Rock & Roll Man (musical about Alan Freed)

On Saturday I went to see Rock & Roll Man, an agreeable musical about Alan Freed, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre; this week it's playing at the Lighthouse arts centre in Poole, and if you are within reach it's worth a visit. As far as I know that will be the end of the production's short UK tour though it deserves a longer life. The show had a three-month Off-Broadway run in 2023; this British production has retained Constantine Maroulis as Freed, and the passion and conviction which he brings to the role are a big part of its success.

Alan Freed was a hugely influential DJ in the 1950s; he not only popularised the term "rock'n'roll" but even copyrighted it (a stricture which proved impossible to enforce). He was eventually undone by a payola scandal (the then-common practice of accepting bribes for playing records), though it seems he was a scapegoat; others such as the fresh-faced Dick Clark, more acceptable to the authorities, got away with it. That's putting it very broadly - there is much more detail in the Freed biography Big Beat Heat by John A. Jackson.

 

Jackson's book is credited as the source for Mr Rock'n'Roll, a 1999 TV biopic about Freed which includes a lot of the same events and characters as the musical, though I don't know whether there is any direct connection between the two works. There was also a 1978 feature film about Freed, American Hot Wax, but as that has a narrower focus - the lead-up to a concert - it makes more sense to compare the TV movie and musical first, as both try to convey a sense of Freed's career as a whole.

Rock & Roll Man (the musical) has a greater sense of liveliness and playfulness; Mr Rock'n'Roll (the TV movie, above) has actors miming to the original rock'n'roll records but the versatile cast of the musical, aided by a backing band, are able to conjure up a wide range of rock'n'roll greats performing their most famous songs live - and for the most part they are, as Dave Podmore would say, there or thereabouts. 

Alright, maybe Pat Boone (who is still around) could complain with some justification that his recording of Tutti Frutti, whatever its faults, wasn't quite the leaden thing we hear onstage, but that's surely an example of the show's playfulness in action. And okay, the lead singer on the Drifters' Money Honey may not sound too much like Clyde McPhatter, but more often than not the vocal impersonations score; the show's MD turns in a very good Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, complete with the requisite piano acrobatics, and Frankie Lymon ain't too bad either. The Lymon actor also provides another example of the show's playfulness or mischievousness: in this telling of the story he doesn't only dance with a white girl (the act which resulted in Freed's TV show The Big Beat being cancelled) but makes a big deal of kissing her at the end, as shown below; in Mr Rock'n'Roll (the TV movie) Lymon dances with the girl but there is no concluding kiss.

(I note, incidentally, that Larry Marshak was involved in the creation of Rock & Roll Man; in the past he has attracted considerable controversy for promoting fake versions of doo wop and other groups, including the Drifters, without any original members, though there is no pretence about authenticity here.)

The TV movie includes a lot of music but is undoubtedly a drama, with scenes depicting the key events in Freed's rise and fall in a naturalistic manner, occasionally making use of Freed's voiceover to help knit things together. The makers of the musical (Gary Kupper, Larry Marshak and Rose Caiola) have framed the action as a dream of Freed's just before he dies in which he imagines himself on trial; this allows for a more fluid, impressionistic approach to telling his story. (One nicely comic touch is that he is being defended by Little Richard in his campest mode - and the actor looks very much like Richard, too.) The key events of Freed's life are also included in this telling but with the license which the dream device affords they are sketched in more lightly.

The trial idea seems to dribble away a bit in the second half before coming back more strongly to round things off. In the trial it's not payola which is the issue - though that is mentioned during the show - it serves more by way of a final reckoning of Freed's life, and whether or not, as J. Edgar Hoover contests, corrupted the nation's youth. 

The - surely improbable? - suggestion is made at one point in the musical that Freed's associate Morris Levy is astonished (like Claude Rains being "astonished" in Casablanca?) to learn that Freed has been accepting "consultation fees" from record companies and that it is this discovery which causes Levy to withdraw his support from the beleaguered DJ. The TV movie is perhaps clearer (though I have the luxury in the latter case of being able to watch scenes again) about Levy, in effect, throwing Freed under the bus in order to avoid being investigated too fully himself. Jackson's biography does note one point in Levy's favour: unlike most of the DJ's other friends and associates he kept in touch with Freed throughout his declining years, giving him at least some financial support.

And what does come over strongly and convincingly in the stage show is that whatever the rights and wrongs of the money issue Freed did seem to have a genuine love for the music, and the fact that in Taylor Hackford's documentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll Chuck Berry, of all people, speaks of him with considerable fondness would seem to confirm that. Berry was not one to view business associates with overwhelming fondness and, as mentioned in the musical, Freed had been apportioned a share of the royalties for Maybelline. 

Despite the numerous rock'n'roll hits by Berry and others to be heard in Rock & Roll Man, however, it isn't simply a jukebox musical, and there are also newly composed songs (by Gary Kupper) for the Alan Freed character to sing. These are not, to my ears at least, wildly memorable but they do serve a function and at least we're not subject to innumerable reprises in  the manner of some musicals. Luckily Constantine Maroulis doesn't emulate the croaky style of the real Freed (remember his vocal decorations to such numbers as Rock'n'Roll Boogie?) and - assuming it's not electronic trickery - he is able to hold a final note for an unconscionable length of time.

But one trouble with the show, I think, is that whereas the Jersey Boys musical, for example, could tease the audience with short clips of songs then select particular numbers to blast us with in full, all the period songs in Rock & Roll Man have been shortened to around sixty seconds or so. This provides room for the original songs written for the Freed character (the show is only two hours excluding an interval), and I suppose fuller versions of the oldies would have slowed down the action, but it did mean that although you were able to register each impersonation you didn't really have that much time to relish it. 

On the other hand, it's admirable that the show's makers do stick to the task of telling the DJ's story rather than taking the easy option of reducing his role to that of a glorified MC introducing this parade of oldies: it is a proper biopic, in other words, even if told via snapshots. The style may be more lighthearted than the TV movie but we are given glimpses of the darker side, including Freed's problems with drink and relationships, from the beginning. It's also worth saying that the set design is simple, suited to touring, but didn't feel cheap. And quite apart from the singing the music was played well, not always sticking slavishly to the records though certainly to their spirit, and the show doesn't outstay its welcome. 

So if you can't make it to Poole and Rock & Roll Man comes back to the UK again at some point it's worth a look. It was certainly very well received by the mostly elderly matinee audience in Cambridge on Saturday - coincidentally the 74th anniversary of the Moondog Coronation Ball, the event which gained Freed notoriety when it was oversold, with thousands of punters demanding admission to an already full-to-bursting Cleveland Arena.  

You can find more information and booking details on the Lighthouse website here. It runs until Saturday 28th March.  

(Beat.) 

 Alright, what we gonna do right now is go back ... waaay back ... back in time ... 

Well, to 2011, anyway, which is when I wrote a piece about the feature film mentioned earlier; I'd just had my first chance to see it again since its initial release in 1978. I added some further thoughts a few days later, also included in the repost below.

 

  

American Hot Wax Revisited 

Saw American Hot Wax today for the first time in about thirty years. Enjoyable enough, although more bitty than I remembered. There are good moments when Tim McIntyre as Alan Freed shows that the music matters to him, but as the film is given over to a concert after around the one hour point there isn't a lot of time to develop character.

I'd forgotten that there was a female character perhaps loosely based on Carole King, long before Grace of My Heart, and just how stuffed with music the film is - and not always in a good way: there are times you suspect that the continual snatches of disparate songs are a means of distracting you from the absence of anything but the most basic storyline. The film focuses on a very short time in Freed's life - the buildup to, and performance and immediate consequences of, the concert below - and a paragraph at the end tells us of his eventual fate. 

 I suppose it didn't help that I was watching a DVD from a well-known auction website which looked and sounded like it was dubbed from a VHS off-air recording, so the experience of the music wasn't always enough in itself to compensate for other shortcomings.  But the film, even if not perfect, is worth seeing for some very good moments which will be immediately understood by other lovers of this music.

For example, there is a scene in which a young boy who is president of the Buddy Holly fan club blags his way into the radio studio on the date of his late hero's birthday and Freed coaxes answers out of him which make clear the importance of Holly's music; Freed, himself clearly moved, puts on a Holly side which unites man and boy in what can only be termed solitary-but-shared grooving:

And when the Carole King figure is in tears after a long-awaited glorious vindication (an unknown group has just sung her composition onstage to great acclaim), Freed is puzzled until she confides: "I never had anything till I found the music." Neither did I," he tells her.

The image of Freed below, mid-broadcast, comes from a moment cited by Dave Marsh in his entry on There Goes My Baby in The Heart of Rock and Soul. It is worth quoting in full:

In the best scene of American Hot Wax, Floyd Mutrux's 1978 film biography of disc jockey Alan Freed, Tim McIntire's Freed, sitting in the studio doing his show, gets a disturbing phone call from his father back in Ohio. When it's over Freed hangs his head in his hands. The engineer reminds him from the other room that it's time for another record. Freed says nothing, just reaches over and cues one up. As it begins playing, he speaks over its intro.

"This is Alan Freed and I love you," he says in a voice husky and mysterious. "You know what -- it's raining in Akron, Ohio .., but it's a beautiful night in New York City. These are the Drifters, and 'There Goes My Baby. ' " He reaches over and turns the record up as loud as it'll go. Suddenly, swirling strings deliver Ben E. King's nasal voice crying, "There goes my baby, movin' on down the line." It's a moment meant to convince you that Freed loves the music not because it's made him rich and famous but because it satisfies something within him. And it succeeds.

Not only Freed but "There Goes My Baby" deserves to be enshrined, for the moment when those strings entered, rhythm and blues took an irrevocable step toward soul music.

This next step in the evolution of record-making made it even more decisively a producer's music, concocted in the studio without much reference to what happened on stage or in doo-wop hallways with perfect echoes. "We were trying to create some kind of collage," Jerry Leiber once said. "We were experimenting because the things that were planned for the date were falling apart . . . Stanley [Applebaum, the arranger] wrote something that sounded like some Caucasian take-off and we had this Latin beat going on this out-of-tune tympani and the Drifters were singing something in another key but the total effect-there was something magnificent about it." After it became a hit, he said, "I'd be listening to the radio sometimes and hear it and I was convinced it sounded like two stations playing one thing."

Leiber is too modest. For what the arrangement really brought forward, by forcing King (in his debut as the Drifters' lead voice) to sing in a key well above his natural range and underpinning the result with SO much pseudo-Tchaikovsky, was an air of abject hopelessness - the same kind of frustrated defeat that Alan Freed might have felt after talking to his father. The magnificence, I suppose, comes because we've now had thirty years to understand that the song sounds the same on either end of the wire.

The American Hot Wax soundtrack double album was my first experience of the Drifters' There Goes My Baby and the realisation that doo wop voices could sit within sophisticated arrangements, even if the form was in the process of becoming something else. And even on my little cassette recorder I could hear that the sides had been mastered from good sources and that the compilers or the company had enough money to license what they wanted.

Perhaps Sincerely, with its sudden leap into a freer, looser style of singing -

But I'll never, never, never, nev-ahhh! Le-het her go

made the most impact on me. Dave Marsh also included the Moonglows' hit as one of his choices in The Heart of Rock and Soul:

For most of its length "Sincerely" might as well be a record by the Mills Brothers or the Ink Spots [...] Only the "vooit-vooit" in the background and a bluesy guitar lick hint that something different might be going on. But, at the conclusion of each verse, the arrangement swings into something more like gospel. This oscillation between church singing and the formalities of Tin Pan Alley-era pop is crucial to the entire ethos of doo wop [...] Sincerely is [...] poised [...] on the fault between profound musical changes. 

No faulting Freed's taste, although I'm reminded of a scene in the film where he's considering buying a mansion of a place. It's made clear through a snooty, English-sounding intermediary that the owner doesn't want to sell to him at any price, which distracts us from the question of just how a DJ might have acquired enough money to keep upping his offer ...

... but according to the wikipedia article on Freed Harvey Fuqua insisted that Freed did in fact write the lyrics for Sincerely (though I don't think Chuck Berry ever said the same about Maybellene, despite his fond memories of Freed).

The issue of bribery is lightly touched upon in the film: Freed's lawyer wants him  to sign an affadavit stating he has never accepted money for playing records. Told that four other major DJs have already done so, Freed explains, as to a particularly dimwitted child: "Then they're lying."

If you can acquire a copy of American Hot Wax there is a fair amount to enjoy, although I don't think I'll be revisiting it any time soon: a film of great moments, perhaps, rather than a great film.

The appearances by Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis in the concert sequence are not wildly exciting (though when I saw it at the Glasgow Film Theatre all those years ago some teddy boys dutifully got up and started jiving for Jerry Lee) and it's a pity that Screaming Jay Hawkins's performance is all but cut out of the movie. But you do get a few very pleasing scenes of fictional doowoppers the Chesterfields singing, and a telling detail which recurs throughout the concert section and indeed closes the film is of a young African American man, looking not unlike Little Richard, wildly beating out one of Richard's songs on an upturned oil drum outside the theatre - for himself, it seems, as much as any spectators.

The FBI agents appointed to bring Freed down see this vision as a warning of what this music could lead to in the nation's youth, but by the end - and especially after the lukewarm performance of Jerry Lee - he seems to represent the essence of rock'n'roll: raw, simple, unstoppable - and forever young.

Postscript: 

Despite what I said above, I watched American Hot Wax again a couple of days later - though I admit I fastforwarded through some of the concert performances.

Anyway, the point is I can see I was too harsh in some of the observations above. The film does make sense - and you can see how, even at the very beginning, all the subplots are set in action, ultimately all joined through the connection with Freed: the aspiring songwriter; the group hoping for a break; the kid for whom the music is everything.

And as I said, there are great moments. In addition to the ones already mentioned, the Buddy Holly kid is momentarily in the midst of a group (the Planetones?) singing Hushabye and you can see the pleasure on his face as he sings and fingersnaps along to this rockin' nursery rhyme: at last the music which has sustained him through records and the radio has been made manifest, and he is slap bang in the middle of it.

A friend used to say that the occasional episodes of Thunderbirds and other Gerry Anderson series where a child somehow gained entree to Tracy Island (or an equivalent sanctum sanctorum) were a mistake: why should young viewers identify with such interlopers when they were too busy imagining themselves as Scott or Virgil?

Yet somehow that doesn't apply in American Hot Wax: we are the boy, taken up, accepted by the group as, earlier, he was by Freed himself, and going from uncertainty to palpable, glowing delight in about three quarters of a minute. "Get into it," one of the group counsels, and into it is what he indisputably gets:

 

There are delicate details too: the Carole King singer's mother - not quite visible in the image below - washing up and keeping a wary eye on her daughter teaching her song to the black group in the living room:

And one moment which I remembered from my first viewing of the film: the Carole King-type singer playing and singing Since I Don't Have You at her father with as much regret as anger, as succinct an expression of the generation gap as you could hope to find in a film about this era.

Two small details which, if you know anything about doo wop, tend to suggest that is a film made by people who care. When the Chesterfields are listening to the radio and hear the Diamonds' Little Darling, one of them says "Hey, they copied that off the Gladiolas." And in the scene where Freed is auditioning acts in his office, on the wall there is a huge photograph of the Flamingos.

I still maintain that not every snatch of music is as carefully set up as in, say, American Graffiti but the film does leave you in no doubt of its importance to all the major characters, that it answers something within them which has not found adequate expression before.

I think some reviewers have said it's not much better than the schlocky exploitation movies which Freed made in his heyday. Which is unfair. And yet you could say there is a kind of nod, presumably intentional, in the direction of that much-mocked genre: the FBI figures are clearly the killjoys out to stop the fun and they aren't exactly depicted subtly. But then again, maybe that was more or less the truth: Freed was an important and influential figure whose power over juvenile taste was seen as dangerous.

It's also worth saying that it's not just any old concert which Freed is staging, but the event which turned out to be his last hurrah. So that even if there are some superficial similarities with trashy fifties movies, the difference is that although many scenes in the film make a convincing case for the importance and significance of this music, unlike Rock! Rock! Rock! et al there are no sceptical adults or parents who can be glimpsed unconsciously tapping their toes and starting to come around  to the idea that, shucks, maybe it ain't so bad after all. Iinstead of being co-opted the adults - in the form of the FBI and the sceptical or downright hostile parents - effectively win the day, thus neatly inverting the rock'n'roll movie genre.

 

Some time after writing the above I was contacted by John Kaye, who wrote the screenplay for American Hot Wax; he told me that every year or so he and director Floyd Mutrux try to persuade Paramount to release American Hot Wax on DVD but "Now that the music rights have increased so dramatically, they don't see an upside." A great pity. But at the time of writing (2026) you can at least watch American Hot Wax, in okay quality, on youtube here. 

 

Mr Kaye also directed me to an essay by Charles Taylor about the film, which he kindly allowed me to post on this blog; you can find it here.

 

Ditto Mr Rock'n'Roll: The Alan Freed Story, here. 

 

 

Photographs from the British production of Rock & Roll Man by Pamela Raith.