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The World's First Rock & Roll Concert

© Barney Quick

Many of them were just teenage girls from middle-class black families. They came in pairs or groups. As they looked around, they could see some troublemakers sprinkled into the crowd, the kinds of kids who messed with liquor and weed. The main thing that made the middle-class youth nervous, though, was the sheer rate of expansion of the crowd. It was swelling by the minute. They could feel themselves being lifted off the ground and carried along by the pressure of surrounding bodies. The Cleveland Arena’s steel doors began to bulge. The kids began to wonder if the doors could withstand much more. They couldn’t. They slammed to the ground. The surge carried the multitude into the hall. Paul Williams, a veteran of the swing era who had switched from alto sax to baritone and become a popular jump-blues honker, was onstage. Kids were dancing, but it was a challenge as the swarm kept streaming through the doorways. These young r&b fans wondered where the cops were.

Then someone got stabbed up in the bleachers. Fights broke out everywhere. The crowd stormed the stage and destroyed the props. By the time city officials got to the microphone and shut the proceedings down, most of the musicians and promoters had fled.

Thus did the night of March 21, 1952 put Cleveland on the modern-music map and secure Alan Freed’s place in American cultural history. This was the prototype for a kind of event that helped shape the second half of the twentieth century, the rock concert.

The show was called The Moondog Coronation Ball and the posters dubbed it “the most terrible ball of them all.” It was the brainchild of Freed, a hard-drinking WJW disc jockey with a penchant for stirring up excitement.

Freed, then a twenty-five year-old Pennsylvania native, is often portrayed as being motivated by a deep love of black dance music. If he harbored such a sentiment, that came later. In the early fifties in Cleveland, he was whipping up a frenzy among the city’s youth for self-serving reasons. It was the obvious way to revive a sinking broadcast career.

After army service and a stint in Akron, Ohio, Freed had come to WJW to play classical records on a program sponsored by Leo Mintz’s Record Rendezvous, a big store on Prospect Avenue. He and Mintz, who had started the store in 1939, became drinking buddies. One day, while they were tossing back some spiritous beverages, Mintz remarked that jump blues, doo-wop and other simple contemporary forms of black popular music were increasing appealing to both black and white kids. His idea was to buy a slot of late-night time on WJW and have Freed plug these kinds of records. Freed was game, even though he didn’t know much about r&b. He began to familiarize himself with the music itself as well as the manic style with which jocks presented it in other markets.