Alan Freed, the Moondog Ball, and the First Rock Concert
Near Cleveland, Ohio
On July eleventh, nineteen fifty-one, a disc jockey at WJW radio in Cleveland started playing rhythm and blues records to a predominantly white audience and calling it something new. Alan Freed billed himself as "The King of the Moondoggers" and his show "The Moondog House." The music was not new. Black artists had been recording and performing it for decades. What Freed was doing was introducing it to an audience that had largely not had access to it, and giving it a name that white radio stations, white listeners, and eventually white teenagers could adopt. The name he used most often was "rock and roll."
By early nineteen fifty-two, Freed and a Cleveland record store owner named Leo Mintz decided to hold a concert. They booked the Cleveland Arena on Euclid Avenue for March twenty-first and announced the Moondog Coronation Ball. The lineup included Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers, Tiny Grimes and the Rockin' Highlanders, and several other acts. Tickets sold far beyond what anyone anticipated, and additional tickets were printed, some counterfeit, without anyone controlling the total number in circulation.
On the night of the concert, somewhere between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand people arrived at an arena that held approximately ten thousand. The fire department closed the doors. Paul Williams played one song, the opening act's set. Then the authorities shut it down. Most of the people who came never got inside.
Freed's radio audience was larger the following week than it had been before. The chaotic night had proved something about the size of the audience for this music, even if it had proved it badly.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland in nineteen ninety-five, partly on the strength of this history. One song, one shut-down concert, as the origin point of a case for the city's permanent claim on the music.
