comes up to me and asks me if I 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.
"But my father had just had a massive heart attack, and he couldn't work," he recalls, "so my family really needed the money. And the money was good."
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 -- "pompadour city," he calls it -- as were immaculate white bucks, skinny mohair pants and boyish pullover sweaters.
The result was stardom at 15. At first, the screams that greeted his appearances practically scared the mohair pants off him, but soon, he says, "you get to like it. You get to see it as a mea sure of your success."
He liked the screamers, too.
"Girls? Oh, yeah," he says, laughing. "I was like a kid in a candy store."
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.
"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.
"Honestly, though, I've never been a big rock fan," Rydell admits.
Fabian, on the other hand, worshipped the doo-wop musicians, many of them black, who were helping change the sound of pop forever. He knows from personal experience that his character's line in the NBC movie about "colored music" is drawn from real life.
"I was on tour in Virginia with (African-American singers) Little Anthony, the Coasters and Frankie Lymon," he remembers, "and the bus stopped and they got off. So I got my things, too, and started to get off, figuring we'd come to our hotel.
"But somebody told me, 'No, you stay here. That's just where the blacks stay. We have our own hotel.' And I couldn't believe it. Here I am, this kid from Philadelphia, what do I know? My stomach cramped up and I wanted to cry.
"Basically, white people stole this music from black people, and then they treated them that way."
Fabian has nearly 100 movie and TV appearances on his resume, from his early days on "American 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 up 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 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 (stuff) off my equipment!" Thank goodness, Rydell adds, for headphones.