In those days radio didn't play African-American "race" music. Early in 1950 Leo Mintz heard Akron Ohio DJ Alan Freed. Liking Freed's style and Jewishness, Mintz lured him to Cleveland to host a program on one of his white stations from 11:15 p m to 1 a m. At the same time Leo Mintz saw white suburban kids come to his store and play African-American records. Putting 2 and 2 together he gave Alan Freed these records to play on his Moondog Show. Freed adopted African-American DJs' practice of talking over records and developed a loyal following. coining the term "rock and roll." More than that, Leo Mintz's business grew.
African-American kids attended the show in droves (it was in
dance party format) White kids rushed to Leo Mintz's Record Rendezvous to buy records they heard on the Moondog Show. Soon after Alan Freed proved white radio stations and white and African-American audiences accepted African-American music, along came Elvis Presley. With artists that followed and vast amounts of money made by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and everybody after that, it's amazing to consider it would never have happened without an enterprising Cleveland Ohio Jewish businessman Leo Mintz, wanting to sell a few more records.
Rock and roll matters because it's fun, it's thrilling. At least since the late 1940s or early 1950s rock and roll had an endless capacity for self-renewal: When rock and roll seems completely dried up with nothing left to say it surprises you. You never know what will be said, how it will be said or how you'll react. Rock and roll has always been an arena where, with virtually no resources, anybody can step forward and be heard. Rock and roll is a democratic art unlike any other, no matter how inexpensive movie cameras or desktop publishing gets. Some vast percentage of what's made under such conditions will be of no real interest, but that's true of any art form.
It's also in the nature of democratic art that remarkable people will make themselves known to us. In the 1950s 10,000 R&B groups, doo-wop groups, made records. Even if only 10% of that number is true it's extraordinary: urban African-American kids with no money, who did or didn't finish high school, made records heard nationwide. From the 1970s through the 1990s far more than 10,000 punk rock groups in the U S, Great Britain and worldwide made records and continue to do so, assuming not so much they'll get a hit but they'll be heard and somebody would talk back to them.
WHAT STRUCK YOU ABOUT BOB DYLAN'S BASEMENT TAPES?
In 1967, as this country tore itself apart, Bob Dylan and the Band hid out in the mountains of upstate New York playing around with the oldest strains of American folk music and languages. Out of that they produced songs, rehearsals, jokes, fragments - varied, contradictory, funny, weird stuff - opening into every direction of the country's past and future. They drew a new picture of what the country was made of, what shape it was taking, what shape it still might take, in the spirit of a weeklong drunk.