[On March 21st, 1952, Cleveland Arena hosted the Moondog Coronation Ball, an event widely considered the first major rock and roll concert. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that concert and other groundbreaking rock and roll figures and stories, leading up to a special weekend post on 21st century rockers carrying the legacies forward!]
On two
contrasting sides to the pioneering DJ, and how to bridge the gap.
If you’re like
me, you probably know the name Alan
Freed in conjunction with the “payola”
scandals of the late 1950s, media controversies and eventually legal
battles over the (at the time) frequent practice of bribing radio DJs to play
certain songs and artists. Indeed, Freed has come to be so consistently
associated with payola (the scandals around which caused him to lose his
job and ended not only his DJing career but also in some clear ways his
life, as they contributed to the chronic alcoholism that left him dead at the tragically young age of
43) that my initial focus for this post was going to be entirely on payola
with Freed as Exhibit A in telling that particular story. Similarly, the 1978 Freed biopic American Hot Wax focuses on a very specific historical moment, one that happens to
be at the height of the payola scandal (during the period in November 1959 when
Freed [played in the film by
Tim McIntire] famously refused to sign a radio station drafted statement
stating that he had never received bribes, leading to his firing from New
York’s WABC).
Payola may have
ended Freed’s career and life, however, but it doesn’t take much additional
research to realize that it most definitely did not define them. Freed was inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame as part of the very first class of inductees in 1986, for
two interconnected reasons: his central role in promoting rock and roll in its
earlier moments (he’s widely considered the first DJ to play rock and roll music,
and even the first the use
the phrase “rock and roll” on the radio); and his consistent, vocal promotion
of black artists and music during an early
1950s moment when such support was, to say the least, striking. I’ve
written before about the cross-cultural origins of rock and roll in
relationship to pioneering figures like Chuck
Berry and Fats
Domino, but it’s fair to say that no single figure better exemplified—and,
indeed, did more to amplify—that 1950s cross-cultural moment than did Alan
Freed. While Freed didn’t create such artists, he very much helped get their
work and voices out to broader American and international audiences, a role and
influence that more or less defines the best of what radio can do and be.
So what do we do
with that duality at the heart of the hugely influential (if tragically brief)
career and life of this radio pioneer? It’d be easy, and not inaccurate, to see
it as a contradiction, an example of the worst and best of radio summed up in
one telling figure. But I would also say that these two histories are
intimately interconnected through one shared lens: that of radio’s profound
cultural influence in and on mid-20th century America. In our
current moment of YouTube and TikTok and so so so many other ways that artists
and music can be shared (and even in prior moments of Napster and MySpace and
so on), it can be difficult to really understand just how much power an
individual DJ like Alan Freed could have on what music was being played and
heard. But one easy way to understand that influence is to read about the
payola scandal, during which for example Freed’s fellow DJ
Phil Lind disclosed to a Congressional hearing that he had been paid
$22,000 (roughly $200,000 in today’s society) to play a single record more
frequently. For a time, DJs—and radio more generally—comprised perhaps the
single most powerful cultural force in American society—and DJ Alan Freed
specifically illustrates the profoundly progressive uses to which such power
(and, yes, such illicit money) could be put.
Next rock and
roll remembrance tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other rock and roll pioneers you’d highlight?
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