I saw my first rock show, at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, in ... 56? ... 57? I can't remember the year precisely and Google isn't helping me, but I'll pledge 56. Remarkably, I can't find a single reference to the day when the show in question first opened its doors and an excited crowd of kids, fighting to get in, caused a stampede that left one kid trampled to death and several others injured.

Aware of all the advance hype and excitement, and figuring that 'Tings Might Happen, I wasn't there that day. No, I was there a week later, seven days into the show's ten day run. But kids were still dancing in the aisles to this, that and the other act, and the balcony was still swaying, a danger that the theatre management apparently elected to ignore because the show was breaking box office records.

To my knowledge that was the first rock show in NYC. It had been produced by Alan Freed, the Cleveland DJ who came to NYC and made it big. Deeply involved in payola, and in making movies that featured the acts he owned large pieces of, and paying the required monetary tributes the NYC mob, who owned him, Freed became a legend ... and he remained one until his station, WABC, fired him because he refused to say whether he had ever accepted payola.

Before that show there had been Vaudeville, dying a lingering death. After that show Vaudeville was mainly to be seen only in a) the Ed Sullivan TV show, and b) the Academy Of Music theatre on East 14th Street, right next to Julian's, a legendary pool hall that also must be the subject of a story for another day.

As I recall, Freed was succeeded by "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, a DJ who did then and does today make me cringe. I caught him last winter emceeing a show paying homage to Disco. He was just as smarmy and patronizing and ... well ... think of screeching chalk on a blackboard. Anyway, Morrow drove me to seek part-time shelter at WLIB, at the time a low power "race music" station, nothing remotely resembling its status of today as Number One in the NY/NJ/CT Tri-State area. (At least that's how things stood several years ao. I don't really know what's happening today.)

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At the time WLIB really had only one thing going for it and that was the seminal DJ Jocko Henderson, not yet a legend but soon to become one. Here's a typical Henderson on-air rap. Maybe I've made it up, maybe not, but Jocko would have been right at home saying it, and playing percussion under it using his stiffened fingers on a table top ...

Ee-tiddly-ock

This IS your man Jock

And I'm back on the scene

With the record machine.

The time right now?

Eleven nineteen.

In the immortal words of Steve Allen, I kid you not. As I recall Henderson did six hours, from 9PM to 3AM, all filled with his unique ad-libbing, all filled with the records HE wanted to play. He would take requests, but only if they coincided with his own tastes.

Like Freed, Henderson began packaging shows of his own, these put on at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. People think that Bootsy Collins invented the rocketship landing on the stage, but they're wrong. It was Jocko, who sometimes stepped out of the machine dressed like Cab Calloway -- in a blindingly white tux with top hat and cane. So, folks, there's nothing new under the sun. Bootsy is rooted in Jocko is rooted in Calloway is rooted in, most likely, Mister Bojangles.

I can't go further back than Bojangles but the lineage must have been known to the people of that time. Bojangles, by the way, is the subject of the song by The Byrds, "Mister Bojangles". Apparently one of them came across Bojangles living in a trailer, impoverished and forgotten. Well, Roger McGuinn may not have heard of Bojangles before that but I had, though I can't tell you when or where.

Being a night owl I often caught long stretches of Jocko's show on WLIB, but not always, because he had competition. Yes, folks, the main thing going down on the NYC airways of the time at that hour was the legendary Jean Shepard, who single-handedly invented talk radio, complete with seven-second delay on the playback. But before introducing call-ins as a feature of the show, Shepard had always done six hours of non-stop monologue, interrupted only by ads and station breaks that he did himself as I recall. (I think this was WOR, quite a big station, but not at night.) And he never repeated himself, never. He invented characters who would tell stories, and some of his characters were regulars, so to speak, but the stories never repeated. A truly astonishing performance.

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As it happens I was in ground school with Shepard in ... 67? Also in our class was the man who would later become known as Big Ed Mahler, the famed airshow aerobatic pilot, though at the time he was simply Eddie Mahler, son of a wealthy car dealer. This was all at Princeton Airport, another story for another day. But I digress ... ...

... ... And I digress to another digression :D ...

I don't think he ever complained but Cab Calloway was sentenced to spend the rest of his days performing a single song -- "Minnie The Moocher", just as Bobby Pickett had to perform "The Monster Mash" in supermarket parking lots till he dropped dead, and as Jimmy Buffet will have to perform "Margaritaville" in the bar he owns till the day Key West is wiped out by a hurricane. (I don't wish Buffet dead but I do wish that this song be six feet under. Which reminds me :) ... Television pioneer Art Linkletter, today 95, recently observed that "It's better to be over the hill than under it". :D)

(Hey Sherm! I know that constructs like "under it". with the period following the quotation mark are a no-no. However, you have no choice but to agree that the English language is whatever educated people say that it is. I say that the trailing period looks better, just as I Like To Capitalize All The Words In A Title Includiing The Minor Ones. So there.)

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Ahem ...

As I had been about to say, my rock show attendance career began with Alan Freed. It also continued with Alan Freed and the Brooklyn Paramount until the fall of 57, when it came to an abrupt end.

It came to an abrupt end because I had made a friend at summer camp -- a friend whose uncle just happened to be the manager of the Brooklyn Fox Theatre. And Freed didn't put shows on there, competing DJ Murray Kaufman did.

Yes, folks, Jesse Kligman and I got to go backstage at the Brookly Fox for probably every "Murray The K" show produced betweent the fall of 57 and the fall of 60. All we had to do was to go up to the stage door alongside the theatre, knock, and tell Whoever that we had Uncle's okay, and that they should check with Uncle if they didn't believe us. (Nobody ever checked. I mean, how many fans know the name of the manager of the theatre they want to invade?)

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Aside: Like my prep school, the summer camp had the children of a number of famous people, or kids who later became famous.

Like Vicki Wilson, who later achieved notoriety as Whatever. Vicki was one of the daughters of Sloan Wilson, the guy who wrote "The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit". The book and the movie had been hits in the USA, but it faded off the radar screen here. But not in Russia.

That's right folks, TMITGFS sold like hotcakes in Russia for many, many years. Now the Russians were reasonable people back then. They paid royalties. Trouble was, they didn't allow the royalties to leave Russia. So every year, after summer camp, Vicki and her parents would go off to Russia for a vacation, their goal being to spend away whatever royalties had accrued in their absence.

Another friend of mine there was a girl named Georgia Godowsky. Not a very impressive name. In fact you've never heard it before. But Georgia's uncle was (drum roll) the legendary composer Irah Gershwin brother of George Gershwin, after whom Georgia had been named. (Georgia's mom's sister married Irah. No, I never met him though I certainly do wish I had. You will note that they HAD to name her Georgia. I mean, whoever heard of the feminine version of Irah?)

Another was Sue Kolker, who appears in Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" as someone who persistently stood in the way of progress regarding Whatever in White Plains or some such place.

We also had Dave Wyler, heir to the Wyler Watch fortune. Dave wasn't stuck up or anything, he was simply obnoxious, so I did not hang out with him. But I did hang out with Peter Rutter, later a congressman from Cincinatti.

And oh yes ... My counselor for two years in a row was a certain Albert Shanker, a schoolteacher who would later found the National Teacher's Union. I will make no further comment about him because I don't want to get into politics in the FlightSim.com blogosphere. However, he was a really nice guy, very patient with we hormone-laden little male warriors.