The Moondog: Alan Freed, the Payola Scandal, and the First Rock and Roll Riot
Download MP3Episode 7: The Moondog: Alan Freed, the Payola Scandal, and the First Rock and Roll Riot
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Thomas Stubbs: [00:00:00] On the night of Friday, March twenty-first, nineteen fifty-two, a twenty-year-old named Jimmy Supton was playing poker in a fifth floor hotel room across Euclid Avenue in Cleveland when the noise from the street pulled him to the window.
His father had built the Cleveland Arena fifteen years earlier for hockey. What he saw below was a crowd trying to force its way into the building. The crowd was banging on the doors. The crowd was yelling to be let in. What they wanted to hear was this
Paul Williams and His Hucklebuckers, [00:01:00] Savoy Records, 1949. That saxophone riff was the number one rhythm and blues record of 1949, fourteen weeks at the top of Billboard chart, and it started a dance craze. And on the night of March twenty-first, nineteen fifty-two, Paul Williams and that band were the first act on stage at a dance called the Moondog Coronation Ball.
The venue held around nine thousand seven hundred people. Advance ticket sales were reported at eight thousand six hundred. Counterfeits had circulated. A second night's worth of tickets had been printed and sold, all of them dated March twenty-first. Estimates of the crowd outside the arena ran from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand.
Whatever that number was, it was too many for the building. At nine thirty, the crowd broke through four of the arena's panel doors and went in anyway. The ticket takers at the gates were older union [00:02:00] men in black homburg hats, the same staff who worked the hockey games.
They had never handled anything close to what hit them. Thirty more police were called, forty more firefighters. Paul Williams and His Hucklebuckers took the stage. Behind them on the bill, Tiny Grimes and his Rocking Highlanders, a Black instrumental group that performed in Scottish kilts, The Dominoes, Veretta Dillard, Danny Cobb.
None of them got through a set. The bar was shut down at ten thirty. At eleven fifteen, the fire department ordered the dance stopped. The coronation, which was supposed to crown the two most popular teenagers on the floor at midnight, never happened. Five people were arrested for drunkenness, one for fighting.
The man who organized the dance was a thirty-year-old white disc jockey named Alan Freed. On the air the next day, Freed said he had cried [00:03:00] This is Groundwater. I'm Thomas Stubbs. Episode seven: The Moondog. Last episode, we watched the recording industry build two shelves out of one music.
Race records on one side, hillbilly on the other, a business decision that hardened into a wall. This episode is about the man who spent a decade taking the wall down over the radio and what the government did about it.
Act One: One Audience
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Thomas Stubbs: Act one. One audience. What the papers called a riot was not actually a riot. Velina Minor Williams covered the dance for the Call and Post, Cleveland's Black newspaper.
She walked the dance floor. She talked to the promoters. She watched the evening fall apart, and her eyewitness account reported that less than one percent of the crowd was white. This is the detail that most later accounts of the Moondog Ball leave out. Freed's audience on the airwaves by [00:04:00] nineteen fifty-two included a substantial number of white teenagers.
That was the novelty of what he was doing. But the audience that turned out for the live dance, the Cleveland Arena on a Friday night, the audience that broke down the doors to get in, that filled a hockey arena twice over, that audience was almost entirely Black. The shelf system the recording industry had built over the previous quarter century assumed two audiences.
What Freed's signal was revealing was that there really was one audience unevenly distributed. The Black audience for rhythm and blues was large and long-standing, and it never needed anybody to tell it what it wanted.
The white audience for the same music was newer, still forming, still hidden from the labels because the retail architecture had been built to keep it hidden even from itself. Both were listening to the same music. The two halves the shelf system had imposed were of wildly different sizes.
The arena was not big enough [00:05:00] for even one of them
Act Two: The Record Rendezvous
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Thomas Stubbs: Act two, the record rendezvous. Alan Freed was thirty years old on the night of the Coronation Ball. He had been in broadcasting for most of the decade. Classical music in Youngstown, the usual rotation of easy listening and news gigs in Akron, the steady work of a journeyman.
In Cleveland, a record store owner named Leo Mintz started telling him that something unusual was happening at the record rendezvous on Prospect Avenue. White teenagers were coming in to buy rhythm and blues seventy-eights, records meant for the race record shelf. Not a few of them, enough to notice.
Mintz suggested that Freed play the records on the air. Freed agreed. He took the name Moondog, a name he'd borrowed and would soon lose in court to a blind New York street musician. He began hosting The Moondog [00:06:00] House on WJW in July nineteen fifty-one. He banged a cowbell. He talked over the intros, and he called the music rock and roll, which was already black vernacular for what two people could do in a bed.
Freed used it as a genre label because a genre label was what a white teenager could take home to his parents
Act Three: 50,000 Watts
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Thomas Stubbs: Act three. 50,000 watts In September 1954, Freed moved to WINS in New York. Fifty thousand watts on 1010 AM, a clear channel signal that at night reached up the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to the Carolinas and inland to Ohio.
The Cleveland experiment became a regional intervention. The record industry had no answer for radio. The dial did not have shelves. It had only [00:07:00] frequencies.
A fifteen-year-old in Queens or Scranton or Richmond turning the knob at night heard what Freed played, and what Freed played was black records. Fats Domino, Laverne Baker, The Moonglows, Little Richard when Little Richard arrived, Chuck Berry when Berry arrived. The teenager did not know because there was no shelf to tell him that what he is buying had been filed on the other side of a wall built for his benefit.
He just knew he liked it. This is what The Moonglows sounded like on that signal Sincerely, The Moonglows, Chess Records, 1954. That's Bobby Lester singing lead. Freed didn't just play his record, he managed the group. He had given them their name, and if you look at the songwriting credit on the label, you find two names.
Harvey fuqua , The Moonglow who wrote it, and Alan Freed. [00:08:00] Hold on to that. The names on the label, it's going to matter at the end of this story. For a few years, a few years only, the segregated retail architecture that Ralph Peer's generation had built in the 1920s was being routed around by a man at a microphone at night on Columbus Circle.
Act Four: The Warning Shot
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Thomas Stubbs: Act four, The Warning Shot. In July 1957, ABC gave Freed a primetime network television program. It was called The Big Beat. A few weeks in, the camera caught a 14-year-old [00:09:00] singer named Frankie Lyman dancing with a white girl during the show's open floor segment
Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, Gee Records, 1956. Lyman was thirteen when he sang it. Listen to that voice. A boy soprano riding the top of a doo-wop group from Washington Heights, one of the biggest records in the country. country. This is the most famous teenager in American music, fourteen years old, on network television, dancing with a white girl for a few seconds.
The clip ran once. [00:10:00] Southern ABC affiliates pulled the feed within days. ABC canceled the show. The cancellation was the warning shot. The artillery came later
Act Five: The Affidavit
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Act five. The affidavit. In 1959, Congress came off the quiz show scandals looking for another corner of broadcasting to investigate.
It found radio. The practice they discovered was payola, payment to disc jockeys in exchange for playing records, and the practice was endemic. It had been endemic since the invention of commercial radio. Record companies paid DJs directly or indirectly in cash, gifts, in free meals and trips, in co-songwriter credits that entitled the DJ to a share of the publishing royalties for the life of the copyright.
Everybody did it. Everybody had done it for thirty years. [00:11:00] The FCC had never moved on it because there was no law against it to move on. Now, two disc jockeys, same industry, same practice. Watch what happens to each of them. Dick Clark hosted American Bandstand on the same network that had canceled Freed's show two years earlier.
Clark held financial interest in more than thirty music industry companies: record labels, publishers, distributors, pressing plants. He had a stake in every record he played one way or the other. When the Harris subcommittee called him, Clark arrived with documentation, divested his holdings at ABC's request, and walked out of the hearings with his career not merely intact, but consolidated.
Freed, by then at WABC, was asked to sign an affidavit stating that he had never accepted payment or gifts in exchange for airplay. He refused. He was fired on November twenty-first, 1959, [00:12:00] two days before Thanksgiving. In May 1960, the New York County District Attorney indicted Freed on twenty-six counts of commercial bribery.
The case moved slowly. In December 1962, he pled guilty to two counts, paid a three hundred dollar fine, and received a six-month suspended sentence. In March 1964, the federal government indicted him separately for income tax evasion. He did not live to stand trial.
Alan Freed died on January twentieth, 1965, at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs, California, of uremia. He was forty-three. He had no money. Dick Clark, nearly eight years younger, would keep hosting American Bandstand for another two decades. Let me be precise about what I'm arguing because the record here is not clean, and pretending it [00:13:00] is would be its own kind of lie.
Freed did the acts he was prosecuted for. He took money from record labels in exchange for airplay. He took co-writing credits on records he had no hand in writing. He accepted the payments. He signed the credit sheets. Whatever case he had, it was not innocence. The argument is narrower.
Payola was universal. Congress knew this. The labels knew. The networks knew. Someone had to be chosen, and the choice was not random. The disc jockey selected for state and federal prosecution was the one who had spent a decade using a fifty thousand watt signal to dissolve the architecture that the industry had built its segregated business on.
The law that removed him was real. The selection was not. The mechanism, prosecution through legal pretext unrelated to the actual offense, is not unique to this case. It will [00:14:00] return in this story, and when it returns, it will be aimed at singers, not disc jockeys. But its use against Freed was a different register.
Not political speech, commercial desegregation.
Act Six: The Credit Line
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Act six: the credit line. There is a piece of paperwork that holds this whole story, a songwriting credit filed in nineteen fifty-five. "Maybellene," Chuck Berry, Chess Records, nineteen fifty-five. Berry walked into Chess with a country song, a reworking of an old fiddle tune, and came out with
this. Berry wrote it alone, but the writer credit filed in nineteen fifty-five carried three names, Berry, Frato, Freed.
[00:15:00] Alan Freed was the disc jockey who would make the record a hit. Ross Frato and Freed, neither man wrote a note of it. The credit entitled each of them to a share of the publishing income for as long as the song played anywhere. That was the price of the signal. That was payola in its most durable form.
Not an envelope of cash that gets spent, but a name in the paperwork that earns forever. Now follow the names. Freed was fired in nineteen fifty-nine, indicted in nineteen sixty, dead by nineteen sixty-five. His name on Berry's song outlived him by twenty-one years. It kept earning the whole time. Chuck Berry had to go to court to get his song back.
He won in nineteen [00:16:00] eighty-six, thirty-one years after he wrote it by himself, and on some reissues, the extra names are still there. Hold that next to the other credits in the story. The industry took Louis Armstrong's name off a record he played on. It took Leslie Riddle's name off a catalog he helped build, and it left Alan Freed's name on a record he never touched for three decades.
Real credit came off, false credit stayed on. The man who broke the shelf system was removed. The shelves are back
This has been Groundwater, episode seven, The Moondog. I'm Thomas Stubbs. The book this episode draws from is called Race Records: The Lie That Split American Music and the Blues That Ran Underneath. Next episode, the shells come down for real, not on a radio, but in the rooms. Four recording studios, [00:17:00] a storefront on Union Avenue in Memphis where a truck driver walked in to make a record for his mother, an address on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago where the Rolling Stones went on pilgrimage, a converted movie theater with a sloping floor, and a cinder block building in Alabama where Aretha Franklin found out who the tightest rhythm section in the South actually was.
The rooms where the walls came down, episode eight. Thank you for listening
