Rock Concert E-Book

Marc Myers

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience - and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In Rock Concert, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there. Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock's stratospheric rise. Rock Concert provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock 'n' roll through the lens of live performances, spanning the rise of R###B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the '60s, to the growing arena tours of the '70s and '80s. Elvis Presley's gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the '60s, the Grateful Dead's free flowing jams and Pink Floyd's The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colourful anecdotes, Rock Concert will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Leseprobe

Also by Marc Myers

Anatomy of a Song

Why Jazz Happened

First published in the United States of America in 2021 by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © 2021 by Marc Myers

The moral right of Marc Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Photo credits are as follows: Photos 1.1 (Big Jay McNeely), 1.2 (Record Rendezvous), 2.1 (Alan Freed), 2.2 (Paramount Marquee), 2.3 (Chuck Berry), 4.2 (Joan Baez), 4.3 (Peter, Paul & Mary), 5.1 (Ronettes), 5.2 (Beach Boys), 5.3 (Bob Dylan), 8.2 (Jimi Hendrix), 8.3 (Summer of Love), 9.1 (Michael Lang), 11.1 (Sly Stone), 11.2 (Allman Brothers Band), 11.4 (Cameron Crowe), 12.3 (Angus Young), 13.2 (Bruce Springsteen), 13.3 (The Wall), 14.2 (Stage Rails), 15.1 (MTV VJs), 15.2 (Line to Buy Tickets), 16.1 (Hall & Oates), 16.2 (Mick & Tina): Getty Images. Photo 1.3 (Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller): Courtesy of the Leiber/Stoller Archive. Photo 2.4 (Leo, Phil, Marshall Chess): Chess Family Archive/Chess Photograph. Photos 3.1 (Elvis), 10.4 (Concert for Bangladesh), 11.3 (Ian Anderson), 16.4 (Phil Collins): Alamy. Photos 3.2 (Elvis Fans), 14.1 (Watkins Glen): Associated Press. Photo 3.3 (Wanda Jackson): Courtesy of Wanda Jackson. Photo 3.4 (Barbara Hearn & Kay Wheeler): Memphis Press-Scimitar, Nov. 1956. Photo 4.1 (George Wein and Lorillards): Newport Daily News. Photo 6.1 (Beatles at Shea Stadium): George Orsino. Photo 6.2 (Led Zeppelin): Boston Globe. Photo 6.3 (Frank Barsalona): Courtesy of D GORTON/The New York Times/Redux. Photo 6.4 (Don Law): Simon, Peter, 1947-. Don Law in his office at the Boston Tea Party, October 23, 1969. Peter Simon Collection (PH 009). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Photos 7.2 (Fillmore East), 7.3 (Joshua Light Show): Courtesy of Amalie R. Rothschild, 1969. Photos 8.1 (Grateful Dead), 12.2 (Steve Miller): Images taken by Baron Wolman, provided courtesy of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame + Museum. Photo 9.2 (Chip Monck): Henry Diltz. Photo 9.3 (Bill Hanley): Courtesy of Bill Hanley. Photos 10.1 (Stones at Altamont), 10.3 (Stones Plane): Courtesy of Ethan Russell. Photo 10.2 (Beatles on the Rood): Ethan Russell, courtesy of Apple Corps LTD. Photo 12.1 (Todd Rundgren): Shutterstock. Photo 12.4 (Alice Cooper): Mike Reiter. Photo 13.1 (Wall of Sound): Mary Ann Mayer. Photo 16.3: Evening Standard.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press UK

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Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 653 8

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 881 5

Printed in Great Britain

To Alyse, Olivia, and Dylan, my rock stars

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1: The 1950s

Chapter 1.    Los Angeles Auditoriums

Chapter 2.    Cleveland Theaters

Chapter 3.    Chicago Clubs

Chapter 4.    Memphis Fairs

Chapter 5.    Northeast Fests

Part 2: The 1960s

Chapter 6.    Folk at the Mall

Chapter 7.    Pop’s Endless Summer

Chapter 8.    Dylan Invents Rock

Chapter 9.    Ballrooms and Be-Ins

Chapter 10.    Festival Mania

Part 3: The 1970s

Chapter 11.    Image, Media, and Branding

Chapter 12.    Arenas, Stadiums, and Tours

Chapter 13.    Sight and Sound

Chapter 14.    Concert Maximus

Chapter 15.    Rise of Exurbia

Part 4: The 1980s

Chapter 16.    Not Just Another Brick

Chapter 17.    Killing the Radio Star

Chapter 18.    Computerized Ticketing

Chapter 19.    And in the End, Live Aid

Epilogue

Fifty Best Live Albums, Concert Films, and Rock Docs 299

Source List

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Live music has a long past. The Hurrian songs—one of the world’s oldest examples of written music, composed 3,400 years ago—were meant to be performed in front of an audience. Scratched onto clay tablets, the ancient songbook was unearthed by archeologists in the 1950s at the entrance to a royal palace in Syria. The tablets even included tuning instructions for a Babylonian lyre, an early stringed relative of the guitar. Though many of the songs survived only in fragments, the one complete tablet was a hymn to Nikkal, the Hurrian goddess of orchards and wife of the moon god. Love songs and concerts weren’t far behind.

From the beginning, live music’s purpose was to transform a gathering into a community by unifying an audience’s mood. Live music could accomplish what oratory often failed to achieve—collective agreement and a sense of belonging. Through the centuries, live performances that had once been held only at palaces, churches, and the homes of the wealthy expanded to public spaces. The arrival of printed sheet music in America in the mid-1800s and wax phonograph cylinders in 1889 gave rise to popular music and at-home entertainment, but they didn’t replace live music. In fact, the proliferation of parlor pianos and recorded music boosted the public’s interest in performance. At the start of the twentieth century, live music not only was a diversion but also helped assimilate millions of newly arrived immigrants by making them feel American.

The first rock concerts went one step further. For the first time, a genre of popular music was recorded and performed specifically for adolescent listeners. In addition to uniting this market, the music empowered the youth culture to air its grievances and stand up for its rights. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, traditional popular music certainly attracted teens, but they were listening to their parents’ music. What changed in the mid-1950s was access and allowance money.

Starting in the early 1950s, sales of portable phonographs for teens and preteens began to climb. Parents were happy to shell out for lightweight record players, since the turntables and 45s kept children at home in their rooms and allowed parents to watch their new TV sets undisturbed. Smaller night-table radios also wound up in children’s rooms, giving them an opportunity to find new music anywhere on the dial. But as parents soon discovered, the music teens found was provocative and liberating.

From the start, rock ’n’ roll artists, records, and concerts sided with teens in their battle for independence from parents. Over time, the music would support a wide range of teen grievances. Between 1950 and 1985, rock echoed the American youth culture’s concerns with segregation, lousy teachers, the threat of nuclear war, middle-class conformity, the draft, the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, pollution, gay rights, world hunger, imperiled family farms, and more. Through rock, the youth culture had a voice.

Rock’s roots date back to 1944 and the emergence of hundreds of independent record labels. A good number of these labels recorded Black artists pioneering a new form of saxophone-driven dance music known broadly as jump blues. This extension of boogie-woogie led directly to R&B in 1949, which relied on smaller ensembles, vocals, and a distinct backbeat. By then, the use of tape in studios reduced the cost of recording and enabled a greater number of small labels to record R&B artists. Unlike pop and jazz, R&B exhibited a new level of earthiness and blunt sexuality, and R&B concerts added visual excitement.

In the mid-1950s, the music shifted and a new, gentler form of R&B was marketed to teens. Instead of dwelling on sex, drinking, cheating, and other adult themes that dominated R&B records, rock ’n’ roll concerned itself with teen anxieties and social issues such as cars, school life, dances, dating, breaking up, and falling in love. Uplifted by animated disk jockeys who played rock ’n’ roll records and championed the youth culture on the radio, teens embraced the music and concerts as a way to bond socially and rebel against the restrictions imposed by authority figures. They also began to question and challenge adult values.

Before the arrival of rock ’n’ roll, popular music made little effort to win over young listeners. One of the first significant pop concerts was Paul Whiteman’s An Experiment in Modern Music at New York’s Aeolian Hall in February 1924. The concert was notable for the debut of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a classical-jazz suite commissioned exclusively for the event. Whiteman’s intent was to show that American jazz in the hands of a Broadway songwriter could impress a highbrow audience weaned on European classical music. The paying audience was composed mostly of adults.

Louis Armstrong’s lyrical and bold trumpet playing during performances with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in the 1920s and in his own Hot Five and Hot Seven ensembles helped jazz’s raucousness and dance steps connect with young adult audiences. Armstrong also helped establish the electrifying improvised solo. Bix Beiderbecke’s horn did the same with college-age audiences in the 1920s. Throughout the decade, jazz was so potent that the syncopated music left its mark not only on young adults but also on everything from fashion and design to architecture and the English language. There’s a reason the 1920s was known as the Jazz Age.

With the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s, radio became the country’s most popular source of live music. You paid once for a radio and all of its programming was free, thanks to the sponsorship of advertisers. Once the sound quality of radio vastly improved with the advent of the ribbon microphone in 1931, live on-air music and announcers’ voices were clearer and more lifelike. Radio sales climbed and programming became more diversified. By the mid-1930s, radio house bands and orchestras performed popular and classical music live in the radio studio throughout the day. To protect those jobs, the musicians’ union prohibited the airplay of records.

The first inkling that live dance music might gain traction with young audiences nationwide came during Benny Goodman’s appearance at Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom in August 1935. Since the early 1930s, Black bands led by Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb, and others had already been playing a new, looser form of dance music at ballrooms in Black communities. White radio listeners were largely unaware of these bands or their performances in the early 1930s, since “race records,” as they were known then, were sold mostly in Black neighborhoods.

In the summer of 1935, Goodman’s final cross-country tour performance was to be held at the Palomar Ballroom, with the NBC radio network set to air the show. When the Goodman band launched into uptempo arrangements of “Sugar Foot Stomp,” “King Porter Stomp,” and other instrumentals, a thunderous cheer went up from the mostly white teens attending, who had followed the band on the radio during its travels. Goodman’s three-week Palomar engagement launched what became known as the swing era—when Black big band dance music crossed over to young white audiences listening to national radio networks.

The impact of the swing era’s groove on the youth culture can be seen in a YouTube documentary clip of the Carnival of Swing concert held at New York’s Randall’s Island Stadium in May 1938. The benefit concert—known now as one of the first outdoor jazz festivals—ran about six hours and attracted an estimated 23,000 young white and Black fans, who danced freely in place and in the aisles as Count Basie and other leading swing bands performed.

But swing’s rise and hold over the youth market was cut short in 1941, when America entered World War II. During the war, millions of young men enlisted or were drafted—limiting the size of paying audiences and making it difficult for bands to hold on to musicians, since many wound up in the service. War worries and the declining number of eligible young men on the home front gave rise to a new teen pop phenomenon—Frank Sinatra.

Thin, seemingly vulnerable, and brashly charismatic, with a new, conversational approach to singing romantic standards, Sinatra became pop’s first teen idol and superstar. Between late 1942, when he became a solo act, and 1944, when a near riot broke out in Manhattan due to crowds too large for the number of seats available at one of his Paramount Theatre concerts, Sinatra’s sensitive persona and caressing vocals were entrancing, particularly for young women.

After the war, a new tax on dance establishments gave rise to clubs that hired smaller jazz and lounge groups. Many of these ensembles played a new form of jazz in which improvisation, speed, and poly-rhythms dominated. While artistically spectacular, this form of modern jazz wasn’t exactly conducive to dancing. Many in the Black community who still favored dance music shifted to jump blues and then R&B, which grew in popularity in the late 1940s.

By the start of the 1950s, with the musicians’ union now permitting radio stations to play records on the air, DJs found they could earn extra income by spinning R&B records at neighborhood dance parties. They also began holding concerts where teens could see the artists who had hit records. The youth market for R&B grew, and more radio stations began playing the music to meet the demand and to attract sponsors. The R&B concert trend began in Los Angeles and quickly spread to Cleveland in the early ’50s and then—as rock ’n’ roll—jumped to Chicago, Memphis, and New York in the mid-’50s. Local rock ’n’ roll TV shows modeled after Philadelphia’s American Bandstand also captured the imaginations of school-age teens.

In the early 1960s, pop-rock performances in theaters and on TV along with the Beatles’ arrival in America and the subsequent British invasion turned rock ’n’ roll into a cultural phenomenon. Bob Dylan’s 1965 electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival led to a more introspective and personal form known simply as rock. Reliant on poetry and social commentary, Dylan’s music inspired a growing number of artists to write and record original songs while jazz artists such as John Coltrane encouraged them to take extended solos. The emerging rock album soon found a home on FM radio, where stations needed content to fill airtime. Broadcasting in stereo, FM helped launch a new era in live rock performed at ballrooms, theaters, and free outdoor festivals. In the 1970s, rock splintered into subcategories and major bands began filling sporting arenas and stadiums. Meanwhile, outdoor concert attendance records were set at events such as Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in New York, and California Jam in Ontario, California.

By 1980, the rock concert had become a theatric extravaganza as progressive-rock bands such as Pink Floyd staged opera-size performances. The launch of MTV in 1981 brought visual rock performances into homes and placed new demands on performing bands to look and sound more like their stylized videos. Easy access to credit cards and computerized ticketing in the early 1980s not only provided convenience but also led to higher ticket prices, angering audiences that had grown accustomed to free or inexpensive shows. Live Aid in 1985 was perhaps the last spectacular rock concert before ticket prices climbed significantly and concert revenue, not albums, became the leading money maker for rock artists.

Rock Concert is a five-decade story of how enterprising songwriters, producers, disc jockeys, managers, promoters, and artists sided with the youth culture as it struggled to be heard and changed society at large. Once the music became more accessible on the radio and grew in popularity, the trial-and-error approach to staging a concert resulted in standardized production strategies, better sound, improved security, sophisticated concert technology, shrewder ticketing, and, ultimately, a multibillion-dollar industry and a successful model for all large-scale music concerts. To endure between 1950 and 1985, rock wisely remained in sync with the youth market rather than chase after a single generation as it aged. But the rock concert hardly remained static. Over time, artists adapted to larger spaces, the latest speaker systems and lighting, new instruments and enhancements, longer tours, special effects, more sophisticated media coverage, and branding.

This book isn’t meant to be an all-inclusive, day-by-day history of the rock concert. Nor does it weigh in on rock’s glamorization of drugs and alcohol or the sexual abuse of underage and adult fans by some performers and those who worked for or accompanied them. The book also isn’t intended to touch on every major event and artist within the thirty-five-year period covered. I’m sure readers will click off plenty of concerts and artists who they feel should have been included in these pages, which is only natural. Instead, Rock Concert is a vivid narrative in the words of those who performed at, promoted, witnessed, or participated in events that contributed to the rock concert’s development.

I hope that by reading this book, readers will come away with a sense of how the rock concert flowered and influenced American culture over the decades and how it went from small and dynamic in the 1950s to massive and meaningful by the early 1980s. To help fill in any historical blanks, I’ve included lists of my fifty favorite live albums, fifty favorite concert videos, and fifty favorite rock documentaries.

For many readers, the book will stir memories of the early rock concerts they attended and how they became turning points along the road to adulthood. Sitting in the dark, we saw and heard musicians we knew only from album covers and bedroom turntables. Yet the music was deeply personal. Experienced live, the rock concert allowed us to see and hear our idols onstage for the first time. It was our introduction to celebrity and to artists who embodied their audience’s spirit.

My first rock concert was Santana, with Booker T. and Priscilla as the opening act, at New York’s Felt Forum on October 16, 1971. I had just turned fifteen and went with my best friend, Glenn. As you read this book, I’m sure you’ll think about your first and the others that followed, and I hope you’ll learn a few things along the way.

PART 1

THE 1950s

The rock concert can be traced to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, when R&B revues were held at Johnny Otis’s Barrelhouse in the city’s Watts section. At the time, L.A. was filled with young jazz and blues musicians, newly formed independent record labels, and clubs featuring nearly every type of popular music. The city and its surrounding suburbs also were flush with independent radio stations newly granted licenses by the FCC in hopes of keeping radio alive as TV proliferated. In 1950, in the South Central section of the city, where most Black residents lived, a few disc jockeys at low-signal stations began playing R&B records by local artists. By 1951, Black, white, Mexican-American, and Asian teens who lived in the area began to pick up R&B on their radios. One of those disc jockeys, Hunter Hancock, was hosting live R&B concerts and promoting them on his radio show. Teens soon showed up at the concerts in droves. Captivated by the music onstage, they ignored L.A.’s segregation laws and mingled freely with each other. Rebellion against adult norms had begun.

Word of L.A.’s growing R&B market soon reached Billboard and other music trade publications. In Cleveland, disc jockey Alan Freed started playing R&B records. When he first tried to hold a concert there in 1952, too many people showed up and the concert was canceled. More Freed concerts followed at regional theaters. By mid-decade, an electric blues guitarist in Chicago named Chuck Berry began performing at clubs and recording what would become rock ’n’ roll. In Memphis, Elvis Presley combined country and R&B and performed live on the radio and at county fairs, clubs, and sports arenas. Known as rock ’n’ roll, the music reached New York in 1955, when Freed, who had taken a DJ job there, began holding concerts at a large Brooklyn movie theater, launching the multiday rock ’n’ roll revue for integrated teenage audiences.

By the late 1950s, rock ’n’ roll held sway over teens nationwide. The music and artists were also featured regularly on TV jukebox shows and in movies for the teenage market. The music’s surging popularity was helped in great measure by payola—hefty cash payments and gifts of value provided by middlemen to radio DJs to ensure the repeated airplay of specific records. Payola also took the form of ad dollars that record companies spent at specific radio stations in exchange for airplay. Interestingly, such gifts weren’t illegal at the time if broad legal loopholes were exploited. The value of payola was immeasurable and immediate. The frequent play of a record increased its sales potential and improved the odds of it becoming a national hit.

Chapter 1

LOS ANGELES AUDITORIUMS

Since 1916, Los Angeles had been a prime destination for millions of Black people migrating from the South for better-paying factory jobs and freedom from the threat of racial terrorism. They brought with them a passion for the blues and dance music. Before long, Black musicians in the city combined the blues and dance beats, and the music landed on jukeboxes at bars and clubs in Black neighborhoods. In addition, many early R&B songs had adult themes camouflaged by lyrics laced with innuendo, and most of the artists who recorded them were young adults. Those who were too young to drink in bars could hear R&B live in theaters and ballrooms or listen to it on small local radio stations. Rising sales of affordable nightstand radios let white teens in the L.A. suburbs pick up the signals. The question was: Where could they see the artists perform?

Ernie Andrews(Los Angeles jazz, blues, and pop singer)

Los Angeles was wide open in the mid-1940s. All the major big bands and acts stopped in the city to perform and kick back, especially in the winter, when touring the country was harder. Top bands made short films in Hollywood or appeared in feature films. The city really became a music center after America’s entry into World War II in December ’41, when L.A. was a major military port. Soldiers and sailors stationed on bases near the city as well as crowds of defense workers sought out entertainment. So did the many Blacks who had already migrated to the city from all over the country to work in the region’s war plants.

After school and over the weekends, I worked as an usher at the 2,000-seat Lincoln Theatre, one of Central Avenue’s major concert halls. When I was seventeen, I was promoted at the Lincoln to head usher. Amateur nights, on Wednesdays, were packed. Everyone who was trying to break into show business would appear. I sang on those nights in my uniform. After each performance, you’d wait for Pigmeat Markham or Bardu Ali or Sybil Lewis to come out and hold a hand over your head. If the audience didn’t like you, they’d let you know it, and you’d have to get off. But they loved me, and I’d be onstage so long that Pigmeat and Dusty Fletcher would have to cut me off to let others get on.

There were plenty of places to hear music and dance in L.A. in the 1940s, like the 5-4 Ballroom on the corner of Fifty-Fourth and Monet, and the Elks Hall on Central Avenue. They’d have dancing and singing and a mixture of jazz and R&B. The Downbeat on South Central Avenue was always hot. You’d have to be twenty-one to get into many of them, but I was tall for my age. In 1945, I was discovered by songwriter Joe Greene during one of those Lincoln Theatre amateur shows. Overnight, he wrote “Soothe Me” for me. I recorded the ballad with the Clara Lewis Trio on Greene’s Gem label. We sold 300,000 copies. Then Joe wrote another one for me, “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’.” It was even bigger.

I performed on Central Avenue with everybody you could name. I was trying to gain momentum. I performed at the Downbeat, the Last Word, the Dunbar Hotel, and Club Alabam. Many of the people who came up from the South loved the blues. They grew up with it and lived it. Unlike other vocalists, R&B singers didn’t just stand there and sing. They moved with the music. That’s true of the blues shouters and the vocal groups, too. Many of these artists were earthier than jazz singers but not as schooled or as polished. Blues with a dance beat became hugely popular. Young people caught the music in L.A. on radio shows on small stations, hosted by guys like Hunter Hancock and Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg. Though these DJs were white, they sounded Black and created opportunities for everyone in the Black community.

In the late 1940s, I remember seeing R&B tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely at the Last Word, across from Club Alabam on Central Avenue. He’d leave the stage playing his horn and lead everyone out into the street, honking and stomping. Bardu Ali had a full band that featured Johnny Otis on drums. They were partners in a club called the Barrelhouse. Johnny Otis was a giant. He was a great drummer and he got the beat. He brought a lot of Black R&B artists along. Even though he was white, he was dark and sounded Black.

Mike Stoller(songwriter and record producer with Jerry Leiber)

In 1940, when I was seven, I began spending summers at an interracial summer camp called Wo-Chi-Ca, which stood for Workers’ Children’s Camp. It was near Hackettstown, New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York. Such camps were unusual then. One day, I heard someone playing boogie-woogie on a piano in the camp’s barn. I slipped inside and saw a Black teenager sitting at a beat-up upright. I was mesmerized. When he left, I approached the piano and tried to do what I heard him doing. After the summer, when I went home to the Sunnyside section of Queens, New York, I kept trying.

I was crazy about boogie-woogie. For the next few years, I couldn’t hear enough of it. My interest was so obsessive that when I was ten, I traveled by subway to take six or seven lessons from the famous pianist and composer James P. Johnson. He lived in Jamaica, Queens. This was in 1943 and ’44. My life would have been very different if I hadn’t taken those lessons. While I may have picked up some of the blues listening to the radio, getting it firsthand from James P. was much more powerful.

Still, like many kids after World War II, my imagination was awakened by the radio. Before television, that’s all we had on each day. The radio was my doorway to the adult world, especially adult music. Black artists were foreign to most other white kids then. I listened to stations that played R&B and jazz, with disc jockeys like “Symphony Sid” Torin. I heard musicians such as Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, and Louis Jordan and vocal groups like the Ravens and the Orioles. In my early teens, I spent a lot of time with a friend, Al Levitt, taking the subway into Manhattan to Fifty-Second Street, where all the jazz clubs were and the bebop musicians played. On Saturdays, we went to a social club on 124th Street in Harlem. The music was remarkable and exciting.

In 1949, when I was sixteen, my family moved to Los Angeles. L.A. then was a city of transplants: there were whites from the Southwest, Blacks from the South, Mexicans, and Asians. They were largely isolated in their own neighborhoods with distinct borders, but I socialized with kids from all these groups in my senior year at Belmont High. That was a lot more exciting than my all-white high school back in Forest Hills, Queens. In May 1950, when I was a freshman at Los Angeles City College and living at home, someone called me on our phone. It was a guy named Jerry Leiber. He’d heard about me from a drummer he knew and asked if I wanted to write songs with him. Jerry said he had moved with his mother to L.A. in 1945 from Baltimore and that he wrote lyrics. I politely told him I wasn’t interested in pop music. Jazz was my thing.

Less than an hour later, Jerry was at my front door. He handed me pages of lyrics. When I saw that his lyrics were in the form of twelve-bar blues, I agreed to write with him. I turned Jerry on to some of the jazz artists I loved and he got me into R&B and the blues. Of course, I’d always been into boogie-woogie, which is really what brought us together. Many boogie-woogie records at the time had a blues song on the flip side. Jerry and I were like two sides of the same record.

Jerry and I hung out at record shops, theaters, and clubs on South Central Avenue. After I met Jerry, we’d go see producer Gene Norman’s annual Blues Jubilee concerts at the Shrine Auditorium near the University of Southern California. Gene was a big disc jockey then, more on the jazz side than R&B. One day we met Gene, and he told us where a lot of the R&B musicians performed. So Jerry and I went to the theaters and clubs in search of artists who might record our songs.

At one of these places—Club Alabam, next to the Dunbar Hotel—we met Wynonie Harris, Percy Mayfield, and others. We also met Jimmy Witherspoon and gave him our song “Real Ugly Woman.” He wound up recording it live at a concert at the Shrine in 1950. Through sheer luck, the concert was taped, and the tape of our song was released on a record. Jerry and I went everywhere and met everyone we could on South Central Avenue. It was a thriving main street in the city’s Black community. Jerry and I felt like we belonged.

In 1950 and ’51, Gene Norman and Hunter Hancock were the big R&B concert promoters in L.A. At some concert, I remember writing a big band arrangement for the Robins after they had a hit with our song “Loop De Loop Mambo” in 1954. I wrote out the trumpets the same way my right hand would play the notes on the keyboard. I was thrilled with the result. There also were concerts in larger clubs, like the 5-4 Ballroom with Big Jay McNeely. A lot of white and Mexican-American kids came to hear him, Chuck Higgins, Gil Bernal, and other performers. Even in cases where radio stations were aimed primarily at a Black audience, DJs would announce where concerts were held. White kids who otherwise never would have heard of these events found their way there.

At the time, there were five or six independent R&B record companies in the city, labels like the Mesner brothers’ Aladdin, Art Rupe’s Specialty, Otis and Leon René’s Excelsior and Exclusive, and the Bihari brothers’ Modern. Lester Sill, who did sales and promotion for Modern, first met Jerry at Norty’s Music, a record store on Fairfax where Jerry worked after school. Lester introduced us to a few people, including Ralph Bass of Federal Records. Ralph in turn introduced us to Johnny Otis. All Jerry and I wanted was to write good R&B and blues songs for the Black artists we revered. Our heroes were Charles Brown and Jimmy Witherspoon. When Johnny Otis introduced us to artists like Little Esther and Big Mama Thornton, they needed songs to perform and record. You didn’t have to ask us twice. We wrote “Hound Dog” for Big Mama in about fifteen minutes. Those fifteen minutes changed our lives.

Bob Willoughby(Los Angeles photographer)

In 1947, when I was twenty, I lived at my mother’s house on Marvin Avenue in Los Angeles. I loved listening to jazz and R&B on the radio. The music’s energy, soul, and beat were mesmerizing. I also admired the cool confidence of these musicians on- and offstage. I was passionate about photography then and had been from the age of twelve, when my parents first bought me a camera. By 1948, I sat in on photography classes at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. I couldn’t afford college, so auditing classes was the next best way to learn. Before long, I began working as an assistant for several photographers I had been studying with. During my downtime, I photographed dancers and jazz musicians. I set up a darkroom in the garage, where it was pitch-black at night. In the garage, I always had my radio tuned to jazz and R&B stations.

One night in late ’51, I was listening to KFOX, an R&B station. The DJ, Hunter Hancock, began promoting a midnight concert he was hosting at the Olympic Auditorium. He was urging listeners to come down to see the show. The Olympic was an arena on South Grand Avenue built in 1924 and often used for boxing matches. The idea of starting a concert at midnight was so intriguing I had to take my cameras and see what it was all about. I walked into the Olympic sometime after midnight, when the concert was already underway. The hall felt as if it was rocking on its foundation. I could see the audience on their feet, screaming. You could taste the energy. I had never seen or heard anything to match it. It was my introduction to the amazing tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely. Big Jay stood where the fight ring was normally set up, in the center. He was playing his heart out, and the crowd was exploding around him. He had created some sort of resonance with the audience. In some weird way, he seemed to be playing them.

What I saw was so mind-boggling that I found myself scrambling for the cameras around my neck as I ran down the aisle toward the fireworks. I was afraid I was going to miss it all. But I didn’t really have to worry. Big Jay was a marathon player. I was so caught up in the excitement, I climbed up on the stage without thinking. Big Jay was strutting back and forth onstage, playing run after run on his sax and honking his way through forty-five minutes of pulsating, explosive rhythm. While playing, he kneeled down, he sat, he lay flat on his back. He played into the faces of orgasmic girls. He was on some spaceflight. He perspired until his clothes were soaking. And then he took off his wet jacket without missing a beat.

The crowd was nearly hysterical. Big Jay literally was a pied piper. I was told that at another concert in San Diego, he had swept the entire audience out of the theater and led them on a tour around the block while honking on his saxophone. All of this was much to the dismay of the local police. In L.A., the police weren’t too sure what might happen at this gig either. You could see them in the crowd, probably looking for drugs. But with Big Jay in orbit onstage, the crowd was already euphoric.

Big Jay McNeely(R&B tenor saxophonist)

I decided to play the saxophone when I was sixteen, around 1943. My brother played the instrument and was an excellent musician. When he was drafted during World War II, he left his saxophone home. I was working at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company at the time. I decided music would be a better bet for me. I rode my bike each day to Alma Hightower’s house and took lessons for twenty-five cents. Then I took lessons with a gentleman who played first saxophone chair with the RKO Studio Orchestra. When my brother, Robert, came home from World War II, we both studied voice with a guy who would teach the Hi-Lo’s and the McGuire Sisters. My brother and I figured eventually we’d have to sing and that studying singing would help us with our blowing.

In 1947, I played at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by drummer Johnny Otis. It was right down the street from my home in Watts. There was a lot of blues energy there. At the end of 1948, Ralph Bass, an A&R guy who was at Savoy Records at the time, asked me if I wanted to do a record. I said yeah. He told me to put a tune together. A kid I knew in Watts had a record shop. He gave me a record by Glenn Miller that opened with a drummer playing the sock cymbal. I can’t remember the name of the song. But I built a blues off of it called “Deacon’s Hop,” which became a #1 hit on Billboard’s jukebox “race records” chart in early ’49. Hunter Hancock broke in the record by playing it a lot. He’s the one who started playing race music, our music, in L.A.

One night on tour in 1950, we played Clarksville, Tennessee. When we played for the first time, the audience didn’t respond. They just sat there. I couldn’t understand that. The music usually got people going. So on the next set I did something different. I got down on my knees to play. Then I laid down on the stage and played from there. People went crazy. After the concert, I said to myself, “I’m going to try this again.” So I did it in Texas. And again, everyone went crazy. Back in L.A., I did it, too. The kids went nuts. They loved that I was on my back blowing like that. My energy fired up theirs.

Pete Foxx

(Los Angeles singer-guitarist and original member of the Flairs)

My friends in junior high school and I first heard the Swallows, Sonny Til and the Orioles, the Clovers, and Billy Ward and His Dominoes on Hunter Hancock’s show. These were the vocal groups we tried to imitate. The Swallows were from Baltimore. We listened carefully to their records—like “Will You Be Mine” and “Eternally.” Then we copied what they were doing, humming harmony notes as our lead vocalist sang. I sang baritone. Eventually, four of us in school started singing songs these groups recorded.

We first started singing in junior high school in 1949. The first group we formed in high school in early 1952 was the Debonairs. We went through several different incarnations with guys coming and going. By the time we were in Jefferson High School that fall, a couple of the guys in the group were from Fremont High and Manual Arts. As the Debonairs, we sang in a talent show at the Lincoln Theatre on South Central Avenue. Whoever got the most audience applause won. We won, because we had the most friends there. The guys in our group were from different schools, so our friends came from all over.

In December ’52, we wrote some songs and felt we were ready to record. Somehow, we hooked up with John Dolphin, whose record store, Dolphin’s of Hollywood, was near Jefferson High. We recorded two sides: “I Had a Love” and “Tell Me You Love Me.” He renamed us the Hollywood Blue Jays on the record, probably because his label was called Recorded in Hollywood and bird groups were popular then. But we didn’t sell many copies. So Cornell Gunter, our lead vocalist, looked through his favorite records and saw that many were on the Modern label. He called them up. The person on the other end told him to come down.

Our first record on Modern’s Flair label was “I Had a Love” backed with “She Wants to Rock.” The label renamed us the Flairs. We were just teenagers and didn’t know the workings of the record business. We paid a price for that. The names that appeared as composers on some of our records had nothing to do with writing the songs. Whenever our Flair records came out, Hunter played them on his programs. We even went on his radio show, which he broadcast from his Hollywood office. Hunter was white but that didn’t matter. Everyone knew he was white. We felt he was playing Black music because that’s what he liked to do. We didn’t give it another thought. When we went on his show, Hunter was good to us. His sidekick was a Black woman named Margie Williams. Everyone in the community was comfortable with him and he was comfortable with us.

Our first concert after we began recording as the Flairs was in 1953, at the Shrine Auditorium. We did four or five songs. There were others on the bill. Chuck Higgins, the saxophonist, led the house band. I remember it turned out very well. Other concerts and ballroom appearances in R&B vocal group revues followed. We also sang on local TV. Many of the people in the audience at these concerts were white. Years later, I asked someone who was white how he and his friends found out about our records. They weren’t widely distributed outside of the Black community. The guy said their parents didn’t allow them to listen to Black music, but they listened anyway. Then they snuck around and passed records back and forth among themselves. They found out about the music by listening to Hunter and other R&B DJs around L.A. who were inspired by his success.

When R&B first began being played on the radio, Black kids in L.A. didn’t know that white kids were into the music. If you lived on the east side of L.A. then, where most Black people lived, you rarely got to the west side, where the white people lived. We knew there was a certain amount of segregation in L.A. and that there were distinct ethnic and racial neighborhoods. But that didn’t matter to us, since we didn’t need to go to them. The Flairs played all over L.A., up along the coast and even up in Washington State, where nearly everyone in the audience was white. These were mostly dance halls. We never thought that a white audience was shocking. We just thought of them as an audience.

Art Rupe(Specialty Records founder and producer of Fats Domino, Little Richard, and other R&B artists)

I never produced any concerts on behalf of my L.A. label. For promotion, I concentrated on obtaining radio airplay. Concerts weren’t as effective as radio play. It’s important to remember that the white DJs who played R&B records were not necessarily social justice advocates. They were merely creating and supplying the growing demand for this music. Both Hunter and “Huggy Boy” Hugg played many Specialty records. And with no payola. Gradually, more mainstream DJs in Southern California began to play R&B records that they felt would suit their mostly white audiences. With radio dramas moving to television, they had plenty of airtime to fill. Before long, stations playing R&B records began to reach the adjoining L.A. suburbs as the audiences for this music grew. Many of these listeners were the kids of white parents who, like the parents of Black listeners, had migrated to the region in search of jobs.

Big Jay McNeely

As Hunter Hancock’s R&B revues became more popular in L.A. in 1951 and early ’52, there was a backlash. More and more white, Mexican, and Black teens were attending his midnight concerts. This caught the attention of the Los Angeles police, who tried to discourage future attendance by harassing teens leaving in their cars. Inside the arenas, I’m sure the police didn’t like what they were seeing—interracial couples and friends getting wound up while I was playing and other Black artists were performing. I’m sure their parents started complaining when they heard where their kids had been the night before and how excited they were. The police also got rough on businesses that catered to young white and Black friends. At Dolphin’s of Hollywood, John Dolphin struggled under police intimidation. The police would block the store’s doors and warn white customers that being in a Black neighborhood at night placed them in danger. Still, a growing number of white teens in the Los Angeles area had other ways to access R&B, like on their radios.

By 1952, I was barred from playing in L.A. Since the police couldn’t stop white kids from coming to the concerts, they made it hard for Black artists to be booked into venues. After I signed with the booking agency General Artists Corporation (GAC), they got me jobs in other cities up and down the West Coast. I guess audiences for Hunter’s concerts fell off, since he, too, had to find theaters outside of the city where he could promote his concerts. Hunter’s support for R&B and his ability to attract white audiences to his radio shows and concerts did not go unnoticed by independent record labels and disc jockeys throughout the country. The music was drawing fans and making money—not necessarily for the artists but for the record labels, radio stations, promoters, and concert halls. In my experience, when music makes money, these people start talking to each other.

Chapter 2

CLEVELAND THEATERS

Once small independent R&B labels gained a foothold in the Los Angeles radio market, R&B record promoters and pluggers quickly fanned out to visit top record stores around the country and disc jockeys in major markets seeking exposure for their artists. One of the most significant record stores in the Mid-west that straddled working-class Black and white neighborhoods was Record Rendezvous at 300 Prospect Avenue in Cleveland. It’s where the term “rock ’n’ roll” was first applied to R&B.

Lance Freed(son of radio DJ Alan Freed)

When Record Rendezvous first opened in 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio, owner Leo Mintz would drive down to Columbus to buy used jukebox 78s at a deep discount and sell them in his store. By the end of the 1940s, Mintz featured a pretty wide selection of R&B records that attracted not only teens but also adult consumers from nearby cities and states. In 1950, one of those adult customers was my father, Alan Freed, a disc jockey then at WAKR in Akron. He began making the forty-mile trip north to the Rendezvous to keep up with what kids were listening to.

Though my father played jazz on his show in Akron, he had become increasingly curious about R&B. The number of R&B record ads and articles in Billboard was growing. Over the course of several visits to the Rendezvous, my dad and Mintz struck up a friendship. Mintz didn’t know much about R&B, but he had a soft spot for the many R&B record promoters and distributors who pleaded with him to carry their records. They’d show him the charts in Los Angeles and other cities as evidence of sales potential. Mintz also was encouraged by the large number of teens who came into his store and danced in the aisles to the R&B records he played on the shop’s phonograph. They also played R&B records in the store’s soundproof listening booths. Over time, my father began to develop a sense of which new R&B records would resonate most with his young customers.

Lesley Trattner(eldest daughter of Leo Mintz)

My father knew a lot about music. He was skinny and tall—six foot four—and knew how to dress and enjoy the good life. He always had a cigarette and a drink in his hand. I have no idea why he opened Record Rendezvous. Like anyone who runs a record store, I assume it was because he loved music and loved being part of the entertainment world.

The store was downtown at 300 Prospect Avenue, a main drag. That’s where all the fancy stores were. The store was a block from the bus terminal, which is how white families and kids reached the store from the immediate suburbs. The Black neighborhood was just a few blocks away. Inside, the store was long and narrow with a lot of record bins. In the back were six listening booths with doors and glass windows. Kids would take a record they wanted to hear back there and listen and dance. The booths were pretty revolutionary, since no other store in Cleveland let you do that. In other stores, records were behind the counter and you asked a clerk for help.

My dad played music in the store and had a speaker mounted outside to pull people in. Many kids came into the store to look for the records they’d heard the night before on the radio. They typically came in humming a few bars to a riff or a few words written on a scrap of paper. My father would help them figure out the record. Distributors of independent R&B records came in regularly urging him to take on their product. My father didn’t know much about R&B. It was new. But he listened for the beat, which is what got kids dancing and spending. Anytime there was a party, I’d bring the records. I was very popular.

When Alan Freed began visiting the store regularly in 1950, my father saw an opportunity. As Alan’s visits increased, my father floated the idea of sponsoring him on a Cleveland radio station. Freed would play the R&B records and my father would have an easier time selling them. My father also knew early that the true market for R&B records was kids. In the store, he watched kids dance the bop and jitterbug in the aisles and in the listening booths after school and on the weekends. He watched in awe and referred to what they were doing as “rockin’ and rollin’.” Freed later picked up on the term.

Lance Freed

In April 1951, my father took a job at Cleveland’s WJW as the host of a classical music show. One night in June, the disc jockey who normally hosted a show from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. called in sick. The station manager asked my dad to fill in. But rather than spin the records the ailing DJ planned to play, my dad went down to his car and grabbed a stack of Mintz’s R&B records from his trunk. After the show, the station manager reprimanded him for breaking with the show’s existing format. When my dad told Mintz what had happened, Mintz called the station and offered to sponsor an R&B show—but only if my dad was the host. Two other local businesses joined Mintz’s sponsorship—a furniture store and Erin Brew, a local beer that my uncle said tasted like piss.

My dad played records and announced ads live on the air with the same intimate “you and me” delivery he used to announce the records. The show quickly developed a following. My dad called his program the Moondog Show, after one of his favorite obscure R&B records, “Moondog’s Symphony,” which came out in 1950. My dad decided to use the record’s mysterious, hypnotic instrumental as his theme to set the show’s exotic, clubhouse mystique. He also began calling himself the Moondog and his listeners Moondoggers. I think opening his show with a song that embraced the sounds of the wild stirred the imaginations of many young listeners. As a friend and the show’s sponsor, Mintz was often in the studio with my dad, handing him records that were distinct or popular with kids in his store.

Tommy LiPuma(record producer and winner of five Grammy Awards)

In the early 1950s, I couldn’t wait for the Moondog—Alan Freed—to come on at 10:00 p.m. I grew up in Cleveland and loved R&B and pop music. There was no one else like Freed. He was broadcasting to the Black community and he created this nocturnal world, an alternate universe where things were hip and happening and the music was filled with all of these secret messages. If you were a Black listener, he was completely in sync with your culture and up-to-date on emerging Black artists. If you were a white listener, you were being introduced to all this stuff. You knew nothing about it, but it was fascinating and exciting.

The music’s energy was unbelievable. Blues shouters, horn sections, honking saxophones, a big beat—all of it. The music was addictive because it never fit into a rigid formula the way pop did. If you were a kid, Freed was your best friend, and he created an atmosphere separate from parents and teachers. It was a secret world of the night, with its own music, dances, and language. On the air, Freed referred to the Record Rendezvous as the ’Vous. Early on, it was hard to separate Freed and Leo Mintz, who owned the Record Rendezvous. Freed created this make-believe world on the radio, but the Rendezvous is where your imagination hit reality. You could go down there, listen to what was playing, and leave with records in your hands. The next natural step for Freed after radio and records was a concert.

Lance Freed

I don’t know if my dad was aware of disc jockey Hunter Hancock in Los Angeles or his Midnight Matinee concerts there. What he did know is that he was broadcasting in Cleveland largely to a Black audience. By the end of 1951 and into the winter of ’52, my dad held a series of dances at small local venues where he played R&B records that were featured on his show. These were called record hops. By February 1952, he and Mintz—along with Mintz’s associate, Milton Kulkin—planned a large dance and concert. They found a local concert promoter, Lew Platt, who was willing to put up the money to sponsor the event that was going to feature five R&B acts. The concert would be called the Moondog Coronation Ball and tickets were $1.50 each, or about $15 in today’s dollars. It was to be held on Friday, March 21, 1952, from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. It was a coronation because at the concert, my dad planned to crown himself King of the Moondoggers. A permit was secured and 8,600 tickets were printed for the Cleveland Arena, which held 12,500 people sitting in the stands and standing on the main floor.

As the concert date neared, Platt began to worry aloud about making back his money. So my dad promoted the concert aggressively on his radio show. According to posters for the coronation ball, the promised attractions included baritone saxophonist Paul “Hucklebuck” Williams, guitarist Tiny Grimes and His Rockin’ Highlanders, the Dominoes, Danny Cobb, and Varetta Dillard. The four partners in the Moondog Coronation Ball had little or no experience accounting for tickets sold in multiple locations and were winging it under the assumption that too few people would show up to make the event financially worthwhile. The big mistake they made was making the tickets general admission instead of reserved seating. By 9:30 p.m. that Friday night, the Cleveland Arena was filled to capacity, with an estimated 6,000 people milling around outside unable to gain admission.

The concert wasn’t oversold. It was a cold night and thousands of people showed up who didn’t have tickets. My dad told me they came hoping to buy tickets at the door, but the event had already sold out. By 10:00 p.m., the streets were a sea of people. Most of those inside and outside were Black teens, the primary audience for my dad’s radio show. The crowd gathering outside the arena unnerved the Cleveland police department. It didn’t take much. After Paul Williams and His Hucklebuckers took the stage, those outside began to force open the doors. The twenty-five off-duty police officers hired by the promoter for the arena clearly weren’t sufficient, so forty additional police officers and thirty firemen were rushed in to maintain order and protect the building. The crowd inside wasn’t happy either. The arena was jammed, making it impossible to dance, let alone hear the live attractions on the primitive speaker system. When the fire department had the lights turned on at 10:45 p.m. and announced that the concert had been canceled, people were urged to leave in an orderly fashion. Many refused at first. According to the papers back then, one person inside was stabbed in the pushing and shoving that followed.

My father’s radio station, WJW, was livid. Management felt the botched concert, near riot, and nonrefundable tickets tarnished the station’s reputation with its audience. The next day, on Saturday, my dad was called into the station manager’s office and told that his show later that day would be his last. When my dad went on the air that afternoon, he had nothing to lose. He opened with a goodbye monologue that became an apology to his audience and wound down with a plea for listener support. It lasted about a half hour. On the radio, as captured on tape, my dad threw himself on the mercy of his audience and launched into one of the great speeches in rock history.

Dad’s mea culpa worked. Satisfied with his apology and distrustful of attempts by the station and the police to blame him for the concert’s failure, listeners rallied to support the Moondog. Dad, Mintz, Kulig, and Platt were lucky. Had there been a stampede or had the police overreacted and triggered a full-blown riot, they and possibly the station would have been liable for deaths, injuries, and civil unrest. From that night forward, after being rescued from the brink of unemployment, my dad realized he owed his audience. He also knew rock concerts could be profitable if safety and security were priorities.

After the coronation mess, Dad immediately set to work planning another Moondog Ball for May. The Cleveland police chief protested. But as the city told the chief, Dad’s request could not be legally denied by the city provided all of its requirements were met. This time, tickets at the Cleveland Arena were for reserved seating. Precautions were taken to limit attendance and protect concertgoers inside. A matinee and an evening performance that started at 8:00 p.m. were scheduled, and ticketing was taken out of the hands of promoters. What’s more, only 6,000 tickets were allowed to be sold for each performance, despite greater capacity, and up to fifty special police were hired to keep order. His follow-up concert, the Moondog Caravan of Stars, was held on May 24 and was highly organized. The two shows were held at the Cleveland Public Auditorium and featured the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, Dinah Washington plus singer Tommy Edwards, and comedian Herkie Styles—a lineup probably selected to make city officials comfortable.

Once my dad proved he could be trusted to put on a safe show, he began to make a name for himself in the local concert business. In 1952, he staged Ohio “Moondog” events in Akron, Youngstown, Lorain, and Canton to sizable crowds. But by the end of the year, his experiments in Cleveland-area concert promotion began to fizzle. In December, one of his concerts was capped at 850 tickets, the maximum capacity at the city’s Play Mor Auditorium. But fewer than 500 tickets were sold. When my dad arrived at the auditorium and saw the small size of the crowd, he said it would likely be the last of the Moondog concerts. But throughout his career, failure often led him to try again on a bigger scale with greater financial risks. In January 1953, he and Platt planned on putting on R&B shows throughout the Midwest and in Southern California. My dad also diversified. He partnered with Lew Platt and LCL Productions of Canton, Ohio, to put on a show at the Cleveland Arena in August 1953 that featured former heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis. About 10,000 people filled the venue. Artists included Ruth Brown, the Buddy Johnson Orchestra, the Clovers, Lester Young, Wynonie Harris, and others. By then, his Moondog Show