Long before the appearance of all sorts of legends and conjectures about the worthlessness of rock and roll, about its viciousness and stupidity, about the fact that it was played in three notes with two fingers, long before all this, one very remarkable, but hardly noticeable story happened: the founding of the American show business, carved in granite, static and parted cruner cracked.
Almost imperceptible at first, she tornly traced a smiling and benevolent face to the audience, lightly touched the microphone, tore the body apart and slanted into the ground.
The rest was and has become a matter of time.
It all started with dancing.
When young whites and young blacks, at the call from the radios, suddenly began to gather in crowds of thousands, just to jump and jump to the incredibly groovy music.
And the ancient show business, impeccably controlled, not subject to fashion and youth trends, reliably keeping the seething young blood in a certain channel once and for all, collapsed, buried under its own wreckage, confirming the somewhat strange thesis that everything is transient and only music ...
The man on the radio was named Alan Fried.
It was he who organized and hosted the world's first rock and roll concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, on March 21, 1952, at the Cleveland Arena.
Long before the official appearance of rock and roll as a style.
It was he who promoted, as they would say now, the rock and roll brand: although the name had existed since about 1946, it was both incomprehensible to the general public and practically not used - except as an element of black slang denoting sex.
And it was he who gave way to the Kings of the South, clearing the debris of inertia and limited audience.
For which he received the black mark of the northern establishment.
It was a crack in the wrong place, that damn Alan Freed.
Pants sprawled over the ass of a flawless dandy.
Fucking hipster.
He was a disc jockey and radio host of American radio stations, on the air of which he brazenly and shamelessly played blacker than black rhythm and blues - the music of pitiful cotton pickers, whining and howling with a guitar and harmonica.
With the tapping of feet in shabby, types and types of worn-out boots.
A challenge to society and morality.
In any case, it should have been destroyed.
Edgar Hoover, whom they still scare naughty children and petty politicians with, as they say (and how can you know anything for certain in the sublunary world), personally and of his own free will accepted a challenge that was not thrown by anyone - he raised his glove, brushed it off, pressed to that the place where ordinary people have a heart, and vowed not to take a sip of lemonade on the hottest of days, until the red rock and roll infection is rooted out of the soul of America!
Yes, my dears, rock 'n' roll at first was revered as the devil of the communist hell, while in the very "communist hell" they shied away from the beat faster than from the plague.
Edgar Hoover.
A deceitful, devious devil.
That's who is to blame.
I am still sure: he invented the payolu, like other evil that invariably swarmed in his head, trimmed with an unchanging hat.
What a terrible irony, what a harsh, gut-wrenching laugh mixed with death moans!
The freest of the countries in the world (as they think to themselves), which gave birth to fate, this very world that swallowed its head, at the same time erupted its monster-strangler.
Just think: how terribly the powers that be in the States were afraid of music.
His own.
On folk roots infused.
They were afraid to tremble, to the point that the reprisal of the objectionable newborn was entrusted to no one - the FBI Director.
A fracture of fate.
The same crack.
Perhaps all this is a horror story, an urban legend about the non-accidental deaths of too many of the first cohort of rockers of the South, but the fact remains: the boys with uncooked cocks were famously mowed down.
Those who did not die in car and plane crashes went into a bottle, went to jail, was torn apart by the press for "immoral behavior" or went on a tour for a couple of years.
Elvis was not touched - Elvis went to the army.
And we know whose plan it was.
And we remember with whom Colonel Parker was unusually strong friends.
Alan Fried was perhaps the first to get into the show business sausage machine.
He saw how he was drawn, knew what he was destined to become, but did not flinch.
He loved decent music too much, as if by the universal mind he was precisely determined for his role in his time ...
Hoover should have closed and burned all the record stores.
But where was he to think of such a thing ...
And here is one extremely successful meeting in the very late 1940s, just in the Cleveland music store, owned by the legendary Leo Mintz - a man without prejudice and with a rhythm in his head, and served as the prototype for a torpedo gap in the long-suffering and angelically pure underbelly of America.
Alan Fried, by that time already a well-known (including scandalous) radio host, Mints liked and received an offer to launch a nighttime broadcast show entirely dedicated to rhythm and blues on WJW (Cleveland radio station).
Let's just say that on the air of Fried (with the full approval of Leo's friend), starting in June 1951, something unimaginable was happening - the show was called The Moondog House, at the beginning of each issue Alan howled into the microphone like a coyote drunk with whiskey.
With a howl, smoothly turning into advertising and back into a velvet baritone, he, along the way, beating the rhythm on a thick telephone book, pushed the audience (and she was already out of her mind) mind-blowing maxims about the next hero of the next forty-five, and all this did not end an hour four in a row.
How boring to live in now.
What smooth and unattainable presenters on the radio.
Rumor has it that they are made at a secret factory somewhere in the mountains.
The templates are outdated, but who will start updating production from nothing?
He was also a universal detonator, this Alan Freed.
With his light hand, radio shows of a similar format began to arise throughout the country, in every state.
He boldly moved to New York, tried to stake out the copyright for rock and roll (unsuccessfully), started organizing live concerts of live stars.
Everything was fine, but ... Not very well.
You know ...
After all, America is not really the promised land.
There are sometimes scandals, wars and high-profile trials.
Hoover chose a tried and tested method - high-profile process.
From today it seems ridiculous even to assume that disc jockeys took money from companies and record producers just so that they more often put on the air, say, Berry.
Or Presley.
Or Lewis.
Their frenzied popularity, beyond both goodness and common sense, did not need such nonsense.
Rather, if anyone had such an idea, they would take money to promote the choral singing of the prairie pioneers.
But ... This is not socialism for you - the market rules here.
Cruel and merciless.
And if little tear-stained girls with tears on their cheeks want Jailhouse Rock, Great Balls of Fire or Maybellene, then so be it eight or twenty-eight times - at least a day, at least for an hour in a row.
Hoover didn't care.
Stopping the "pernicious" procession of roll and roll was the most important of his tasks.
Yes Yes exactly.
And this is absolutely true.
And it arose at the beck of the inflamed brain of Payola (the merger of the words pay - "to pay" and Victrola - a trademark of phonographs) - the concept of a bribe received for the "dishonest" rotation of one or another song of this or that singer.
The scale, I think, is clear to you.
Freed, chosen to be the sacrificial lamb, went through all the circles of hell, including hearings in the Senate with the presentation of "26 proven episodes of a bribe."
Freed denied everything.
His career was ruined.
He, of course, started drinking (and he was not a teetotaler even once).
They stopped calling him to work.
And he died.
In 1965.
From cirrhosis of the liver and much more, reaching only forty-three.
Needless to say, immediately after the death of Alan Fried, they were branded as a dissolute, dishonest, extremely dissolute, licentious and bad manners to the point of complete indecency.
Needless to say that in 1986 (21 years after his death) Alan Fried was among the first of the first to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, opened in Cleveland, where everything is then it began.
And needless to say that now only the lazy does not call Alan Fried the father of rock and roll, his guardian angel and forerunner.
Payola's napalm burned Fried's soul.
But not the memory of him.
All of Hoover's efforts turned to dust in time.
And the current customs of show business in particular and society as a whole have turned Frida into a saint ...
This is exactly what Neil Young sang on the album Everybody's Rockin 'in 1983.
A simple and cute little thing - Payola blues ...
This one's for you Al Freed,
Wherever you go, whatever you do
'Cause the things they're doing today
Will make a saint out of you
Payola blues.
I've got the payola blues
Even though I already paid my dues ...
But you're not surprised even once, are you?
Is there anything more reliable than napalm?
To burn - so to everyone and everything ...
Alan Fried is bright and clean.
Like a coin of silver.
Did he take money?
Didn't take it?
Refer to Mr. Young's text.
But what about Edgar Hoover and his marvelous notions that have gone into the world?
Do you want to wash your hands thoroughly and preferably several times?
Very hot water.
Now the world has somehow greatly diminished holiness.
Don’t you?
I got a brand new record company, new manager too.
Got a great new record, I can't get through to you.
Payola blues
No matter where I go
I never hear my record on the radio.
How about this new Mercedes Benz, that ought to get it on.
Well, thanks a lot man!
I'll play it all day long.
Payola blues
No matter where I go
I never hear my record on the radio ...
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.