Fact #111513

THE FIRST ROCK'N'ROLL CONCERT - an Eye Witness report compiled by Johnny Black, first published in Q magazine.

Diz Russell (performer) : Alan Freed was a white deejay who came to prominence in Cleveland because he realised that a huge black population had moved up from the southern states to find work in the industrial north, and nobody was playing the same music they had heard on the radio back home.

John Lenear (college student) : It was called race music then, but Freed and a couple of Cleveland record merchandisers put their heads together and started calling it rock'n'roll. I was a fifteen year old student back then and, after classes, I'd go down to the Buckley Building and help out Alan Freed by taking calls to his show on WJW.

Marjorie Starr (schoolgirl) : I don't remember any black deejays on the radio then. Alan Freed was white, but he was the only one who played that music and I listened to him last thing every night on the Moondog show.

John Lenear : The music business has always been very corrupt, and it certainly was then. Freed was exploiting the artists whose records he played by taking payola - kickbacks - and by demanding publishing rights on their songs and in a number of other ways.

Marjorie Starr : I heard about the Moondog Coronation Ball because Alan Freed kept advertising it on his radio show. We never got to see those kinds of bands, so this was going to be the biggest thing to hit Cleveland ever.

John Lenear : Part of how the business worked in those days was that a deejay would use his show in any way he could to maximise his profits, and that's what Freed was doing with the Moondog Coronation Ball - making some extra money.

Diz Russell (performer) : I was singing then with The Modern Sounds, and we were very low on the bill. They way Freed got his talent was that he picked people up from the bars and clubs around Cleveland, and he got us to play at the Moondog Coronation for no money, because we wanted to be seen by that audience.

Estelene Lawrence (audience) : Me and three girlfriends rode the streetcar to the Arena which was about ten miles from where I lived. It was supposed to start about 10.00pm but when we got there at 9.00 they'd already closed the doors. We had to wait outside.

Marjorie Starr : I was fifteen, still in school, and my mother forbade me to go, but I hid my clothes at my friend's house and we snuck out with my boyfriend, Richard Jordan, and drove down in his car.

John Lenear : I wasn't working for Freed that night. I went down there to pick up girls. I wore my brown suit with the baggy pants, my red shirt with the folded down cuffs, and a little skinny tie. I looked sharp.

Marjorie Starr : We got to the Cleveland Arena early with our tickets and went right in but it was already wall to wall people, everybody milling around. I thought I'd stepped into hell, it was so noisy.

John Lenear : It was supposed to be a dance but the place was too hot, too crowded, too packed, so it turned into a concert situation because you just couldn't dance.

Peter Hastings (photographer) : The Arena was the home of the Cleveland Barons Hockey team, and they had boxing there too. It had a capacity of about 10,000 but the promoters sold far too many tickets, and then people started arriving outside who didn't even have tickets.

Alan Freed : If anybody, even in their wildest imagination, had told us that some 25,000 people would try to get into a dance, I suppose you would have been just like me. You probably would have laughed and said they were crazy.

Marjorie Starr : Before we'd heard a note of music, there was a disturbance about eight rows in front of us. Some man got shot. He wasn't killed, but he was badly injured. We started pushing our way towards the doors right away, but when we got there, they opened inwards not out, and there were people jammed up against them on both sides, pushing, banging and screaming. The promoters were refusing to let the people outside buy tickets and that started a whole other ruckus.

Peter Hastings : I had been hired by Freed's PR woman, Ann Bassett, to take pictures, so I'd set up my 4x5 plate camera, very cumbersome, in the balcony.

Diz Russell : There were so many acts on the bill, we each got about ten minutes on stage. We opened the show, but already there was trouble. I saw people throwing bottles and breaking out windows.

Peter Hastings : When the first group started playing, I took my picture and right away a fight erupted in front of the stage. I can still see the crowd below us. It was getting bigger all the time. Suddenly everybody around me was heading for the exits. I was a white man and the crowd was almost exclusively African-American, and I found it very uncomfortable, so I thought it wise for me to get out as well.

Paul 'Hucklebuck' Williams (performer) : Even though all this was going on, Alan Freed said we should get out there and play. I must have been crazy, but we went out. We was romping and swinging, and the people outside the doors heard that good music and WHOA! The doors came down. That's how they came in. Broke them down.

Estelene Lawrence : We'd been waiting about half an hour outside when the crowd started pushing and battering the door. Suddenly the door collapsed in and we were all carried along with the crowd into the middle of it. We all linked arms so we wouldn't get separated. We could see a band on the stage, but we couldn't hear it.

Alan Freed : We were having a real great time until the crushing pressure of some ten thousand people still outside smashed open the doors of the arena and converged on the inside. When that happened, and some seven thousand persons without tickets bulged the insides of the Arena, the whole show went out of control.

John Lenear : People had started acting stupid, breaking the doors down. Next thing you know, there's police everywhere.

It worried the authorities that this was going on in a high class part of town, around where all the important civic buildings were. They'd never seen that many black people in the street. The crowd was almost totally black. There were a few whites but, man, you'd need a magnifying glass to find them.

Paul 'Hucklebuck' Williams (performer) : Right in the middle of our first number, I could see this young fellow on the stairs that led up to the stage. He was hitting an older man and, every time he hit him, the old man would stick him with a knife, somewhere in the butt. And then he stuck him one last time and that was it. Young one grabbed his butt and went down.

We stopped playing right then. We had our bus backstage, inside the arena, and we all just climbed on board and got out of there was fast as we could. There wasn't another note of music played that night. It was all over.

David Freed : It was strictly a breakdown in the ability of those who worked for the arena and were used to hockey crowds of eight thousand. Nobody'd ever seen anything like that.

Bill Lemmon (Vice-President, WJW) : People without tickets broke down doors. I saw knives flashing. We were up in the press box and we couldn't get out for three hours. It was madness.

Peter Hastings : Eventually the police came in and closed the show down.

Marjorie Starr : I caught hell from my mom when I got home. She whupped me until the daylight, and if she'd got Richard she'd have whupped him good too.

Alan Freed : Everybody had such a grand time breaking into the arena that they didn't ask for their money back.

Paul Williams : I never got paid for that show and, as far as I know, nobody else got paid either. We all did it as favours for Alan Freed.

Diz Russell : The place was so badly damaged that they had to keep it closed for repairs for weeks. The public in Cleveland were mighty unhappy with Alan Freed and the local papers, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press started a campaign to get rid of him. Eventually he moved to New York.