Why the man who invented rock ’n’ roll died penniless and broken

The name Alan Freed may be largely forgotten now, but for several years in the 1950s and 1960s, he was a cultural trailblazer. He introduced the term “rock and roll” to mainstream US audiences in the early Fifties and brought together, for the first time, black and white listeners through music, helping to bridge America’s racial divide years before 1964’s Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race.

But Freed’s pioneering spirit came at a cost. His career was cut short when he became mired in scandal, and the man who had fomented nationwide “teen-age frenzy”, as The New York Times put it, died in 1965, aged 43, just as the genre he had helped hit the mainstream exploded around him.

Freed’s extraordinary life and legacy are now being celebrated in a musical called Rock & Roll Man, currently touring the UK. He “heard the future – and knew he had to let it sing”, according to the play’s blurb.

When Freed began work as a DJ after the Second World War, white audiences were predominantly listening to swing, Big Band and jazz music, while the nascent rhythm and blues (R&B) genre – effectively blues or soul music – was popular among inner-city black audiences. Freed didn’t care about the distinction, and when he started a dedicated R&B show on Cleveland radio station WJW (which had a large white audience) in 1951, he refused to play white cover versions of black songs.

With his quick-fire, wildly energetic and slightly throaty delivery, Freed would tell listeners: “Let’s rock ’n’ roll with the rhythm and blues!” The phrase having been popularised among his growing listenership, Freed would later codify what rock ’n’ roll was. “Rock ’n’ roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm,” he said.

In 1952, Freed arranged what’s widely regarded as the first ever pop concert: The Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena. A vast crowd of around 20,000 people turned up, but the excitement nearly caused a riot, and the concert was shut down early. Inevitably, Freed’s popularity went through the roof and WJW gave him more airtime. Freed’s effort to bridge the racial divide over the airwaves has echoed down the decades. A 1994 track called They Used to Call It Dope by rap group Public Enemy contains the line: “Alan freed the waves as much as Lincoln freed the slaves.”

Eventually, Freed became a film and TV star as well as a DJ, appearing in movies such as Rock Around the Clock, featuring Bill Haley and the Comets, and Rock, Rock, Rock!, featuring Chuck Berry. However, a nefarious element had started to creep into Freed’s world: bribes for airplay, or payola.

In the burgeoning rock and roll market, radio airplay was the oxygen of success. So record companies would secretly pay DJs to play certain records. According to Cleveland DJ Joe Finan, the era was “a blur of booze, broads and bribes”. “Consulting fees,” DJs cried. Freed became entangled and the establishment — hardly sold on rock and roll in the first place — was quick to pounce. In 1959 the first Congressional Payola Investigations took place.

Freed was fired from New York station WABC for refusing to sign a statement for the government’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) saying that he’d never taken payola bribes. The statement was “an insult to my reputation for integrity”, he claimed. But Freed later admitted that he had accepted bribes (no one knows how much DJs actually took, but one DJ — not Freed – accepted $22,000 to play a record). When payola was made illegal in 1960, Freed pleaded guilty to two counts of commercial bribery, was fined $300 and received a suspended sentence.

He also got in hot water over songwriting credits, such as on Maybellene by Chuck Berry. Back then, record labels would sometimes give helpful DJs publishing credits. Such credits, of course, meant receiving royalties – royalties that would only increase if the song received regular radio play. It was payola by another name. A tax evasion indictment followed, largely due to Freed’s failure, unsurprisingly, to declare tax on his payola income.

But many musicians saw Freed as the fall guy. Neil Young opened his 1983 song Payola Blues with the line, “This one’s for you, Alan Freed” (the sympathetic song’s message seemed to be that payola corruption was even bigger in the Eighties than it was in the Fifties). But the scandal took its toll. Big stations wouldn’t employ Freed so he moved to the west coast and worked for smaller stations. He drank heavily, his career effectively over. Thrice-married Freed died on January 20 1965, aged just 43, still owing the Internal Revenue Service $38,000.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. In 1986, Freed was an inaugural inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Elvis, Buddy Holly and James Brown. In a curious coda, Freed’s ashes were, for a while, displayed at the Hall of Fame’s Cleveland HQ. But in 2014, the Hall of Fame asked Freed’s family to remove them, saying that displaying human remains wasn’t appropriate. “The eviction was a final blow to the tarnished legacy of Freed,” wrote the Wall Street Journal.

However, his legacy should be untarnished. Freed was tolerant and progressive, despite his sad story. As American cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote in 1992, rock ’n’ roll should have died by 1960 because all its founders were missing: “Elvis in the army, Berry on his way to prison, Buddy Holly dead, Alan Freed driven from the airwaves by the payola scandals [and] Little Richard in God’s Arms.”

But rock ’n’ roll didn’t die. And those ashes? They’re now safely and appropriately interred in a Cleveland cemetery… beneath a jukebox-shaped gravestone.

Rock & Roll Man is at Theatre Royal Windsor until March 14, then touring. Tickets: rockandrollmanthemusical.com

[Source: Daily Telegraph]