Last night I was watching American Hot Wax, a great cult classic from 1978. It purports to be a week in the life of Alan Freed, legendary disk jockey who popularized the phrase “rock and roll” and was its most important champion to the mainstream pop audience. It shows Freed at his radio station playing records, being bombarded by record producers and agents and singers looking to get their songs heard, going to a studio to give some production assistance, and trying to put together a big revue at the once-grand Brooklyn Paramount theater.
The film is not historically accurate. There are lots of fictionalized names that are loosely based on historical figures. The film is set in 1959, and there are songs that were not recorded until the early sixties being played or sung. There was no violence at any of the shows that Freed put on at the Paramount, although there were incidents at more than a few rock and roll shows in that period.
But as Greil Marcus famously put it, the film is the most emotionally accurate film about rock and roll ever made. What you see on the screen is the absolute exuberance of people who love rock and roll, for whom music is life and even death. The main subplot is about a teenaged songwriter (loosely based on Carole King and played beautifully by SNL’s Laraine Newman) working with four young black singers who call themselves the Chesterfields (loosely based on Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, who by 1959 had already hit big). Watching these unlikely teams is part of the magic of early rock and roll – the possibilities, the enthusiasm, the youthful optimism. Whatever the happenings in the legal realm regarding integration, rock and roll was moving black and white cultures and people together.
Was it as utopian as this film? Probably not. Black and white acts on tour could not share the same hotels in most parts of the country, for example. But the truth of that era is the passion everyone brought to the issue, and to the music. There were anti-rock authorities who truly hated the music and Freed. And there were kids who cried when they talked about what Buddy Holly meant to them and how crushed they were when they heard about the plane crash that took his life at 22. And there has almost always been a camaraderie among show business entertainers that transcends phony but deadly racial boundaries.
Why am I writing about this film?
It’s Father’s Day. And if you look carefully at some of the programs that are reproduced on line, programs from Alan Freed’s shows at the Brooklyn Paramount, you’ll see my father, one third of a local vocal group that had a big hit in New York City in the summer of 1956.
My father was twenty, and he was married by the time he played on the same stage as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the Dells, and the Moonglows. He was already moving into the so-called real world of white collar work. That work paid the bills, sent me to college, took me to baseball games. But it was the music which my father gave straight to us. Through the music was his soul. And whenever I watch American Hot Wax I see and hear my father, and once again he becomes a kind of idol to me, something that fills me with pride and awe.
This year for Father’s Day I found him a copy of the film. It’s hard to get, probably because of the cost of clearing the rights to all the songs. But I got one for him. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Thanks.