Jerry Blavat — The Geator with the Heator

When Jerry Blavat was 13, he snuck into the Bandstand studio. He and friend Johnny Panvini had befriended Jo Mazzu, a regular on the show. Jerry wasn’t quite old enough to appear on the show, so while Johnny distracted the doorkeeper, Jerry slipped into another entrance.

“I had no way of knowing that a world unlike anything I had ever seen was waiting for me a few feet away,” Jerry said in his book “You Only Rock Once.” “I had never seen a television studio in person, or cameras, or the kind of microphone that Bob Horn used on his podium, and that first day I took it all in hungrily.”

Jerry impressed everyone with his dancing skills and started going to Bandstand every day. “All of my early experiences — dancing in my grandparents’ living room, doing the Mummers’ strut, practicing with Roberta as a child and Jo Mazzu as a teenager, attending dances every weekend — combined to give me a unique style, and by the time I started dancing on Bandstand, my steps were different than most kids’.”

Since then, Jerry Blavat has had a storied career in the music industry. He was the road manager for Danny and the Juniors (whose big hit was “At the Hop”), hosted a syndicated radio show, produced and hosted a television show called The Discophonic Scene, has appeared in television and movies, and owns the nightclub Memories in Margate, New Jersey.

He was inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance’s Hall of Fame in 1993 and is part of a permanent exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Jerry is a Philadelphia music icon!