By Marc Fisher
Alan Freed wasn’t the first white guy to play race records on the radio. That honor belongs to a gent named Hunter Hancock, who knew not a thing about R&B when he started spinning the work of black artists in Los Angeles in 1948. For years, "Ol’ H.H." was the subject of fevered whispering among southern Californians —is he white? Is he black? But Hancock was a genial, gentle sort on the air—so much so that his race almost didn’t matter.
Photo courtesy www.alanfreed.com
Alan Freed was nobody’s friendly radio cousin. By March 21, 1952, the night Freed turned into a real cultural threat, the deejay owned the night in Cleveland. He was the vanguard for the rebel deejays who would breach the color line, the radio renegades who lived the dream Norman Mailer described in his famous essay, "The White Negro," or what Jack Kerouac ached for in "On the Road" as he walked through a black part of town, "wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night."
Freed, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant father and a Welsh Baptist mother, had spent most of his radio career as a classical music announcer. He had a typical program of sweet songs and light classics on WJW. Then, in the spring of 1951, Leo Mintz, owner of the Record Rendezvous, a music shop on the edge of Cleveland’s black ghetto, asked Freed to host a show Mintz was going to sponsor on WJW to feature the rhythm and blues numbers that were selling startlingly well at his store.
Freed was reluctant at first—the classics really were his passion. But Mintz was a good drinking buddy, both men enjoyed a few beers, and Mintz hooked the deejay on the new music’s energy. Freed agreed. He needed the work. Freed started off in July 1951 playing blues and up-tempo swing, mixing in some tunes with a heavier beat and racier lyrics. The evening show turned into the "Moondog House," a title taken from "Moondog Symphony," a tune by a blind New York City street performer that Freed adopted as his theme.
He started molding his patter to the new music, hooting "Howl it out, baby!" over the introductions, ringing a cowbell and keeping the beat by banging on a phone book on the studio table. Unlike Hancock, Freed sounded stereotypically black—he had a naturally gravelly voice and he started extending his vowels and dropping the final G’s from the ends of words. But if he mimicked the lingo of the black artists whose discs he was spinning, he was careful not to talk about them or about race in any way. Indeed, he never called the music he played rhythm and blues, instead using the term rock and roll—an old blues metaphor for sexual intercourse—as a euphemism.
Freed was no rocker, and what he knew of black culture could fit on a 45-rpm record label. But he and Mintz, two Jewish guys who were comfortable hanging in the ghetto, had a keen sense of how to slip through the membrane that separated the races. They knew that in the face of the new black music, the color line would not hold. (Just as Freed’s show went on the air, the owner of Memphis Recording Service, Sam Phillips, was pressing his talent search, telling friends, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." Not far away, Elvis Presley was listening to black music on WDIA, a white-owned station that was playing race records.)
Freed’s show quickly became a cult phenomenon, a magnet first for Cleveland’s young blacks, but soon enough for whites as well. WJW didn’t know quite what to make of its increasingly popular evening program, and Freed decided to take his act to Cleveland’s largest arena to show his bosses just how big this Moondog thing was becoming. Freed lined up some of the black acts he’d been playing on the radio and announced that he would be crowning a new King of the Moondoggers at a Coronation Ball.
Though Cleveland Arena held only 10,000 people, Freed sold more than 7,000 tickets in advance, then thousands more at the door. The throng, mostly black but with enough whites to attract the disapproval of the establishment, grew angry at the impossibility of getting inside. People pushed at the doors, police pulled back from their positions and the fans went wild—fights, knives, kids storming the stage. It took far too long to disperse the crowd. The concert was stopped, the evening a disaster.
Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Freed milked his audience for support, announcing on the air that the Coronation Ball debacle had left him in danger of losing his job. He needed his audience to let management know that they were "with the Moondog." Letters, calls, and telegrams bombarded the WJW studios, of course, and far from sacking Freed, management extended his hours.
In 1954, Freed moved to New York, stardom, and big money—$75,000 a year to spin discs on WINS. He renamed his show "Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll Party" and applied for a copyright for the term "rock and roll."
Once again, Freed took his show on the road. He would run onstage at Brooklyn’s Paramount theater, spin around to show off his glaringly plaid sports jacket, shout, "Go man go!" and introduce Fats Domino, Joe Turner, and other black bands to a crowd that was half black and half white.
Freed would never win the ratings numbers that Top 40 stations drew with far less controversial fare, but by 1957, he was syndicating his show to a handful of stations. The music he played, and the message those choices sent, would shape not only radio’s future but also that of the young people who were just emerging as a cultural force. While Top 40 stations tried to straddle two worlds by playing white artists’ cover versions of the most popular black tunes, Freed and deejays such as Hound Dog Lorenz in Chicago and Wolfman Jack (Bob Smith) from his mysterious platform somewhere on the other side of the Mexican border delivered the authentic stuff—the raw blues, the howls in the night.
But Freed fought hard to separate his show from the public’s increasing association of rock with evil and delinquency. Hollywood hired the deejay to star in a movie based on Bill Haley’s "Rock Around the Clock," and Freed spiced the script with sermonettes on how rock kept kids off the streets and occupied them with harmless fun. But when the flick hit theaters, the newspapers filled with reports of mini-wildings by kids hopped up by the beat, the freedom, and the disapproval of their elders.
Despite his PR efforts, Freed’s pleas on behalf of the innocence of the music clashed with his persona on the air. He was the first deejay who sounded like the music—he melded with the soul, the beat, the energy of the relatively anonymous R&B artists whose records he played. It was Freed’s name, not the artists’, that the public associated with rock and roll. Freed—and jocks who emulated him—made certain of that. Freed’s name was always posted in the biggest letters on the Paramount marquee; the dozen or so acts who appeared at his Rock and Roll Parties seemed mere cogs in his publicity machine.
So when Freed’s concerts turned sour—notably a 1958 show in Boston that ended with white boys surging onto the stage, Chuck Berry fleeing, fights in the arena and violence on the streets—it was the deejay who became fixed in the minds of many adults as an instigator of riotous behavior.
Freed’s on-air antics didn’t go as far as his successor in the evening shift at WINS, Murray "The K" Kaufman, who combined pseudo-black patter with his own code to call himself "Mee-euz-aray the Kee-euz-ay." Listeners to his "Swinging Soiree" could pop over to the local record shop to pick up a pamphlet that spelled out how to talk like The K (another Jewish deejay who breached the nation’s racial seams). But Freed was the sound of safe danger through the 50s—until the establishment made its last stand against rock and roll and rebellious youth in a congressional hearing room.
Payola—gifts and payments to deejays made in exchange for playing records—wasn’t illegal. Payola wasn’t new—in the heyday of sheet music, song-pluggers handed out cash to get barroom pianists to play their tunes. Payola didn’t pierce radio’s color line. What payola did was heighten the influence of deejays and expose songs and artists who might otherwise have disappeared into stations’ overflowing record bins. Even a classic such as Chuck Berry’s "Maybellene" needed payola grease to get it started: Leonard Chess of Chess Records offered Freed a songwriting credit on the tune and Freed played the song for two hours straight on his WINS show. "Maybellene" shot up to #1 on the charts and Freed raked in a share of the profits.
The payola scandal focused on payoffs and playlists, but the purging of rock radio was really a last attempt by the older generation to hold on what they knew, to their ideas of how parents and children should relate to one another, to their concept of race in America and their sense of respect and propriety. The House committee that went after payola in 1960 wanted the biggest fish of all, Dick Clark, whose "American Bandstand" TV show was the new music’s brightest showcase. But Clark got out in front of the committee, admitting all and shielding himself in the generosity of ABC, which promised a slew of policy corrections to protect their star. Freed was the next biggest catch, and he had no shield. He was arrested in connection with his receipt of more than $30,000 from five record companies. In 1962, he pleaded guilty to commercial bribery charges and received a suspended sentence. Unlike Clark, Freed refused to sign an affidavit saying that he had never taken money for playing records. And unlike Clark, Freed, who also worked for ABC, found himself without support. He was fired almost immediately after refusing to sign the affidavit, even though he insisted he had never played a record in exchange for money.
Rather, he said he took money after choosing on his own to play a tune. "If I’ve helped somebody, I’ll accept a nice gift, but I wouldn’t take a dime to plug a record," he said. It was a distinction no one wanted to hear. And in fact, Freed bragged to friends that he had received so much from record companies that he should name rooms in his house in their honor. Within two weeks of his refusal to sign, his house was seized by the Internal Revenue Service.
Many other deejays who fell during the payola probe managed to climb back up the ladder. "I came back and my audience was loyal and before long, I was on top again," said Hal Jackson, a black deejay in New York who for a time was reduced to cleaning offices after his payola arrest. "But Alan Freed was really destroyed. I visited him night after night and there was nothing left of him. He had made the careers of so many black performers, and the white establishment was really on him. They called him 'nigger lover’ and he just kept putting the Shirelles and Dion and all the others on the air. They destroyed that man, totally."
Freed drifted to stations in Los Angeles and Miami, but fell deeper into alcoholism and died at 43 in 1965, ruined.
Marc Fisher is a veteran journalist and author who spent four decades at The Washington Post.