wiser. In Chicago, WGES radio personality
Al Benson, the Windy City’s top African-
American DJ, had his own effective
method of charging local record distributors
for airplay.
“Al had each distributor with a certain
allotment of records,” explained the late
Carl Davis, then working for Benson as his
assistant and tabulator of Al’s weekly survey
sheet and later a top Chicago soul producer
for the OKeh and Brunswick/Dakar labels.
“The bigger you were, the more records
you had. So if you were Lenny Garmisa, you
might have three records. If you were All
State Distributors, you might have six. If
you were an individual, you got maybe one
record. But there was a price for that. They
had to pay for that.
“On top of paying for it, he [promoted
concerts at] the Regal Theater, so if you
had one of your records and he was playing
it, then you had to give him that artist free
for the Regal Theater. And you had to pay
the artist. So he would give his shows at
the Regal, and he was making money bothways – making money for playing the
record, [and] he was making money for you
performing at the Regal Theater. So he was
cleaning up both ways.”
As the figurehead for rock and roll’s
rapid rise, Freed was forced to deal with a
lot of negative fallout during his reign from
exploitative press and preening politicians
that escalated after a handful of violent
incidents following his 1958 stage show in
Boston. Despite the late-50s advent of Top
40 radio formatting, which removed the
music programming responsibility from
DJs, they would be the primary scapegoats
for the payola scandal.
John A Jackson’s 1991 book Big Beat
Heat – Alan Freed And The Early Years Of
Rock & Roll reports that ASCAP, the old-
school publishing organisation representing
Tin Pan Alley pop songwriters, was so
threatened by the mammoth success of its
upstart rival BMI, which handled most rock
and roll and R&B material, that it lobbied
legislators incessantly as it attempted to
regain its lost superiority on the USJIMMY
CAVELLO
AND HIS
HOUSE
ROCKERS
... AND THE POWER
OF “MOONDOG”
Saxist Jimmy Cavello And His House
Rockers learned how powerful Freed was
in 1956 when Alan’s business partner Jack
Hooke approached them at an audition.
“Jack says, ‘Come on, jump into the cab.
We’re going down to the studio right
now. Alan wants to hear the band in
person!’” said Cavello. “So we went down
there. We just threw the cases in the car.
We had our horns in our hand, carrying
the big bull fiddle in the middle of
Times Square! And we went to the radio
station, WINS.”
Freed listened to the young white band
play between spinning platters during his
airshift and liked what he heard. “He
called Coral right then and there,” said
Cavello. “We hooked up with Alan Freed
and Coral Records at the same time!”
Cavello and his band mimed two songs in
Rock Rock Rock!, including the title
theme. “Alan, he’d give you the shirt off
his back,” said Cavello. “The payola end
of it, it was small potatoes in those days.
A hundred bucks. So this artist would pay,
or this artist’s representative or manager
would send a hundred bucks to Alan to
play the record. But you sent it every
week until something happened one way
or the other.
“In those days, it was a necessary evil,
or you didn’t get your record played.”
A grave-faced Alan Freed
outside the courtroom with
his attorney Paul T Smith Bettma
nn^ Arch
ive/Get
tyThe payola scandal