He was born Albert James Freed on December 15, 1921 near Johnston, Pennsylvania. At age 12 he moved with his family to Salem, Ohio. In high school, he played trombone and formed a band, the Sultans of Swing. He loved bandleaders like Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. But traveling great distances to see and hear them, he realized that he wouldn’t make it as a musician.
At Ohio State he planned on studying mechanical engineering. But after seeing the campus radio station in action, he fell in love with radio. He started in 1942 at a small station in Pennsylvania, did some sports casting in Youngstown, Ohio, and in 1945, became a DJ in Akron, playing jazz and pop recordings on WAKR. He became a local celebrity, but after a salary dispute with the station’s owner, he moved to Cleveland for a job on television.
Freed soon embraced the music and its young fans. As his “Moondog Show”’s popularity increased, he decided to stage a dance with R&B stars. “The Moondog Coronation Ball” on March 21, 1952 was a smash. The 10,000-capacity Cleveland Arena was sold out, but another 20,000 people showed up, and many tried to crash the gates. The dance had to be cancelled, but it is considered to be the first ever rock and roll concert.
A tireless and enthusiastic advocate of the music he played, Freed kept time to his favorite records by beating his hands on a phone book. The show became extremely popular, and given its success, and the ever-increasing sales of R&B records, he and Mintz decided this music needed a new name. Freed began calling it rock and roll because “it seemed to suggest the rolling, surging beat of the music.” The term was not new—it had been used to describe sex for a while—but Freed was the first person to call this new music by that name, and he was the first radio deejay to use the term.
Freed’s popularity continued to grow, and in September of 1954, he signed a deal to join WINS in New York. Soon after arriving in New York, he lost his “Moondog” nickname after a threatened lawsuit from a street character with the same name. He then decided to call his late-night show “Rock ‘n’ Roll Party.”
Here are some various syndicated Camel Rock & Roll Dance Party programs dated March 31, 1956 [ LISTEN ] (29:57) April 14, 1956 [ LISTEN ]. (28:55), May 19, 1956 [ LISTEN ]. (28:53), June 16, 1956 [ LISTEN ]. (28:59), and August 14, 1956 [ LISTEN ]. (28:52). Early broadcasts featured Count Basie & his orchestra, and later Sam "The Man" Taylor & his bunch.
August 28, 1956. [ LISTEN ]. (28:56)
August 28, 1956. [ LISTEN ]. (28:56)
This program really rocks with special guests the Flamingos, Chuck Berry, and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, and of course, it's sponsored by Camel.
In the July 1957 issue of Pageant, a mainstream magazine, a writer said of Freed: “He coined the phrase ‘rock and roll,’ and not only sparked the trend but fanned it into flame.” He did it by way of his show, and by concerts he staged in New York and elsewhere, events that began to draw white as well as black youth. For this, he was called a race-mixer and worse. The recording industry’s establishment feared his championing of the independent labels that dominated rhythm & blues, blues, and jazz music. Freed began making enemies.
Soon, parents groups, church leaders, and the press who deemed much of the music obscene and got much of it banned from radio. The New York Daily News called the music “an inciter of juvenile delinquency” and pointed to Freed as a chief offender.
But neither Freed nor the music could be stopped. WINS added a second show to his schedule. He began getting co-writing credits and royalties, on songs that he would play. In July, 1957 he began hosting The Big Beat, a Friday evening TV show on the ABC network featuring a mix of pop and R&B acts.
He taped a weekly 30-minute show for Radio Luxembourg, a pirate station operating off the British Isles. Freed was colorblind. He loved the beat, and the people who made the music, and the fact that they were black made no difference to him.
In 1957 Freed was given a weekly prime-time TV series, The Big Beat, which predated American Bandstand, on ABC. It was scheduled for a Summer run, with the understanding that if there were enough viewers, the show would continue into the 1957-58 television season. It was suddenly canceled after the fourth episode when Frankie Lymon, of Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, was seen dancing with a white girl from the studio audience after performing his number. The incident reportedly offended the management of ABC’s local affiliates in the southern states, and led to the show’s immediate cancellation despite its growing popularity.
The Moondog Show, circa 1954. This aircheck is actually from about six months before Freed joined WINS. Though he's yelling a bit, without jingles and formatics, his sound is far more progressive than what came to be known as top-40. And he always credited the record label. [ LISTEN ].
Freed fanned more flames with his concerts at the Paramount theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn, featuring rhythm and blues artists and drawing both black and white fans. Despite pressure from law enforcement he expanded his tours headlining Chuck Berry and Jerry Lewis, visiting dozens of cities. One such caravan arrived in Boston in May, 1958.
Joe Smith, a popular DJ there, promoted the concert at the Boston Arena with Freed. According to Smith there was little to-do afterwards, and Alan made a mistake putting on the event. Boston was a jumpy town, but strict, Catholic and church-managed. Freed just bringing in the show angered a lot of people.
For security extra cops were hired and at some point the cops instructed Freed to turn the lights on, because the kids were getting crazy. Then Alan took the stage and announced, ‘It looks like the police don’t want you to have a good time here. Come on, let’s have a party.’ With that the kids started coming out of their seats and surged toward the stage. It was kind of a mess.
After the concert, fights broke out in the subway, and Freed wound up being indicted on charges of “inciting to riot during a rock and roll show.”
The rest of Freed’s tour got cancelled. Back in New York, he and WINS, unhappy with each other over various issues, including Freed’s numerous outside activities, parted ways. Within a month – by June 2nd, he resurfaced on WABC, ABC’s New York station. He also agreed to do another television show called Big Beat, on WABD, a DuMont station that later would become WNEW-TV.
In late 1959, while a House subcommittee on legislative oversight, which had conducted hearings on TV quiz shows, turned its attention to payola, the New York District Attorney’s office announced grand jury hearings on misdemeanor commercial bribery charges against disc jockeys. Broadcasting companies, whose operating licenses might be at stake, put pressure on their on-air employees, asking them to sign an affidavit denying any involvement in payola.
Freed, now on the air on WABC, refused to sign the ABC affidavit, telling the station manager that he had received various gifts and didn’t want to perjure himself. ABC fired him on September 21st. Freed would also lose his “Big Beat” TV show on WNEW, and he did his last program on November 23rd, 1959.
Payola House committee hearings.The Congressional subcommittee hearings began in early 1960. Before Freed took the stand, several disc jockeys confessed to taking money and gifts for promoting records. Freed appeared in late April. Although carefully prepared by his attorney, and aware that his testimony might be used against him in criminal cases being pursued by the New York District Attorney, Freed gave the congressmen a detailed accounting of his connections with record distributors, and named record companies that paid him for “consultation.”
Just days after starting on KDAY, he would have to return to New York, where District Attorney Joseph Stone’s grand jury had handed down what amounted to indictments for misdemeanor commercial bribery charges that, investigators claimed, dated back at least ten years. On May 19, 1960, Freed and seven other radio figures were arrested and booked at a police station in Manhattan and charged with receiving a total of $116,850 in payola.
The Innocents
Freed agreed to plead guilty to two of 99 counts, and, in spring of 1963, paid a fine of $300. Behind that number, however, were insurmountable legal bills and, just around the corner, Federal charges of income tax evasion. By the time those hit, in spring of 1964, Freed was too weak to fight. Living in Palm Springs, he entered a local hospital for gastrointestinal intestinal bleeding, resulting from cirrhosis of the liver, on New Year’s Day, 1965. Twenty days later, on January 20, he was gone as the result of kidney failure. He was just 43 years old.
He left behind a family that included three wives and four children.
On January 23, 1986, Freed was inducted into the first class of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, alongside such pioneers and greats as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke.
WHERE DID ALAN WORK? Here is the list: WKST, WKBN, WAKR, WJW, WINS, WABC, KDAY, WQAM, and KNOB.
Some materials found on this page were originally published by the following: History of Rock and Roll, Showbiz 411, PDX Retro, Internet Archive.
