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Leo Mintz Cleveland Ohio

Leo Mintz, owner of one of Cleveland's biggest record stores, was a big advertiser on 1950s radio. Owning low-power radio stations in pre-FM days he played African-American music to advertise these records and bought larger, more powerful general market stations to promote white records. Back then radio didn't play "race" music. Early 1950 Leo Mintz heard Akron OH DJ Alan Freed. Liking Freed's style and Jewishness Mintz lured him to Cleveland to host a program on one of his white stations 11:15 p m - 1 a m. White suburban kids at his store played African-American records. Mintz gave Alan Freed these records to play on his Moondog Show. Freed, like African-American DJs, talked over records, developing a loyal following, coining the term "rock and roll." 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 Moondog's show. Freed proved white radio stations and white and African-American audiences accepted African-American music. Along came Elvis Presley. With artists later and big money made by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and everybody after that, it's amazing that it would never have happened without enterprising Cleveland Ohio Jewish businessman Leo Mintz wanting to sell records.

BOB DYLAN'S BASEMENT TAPES New York 1967

WHY DOES ROCK AND ROLL MATTER?
Rock and roll is 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 is 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, as with any art form. It's the nature of democratic art that remarkable people make themselves known to us. In the 1950s 10,000 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, England 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?
1967, as the country tore itself apart, Bob Dylan and the Band hid in upstate New York playing the oldest strains of American folk music and languages. They produced songs, rehearsals, jokes, fragments - varied, contradictory, funny, weird stuff in every direction of our past and future. They drew a new picture of what the country was made of, what shape it was taking and still might take, in the spirit of a weeklong drunk.

TIME IN A BOTTLE
The "new" Jim Croce album released 31 years after his death at age 30, was never supposed to see the light of day, but end his career before it started. Instead, it's part of a growing market of rereleased older, hard-to-find records appealing to older buyers whose demographic tends not to download music.

When Philadelphia folk singer Croce, who would later have Top 10 hits with songs such as Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, got engaged in 1966 his parents gave him $500 as a wedding gift to produce an album and then get a serious job and support his new wife, Ingrid. Croce produced 500 vinyl copies of "Facets." He kept two and sold the rest, a surprising success with the opposite effect of what his parents wanted. With hits such as Time in a Bottle, Operator and You Don't Mess Around With Jim, Croce supported his family until dying in a 1973 plane crash. For almost 40 years Facets was all but impossible to find. Its mix of covers such as Steel Rail Blues and Coal Tattoo, and a few originals such as Texas Rodeo and The Sun Come Up, was a prize sought by devoted fans.