"Good Just Barely Morning ... "

How WNEW in New York Remade Radio and Became The Place Where Rock Lived: Chapter 17

Chapter 17

“Just a few weeks ago, a young man from Memphis, Tennessee recorded a song on the Sun label and in just a matter of a few weeks, that record has skyrocketed right on up the charts ... He's only 19 years old; he has a distinctive style ... Let's give him a nice hand. Elvis Presley ...”

— Frank Page, announcer, the Louisiana Hayride, KWKH radio.

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It was a hot and sticky Saturday afternoon during the summer of 1954 when D.J. Fontana entered the 3,500-seat Shreveport Auditorium to take his place and wait – as he had every Saturday since taking a job as staff drummer on the Louisiana Hayride — to see if any of the country acts on the bill that night would require his services.

Drums, of course, were still a novelty on the country circuit in the deep south of the 1950’s, but Fontana, who worked in his father's supermarket during the day, got enough requests for his services to keep the job interesting.

“Remember, the Louisiana Hayride was basically a country show, and the management didn’t want to get too far out and put anything too modern on the show,” he said. “What drumming there was on the Hayride was like, a stick and a brush, something real easy. Nothing loud.

“Then afterward they might say, ‘Well, that didn't go over badly, next week maybe we'll try the bass drum.’ Most of the country places didn't have drums at all, so they brought it in gradually, hoping the fans wouldn't object.”

Backstage also on this particular Saturday was a young trio down from Memphis — Elvis, Scotty and Bill — who would be making their debut later that night not only before the paying audience in the auditorium, but also before the loyal listeners at home who tuned in for radio station KWKJ's weekly three hour live broadcast that reached much of East Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana.

“Scotty Moore saw me there and said, ‘You working here?’” Fontana said during a visit to New York with a combo of former Memphis sidemen then calling themselves the Sun Rhythm Section.

“I said, ‘Well, yeah. Sure.’ And Scotty says, ‘Well, we'd like to have some drums on our portion of the show,’” Fontana remembered.

As it happened, the Hayride's management had casually prepared Fontana for this moment by inviting him into the show’s office to hear “That’s Alright, Mama.”

“They said, ‘We're thinking of using this boy Elvis on a couple of our shows and he might want to use you …’”

Fontana said when the request actually materialized, “We went back to the dressing room, me and Elvis, Scotty and Bill, because Bill [was playing] an upright bass and it didn't make any sense to be dragging that thing around from one room to the next.

“They went over the one or two songs they had on records by that point and I said, ‘Well good; we'll try it.’

That night, as Fontana remembered, went pretty much as other nights on the Hayride – each artist on the program was allowed fifteen minutes of airtime, the interval between acts belonging to the show's sponsors or its announcer, Frank Page.

“On that particular night, Elvis was just like any other artist you'd back,” Fontana said. “You'd try to do your best for him, but then he was just another guy out of the way and the next artist would come up.”

But Elvis had made a good impression, and the trio – joined by Fontana – made two more appearances over the next three weeks before signing a contract that would commit them to two weekends a month for the next year.

With the other two weekends a month free, Elvis, Scotty and Bill began booking appearances within the KWKH listening area. Before leaving on one of those excursions, they asked Fontana if he'd like to come along.

“They were going to East Texas one weekend and they wanted to know if I'd go – that's how my becoming a regular member of their band came up,” Fontana said. “I think we went over to Longview, Tallard, Kilgore ... all places within a hundred miles of Shreveport and bandwise, those jobs worked out real good. They liked what I was trying to do.

“Mind you, at this point, Elvis wasn’t that hot yet, so they said, ‘You know, we may be getting some other dates ... so if you'd like to come with us, we'll give you a holler,’” he continued. “Now, it was fun working with those guys, they were a little bit looser in terms of the feel of their songs than other people I was playing with at the Hayride, and you could really experiment if you wanted to ... so I said, ‘Sure, I'd like to do that.’”

In December 1954, Fontana made his first appearance on a Presley single, providing the backbeat on “You're a Heartbreaker” and showing off his country chops on “I’m Left, You're Right, She's Gone.”

By this time, the sheer size of the crowds the group was attracting demanded a louder sound and as the year dissolved into 1955, the percussive intermingling of Scotty's guitar and Black’s bass — the spare accompaniment that had launched Elvis’ career just couldn’t cut it anymore.

“As Elvis began to get fairly hot, we really had to play loud, and you've got to remember, we didn't have the elaborate sound systems we have today. As the crowds got bigger, I doubt they ever heard a word he said — we couldn't — but we knew his moves so well by that time, the way he moved his hands and feet and arms and everything, that we almost always knew where he was in a particular song.”

During a separate interview Scotty Moore said that as the crowds got bigger and louder, he and Black both had larger amplifiers built for their stage work, but it was to little avail.

“You know that swoosh sound you hear sometimes when you dive into the water?” he said. “Well, the crowds would get so loud that that was what you'd hear. Sometimes it would literally be just like being underwater.

“By that point, I think Elvis was mostly listening to the drums, because he could keep going as long as he could hear a little of the drumbeat,” Moore said. “As for the rest of us, as I've said many times over the years, We were the only band I knew of that was literally directed by an ass. Because we would take cues from Elvis’ movements when we couldn’t hear each other.”

In early February 1956, the Presley phenomena had grown to the point where Variety felt it needed to review his first RCA Victor release, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Calling Presley a “country singer,” the industry newspaper went on to describe him as “a compelling stylist who tears his tunes to tatters a la Johnnie Ray.

“‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is an ideal piece of material and he goes to town with the help of an excellent combo,” the review said.

Ten months later, when “Love Me Tender” was released, the same publication came right to the point: “Like his previous disks, this Elvis Presley platter is an automatic hit,” it said.

In fact, it was more than that. A month earlier, and for the first time in the history of the record business, “Love Me Tender” became the first record to achieve one million sales before being released to the public.

“Hearing Elvis for the first time was hearing the magic of rock and roll in its purest form, and if you were young, you were just enamored by it,” remembered Mike Appel, who would later be best known for being the first manager of Bruce Springsteen.

“In those days, pop was fluff. It was ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” and that kind of thing,” he continued. “And then all of a sudden, there was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’”

“It’s difficult to explain to young people today, but I can still remember hearing the words of that song coming over a car radio, ‘Well, since my baby left me …’ and I remember feeling, ‘Wow, who is this?’

“This was like in early 1956, and I remember literally pulling the car over and stopping to listen to it,” he said. “I don’t know how you knew, but you knew this guy was saying something that went beyond the words of the song, that he was singing with a fire that had never been let loose before.”

Appel paused for a moment, grasping for an explanation of what that “something” was.

“I think what Elvis did was he made you realize that if you were going to make your mark in the world, you had to have your own unique voice in order to come out from the shadows,” he said.

“He marked the dividing line. I mean, 90% of the people in the world do no such thing. They go to school. They work. They get married, have kids. Suddenly they have a stack of bills, and they’re constantly paying the bank, paying the landlord.

“What Elvis said to me and countless others was, find out what you love in life and then pursue it with abandon. And I immediately subscribed to that,” Appel said.

There were those, however, with whom rock and roll did not sit well at all. Among them were the disc jockeys at WNEW-AM.

In June 1956, in the midst of Elvis Presley's ascendance, Jerry Marshall opined that Elvis and his management should take more interest in the long-term viability of his career and build his popularity into something more lasting than a “present-day craze.”

"If the future is important, Elvis will have to drop the hootchy-kootchy," Marshall said.

Even Rep. Emanuel Celler, who 19 years earlier led the fight against the growing presence of Nazi's in Brooklyn and Queens and Long Island, felt moved to object to Presley and rock and roll in general, calling both “the end-all and be-all of bad taste.”

NBC-TV in San Francisco agreed, declaring that “Elvis Presley can rock ‘n’ roll to his heart’s content and to the whinnies of the teenagers, but when he bumps and grinds like a burlesque queen, he'll have to take his shiverin’ and shakin’” elsewhere.

Around the same time, a British bandleader named Freddy Randall undertook a 16-day tour of the states on an exchange basis with Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars, and saw the push back against rock and roll in some parts of the country firsthand.

Randall, a jazz trumpeter, found himself traveling with several other musicians on a package tour billed as the “Biggest Rock 'n' Roll Show of 1956.”

At the time, Hugo Winterhalter's “Canadian Sunset” and Doris Day's “I've Gotta Sing Away These Blues” were nestled in the charts alongside Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven.”

Randall and his band mates found the attitude of the South to interracial shows “disconcerting” and “most worrying.”

He told reporters back home in Great Britain that the low point of the tour was a show in Birmingham, Ala., that had been picketed at by people carrying banners with the slogans, “Don't listen to this jungle music,” while armed police stood in front of the stage during the performance in case of any further trouble.

By the end of the year, Presley had made his first million dollars.

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The Crickets actually opened for Elvis at a show in Lubbock in October 1955. There is an interesting coda to the gig. Among his other talents, Buddy Holly was a talented leather craftsman, and he gave Presley a handcrafted leather cover for his acoustic guitar as a gift.

That cover would later play a surprising role in two of Elvis' biggest hits.

"We were always looking for sounds, everybody was," D.J. Fontana said. “I've drummed on walls. I've hit on tape boxes, on floors ... just to come up with a unique sound. One real good example of how one of those really played an important part on a record was on ‘All Shook Up.’

"Elvis had the guitar with the leather cover with him, and while we were fiddling around one day, I laid it across my lap and kind of popped the leather against the wood of his guitar. Elvis said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good. Let's do that on record.’

“We used it quite a bit after that. I think ‘Don't Be Cruel’ was another one we did that one, because it worked. If it works, don't fix it,’” Fontana said.

But that spirit would not last.

For whatever reason, said Jerry Wexler, the former music journalist who went on to a stellar career as a record producer and Atlantic Records executive, “there was a burnout at the end of the Fifties."

"We simply came to a point when we had played out what we had; our songwriters were out of melodies, maybe ideas, and it was a period when I personally lost interest in recording," he said.

By then, Buddy Holly was dead, Chuck Berry was soon to be headed to jail on a Mann Act charge, and Little Richard would retire – albeit temporarily to dedicate his life to his church.

And by late 1957, Elvis and his bandmates -- the only bandmates he had ever known -- were at an impasse that would eventually lead to a split.

"He was getting heavy into the movie thing, and cutting back on the road work, which represented a significant amount of income to us," Moore said.

Although Scotty, Bill and D.J. Fontana would play on the early movie soundtracks and even appear in bit parts in the films; the lack of concert dates finally forced the musicians’ hands.

“We said, ‘We've just got to get more money,’ but they wouldn't pay it," Moore said. “That’s when Bill and I split. After that, we did go back for about two months and do a west coast tour just before he went into the Army, being paid on a per-day basis, but I don't recall playing any dates with him after that.”

As a result, the last recordings Elvis made before entering the Army, a series of singles intended to keep him in the public eye while he was “away,” were recorded with professional studio musicians. While these included the great Hank Garland on electric guitar, much of the organic feel that had made Elvis’ first string of hits was gone.

Of course, that's not to say there weren't success stories during this period.

One example is the songwriter Doc Pomus, who was born Jerome Felder in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1925.

Pomus began his musical career while still in his teens, singing the blues in neighborhood clubs. In fact, it was the proximity of these clubs to his family's home that prompted his name change -- an attempt to hide his career from disapproving parents.

In 1955, after recording one minor hit, a song called “Heartlessly,” Pomus began a songwriting partnership with a young family friend named Mort Shuman. Together they became one of the preeminent rock and roll songwriting teams of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Among their successes were "Save the Last Dance for Me," "This Magic Moment" and "Sweets for My Sweet" for the Drifters; "Teenager in Love" for Dion and the Belmonts, and later, "Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame," "Little Sister" and "Viva Las Vegas" for Elvis.

When I visited Pomus, a polio survivor, in his New York City apartment, another man was just leaving, his head bowed, his pace hurried.

The man, whose face I hadn't seen, had left the door ajar.

I knocked, and was welcomed into Pomus' bedroom, where a small white box of bakery cookies sat on an old school desk, in front of a matching, equally old chair.

"I hope I didn't force you to cut an earlier meeting short," I said.

"Spector," Pomus explained from his bed, on which he sat for the length of our conversation. "Great, great guitar player. In fact, that's what he was doing while he was here.

"Usually when he comes to New York, he'll rent a piano for my apartment, believe it or not. However, recently, the neighbors complained. So, this time he brought a guitar.

"He used to play on a lot of demos for me. He was a fine guitar player," Pomus said. “He truly is an accomplished musician. I don't know why Spector's never gotten that kind of credit."

With that, we began to talk about his partnership with Shuman.

"What happened was, I decided I just couldn't make enough money to live comfortably off singing," he said. "By that I mean, I could never make enough so that I wouldn't have to live in a hotel room sharing a bathroom with somebody. I just got tired of that way of living. So, I decided to concentrate on writing songs. Then I figured the only way to really make money writing songs was to write a lot of them, and I realized the only way to do that was to have a partner."

Shuman was a friend of one of Pomus' cousins and could always be found playing the piano at parties.

"A very talented guy," Pomus said.

"So what happened was, I basically locked him in this room with me for two years, and every song I wrote while we were in that room, I'd give him a piece of; then, as time progressed, he became more and more involved and I'd give him a bigger piece of the song until we became full partners," he recalled.

"Until that time, I was probably more a composer than a lyricist, then it switched around," he said.

Pomus said from the start of his collaboration with Shuman, he was conscious of being "a songwriter functioning in an era of records."

"Years ago, people used to write songs for sheet music. My goal was to write a song that the person coming in for a recording session could sing. That's one reason I think our songs lent themselves to rerecording and reinterpretation over the years," he said.

"The other thing about the partnership, which lasted 10 or 12 years, was that when we sat down to write a song, it was always based on an idea that an adult could relate to -- even with a song like "Teenager in Love."

"We both felt young people had just as many problems in love as older people, so a lot of the songs -- "Save the Last Dance for Me," for instance -- might have language specifically geared toward 14 year olds, but the idea is one that adults could relate to as well," Pomus said. "You know that sentiment of, 'as long as you're here at the end.' I think that accounts for why people who grew up with that kind of music still relate to it a lot."

With 'Save the Last Dance for Me' still in mind, Pomus went on to explain that some song ideas were based on the distinctive sounds of language he heard around New York City rather than on a story line.

"When I write a song with a Latin feel, I always try to figure out what my English lyrics would sound like if they were a translation," he explained. In 'Save the Last Dance for Me,' there's a line that goes, 'And in her arms I'm going to be.' Now, that's not the way somebody talks, but it's almost like a translation into English from another language.

"Another example is a big hit song I wrote with Leiber and Stoller called "Young Blood," Pomus continued. "Now, that's an expression that was used by a character who lived in my neighborhood. We called him Devil. I don't remember what his real name was, but he used to call all the younger guys "youngbloods," and it just knocked me out. I had never heard that expression before, so I wrote a song around it."

I then asked Pomus how consciously he tailored songs so that they would garner airplay on the radio of that period.

"Well, the answer to that can get pretty complicated, and I guess it comes down to how you perceive yourself as a songwriter," he said. "I'm not Chuck Berry, and yet — not to sound egomaniacal about it, because I really don't mean it that way — I can write a certain kind of song as good as you can write it. I think what you have to do in this world is understand your limitations. Once you figure that out, you can really do a lot. There are certain kinds of songs I just can't write, but what I can write, I write pretty well.

“Personally, I think my forte is a certain kind of blues song, and yet was known in the rock and roll field because that's where I had hits,” he continued. “And that brings me around to the specifics of your question.

"I always thought in terms of writing good songs, and if it was commercially viable, that to me, was a plus," Pomus said. "But when you're under contract and the publisher is paying you money ... they expect a hit, so of course we were conscious of that on a certain level."

But for all the reasons for hope — another example, the earliest rumblings of Motown Records in Detroit — were just starting to be heard as well -- the close of the Fifties was a grim time for both rock and roll and rock and roll radio.

Among those caught in the tailspin — was Jerry Lee Lewis, who’s self-inflicted near career suicide came unexpectedly at the start of a British tour in May 1958.

Lewis, expecting to triumph, was met at London's Heathrow Airport by a single reporter named Ray Berry, who during the course of a brief interview discovered that the young bride on Lewis' arm — Myra Gale Brown — was his first cousin once removed and only 13 years old.

The publicity crippled the planned tour, which was cancelled after only three dates.

Things only got worse when Lewis returned home, and it was further revealed that at 22, he had already been married twice before.

The ensuing scandal led to Lewis being blacklisted by radio programmers and concert promoters, sending the “Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin On” singer's career into free fall.

It has been said that only Alan Freed remained loyal to Lewis, continuing to play his records on WABC-AM in New York after nearly everybody else had consigned them to the bottom of the bin.

Freed had joined WABC after a series of disputes with management at WINS caused the parties to cut ties in May 1958. At the time, one of WINS’ concerns involved payola, the practice of disc jockeys receiving cash, gifts and other considerations from record promoters for playing their records.

Taking payola was not illegal during the early rock and roll era; what was illegal was disc jockeys not reporting the extra income when appropriate.

In late 1959, a House subcommittee on legislative oversight, the very same panel that had only recently conducted hearings on TV quiz shows, began looking into payola as well.

At about the same time, the New York District Attorney's office announced that a grand jury was being impaneled to consider misdemeanor commercial bribery charges against various disc jockeys.

Fearing its broadcast license was at stake, WABC asked Freed and other on-air talent at the station to sign an affidavit denying they had ever taken payola. Freed refused, telling the station manager that he, like many others, had received gifts in the past and that to say otherwise he would be perjuring himself.

Among other issues was the conflict of interest that stemmed from Freed's taking songwriting co-credits which entitled him to receive part of a song's royalties. As a result, he could increase his income appreciably by heavily promoting those records on his show.

The most famous example of this involves Chuck Berry's first single, “Maybellene.”

In his 1987 autobiography, Berry recalled the visit he made to a record distributor on his very first trip to New York. Walking among boxes of records labeled “Maybellene Chess, Chicago” Berry said, "I thought well of the amount of product carrying my identity on each item."

“Still, it never entered my mind how much wealth such quantities should bring in sales. I didn't have any idea that Alan Freed was being compensated for giving special attention to ‘Maybellene’ on his radio program by a gift from Leonard [Chess] registering him part of the writer's credit to the song. In fact, I didn't know then that a person also got compensation for writing as well as recording a song."¹

In fact, Berry said he didn't learn about composer payments until he received his first royalty statement and it listed Freed and Russ Fratto, a local Chicago disc jockey, as the co-writers of his song.

“When I later mentioned to Leonard Chess the strange names added to the writer's royalties, he claimed that the song would get more attention with big names involved. With me being unknown, this made sense to me, especially since he failed to mention that there was a split in the royalties as well.”²

Despite the brewing controversy, Alan Freed remained the voice of rock and roll in the minds of many adults.

In the summer of 1958, the Herald Tribune News Service asked he and WNEW-AM's William B. Williams to debate the merits (and, in Williams' case, demerits) of rock and roll.

Both men, at least, professed to consider the new sound music, but Williams was immediately on the attack, dismissing it as “a very narrow and oft times dull repetition of a particular type of music.”

Williams suggested 90 percent of what he called “the current commercial noise” was passed off as authentic rhythm and blues, when in his estimation, it was little more than “tripe.”

As Freed didn't respond directly to Williams, it's clear the two men were interviewed or given the questions to answer separately.

But Freed eventually did defend the music upon which his reputation rested, particularly when asked whether rock and roll was an evil influence of teenagers.

“Just the opposite,” he said. “It gives them an interest. ... and, after all, when the kids have an active interest in something, whether or not it's music, it keeps them from being idle, it keeps them occupied with an active interest.

He's equally engaged when asked about the staying power of the new music.

“It's been riding high for four years now and there's certainly no indication of any let-up in its popularity,” Freed said. “For instance, take a look at the best settler charts for this week – 55 out of the top 60 best-sellers are rock and roll hits.”

Even Williams had to concede that at least some of the recordings and artists of the new era would last – although his charity could best be described as a left-handed compliment at best.

“The public has a happy faculty after a while of weeding out that which is unworthy, so I think the good beat and the contagious rhythm in good palatable rock and roll will have its influence on pop music for a long time,” he said.

As for “the rest” of it, Williams predicted “it will die because of lack of taste.”

The real problem, in Williams' view, was the many disc jockeys who were “eager to capitalize on so impressionable a group of teenagers and feed them, day after day, the same kind of musical garbage, as so much of rock and roll is.”³

Freed was fired by WABC-AM in September 1959, just 14 months before the station launched the “Musicradio” format that would make it one of the pre-eminent Top 40 stations in the country for much of the 1960s. Freed would also be fired from the music TV show he was hosting on WNEW-TV two months later.

During his subsequent testimony before the House subcommittee, Freed spared no detail in explaining his various connections to record distributors and the record companies who paid him as a consultant.

With that, Freed headed west in hopes of rekindling his career at KDAY, a Santa Monica, California rhythm and blues station. But just days after starting his new gig, Freed learned that he had been indicted in New York with seven other disc jockeys on commercial bribery charges.

The official website of Alan Freed maintained by his daughter, Judith Fisher Freed, describes the disc jockey as "wary, weary and increasing his use of alcohol."

In that state, Freed pleaded guilty to two charges of commercial bribery, for which he received a mere $300 fine and a suspended sentence.

Freed's career would never recover. Although he returned to KDAY, he left the station in 1962 after it refused to allow him to promote a rock and roll stage show at the Hollywood Bowl.

From there he moved on to WQAM in Miami. Fla., where he lasted only two months, and then he made one last stab at a career by joining the staff of KNOB-FM outside of Los Angeles.

By then, Freed was facing federal income tax evasion charges. Worse, his health had taken a sudden and dramatic turn.

On New Year's Day 1965, he checked into a hospital in Palm Springs, Calif. to be treated for gastrointestinal bleeding resulting from cirrhosis of the liver. When he died 20 days later, at 43, the cause given was kidney failure.

But the Freed story would have yet another chapter. On March 20, 2002, the brass urn containing his ashes were delivered to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, having been interred since his death at the Ferncliff Memorial Mausoleum in Hartsdale, New York.

“I'm sure some people will find it unusual, and others might find it morbid,” Rock Hall president and CEO Terry Stewart told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “It's certainly appropriate in a rock and roll sense to have his final resting place here.”⁴

In the same article, Lance Freed, one of the disc jockey's four children, agreed that the relocation was appropriate, remembering that his father had said, “If something happens to me, just two things: I want to be near the music and I want to be near the public.”

“He lived for ... the music,” Lance Freed said.⁵

© 2013

1. Berry, Chuck. Chuck Berry The Autobiography. Harmony Books, New York. 1987. Page 110.

2. Berry, Chuck. Chuck Berry The Autobiography. Harmony Books, New York. 1987. Page 110.

3. Unsigned. Aspects of Rock 'N Roll Are Debated. Burlington Daily News Times (Herald Tribune News Service). Thursday, August 21, 1958.

4. Alan Freed's ashes moved to rock hall. By John Soeder. The Plain Dealer. March 22, 2002 Page 1.

5. Alan Freed's ashes moved to rock hall. By John Soeder. The Plain Dealer. March 22, 2002 Page A10.