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TIME MACHINE:
THE BIRTH OF TOP 40 RADIO AND ALAN FREED'S NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE (EARLY
CIA, AND MOB INFLUENCES ON THE ROCK MUSIC INDUSTRY)
The Mafia was to
be enlisted for the covert war against the counterculture, an
incarnation of Operation Underworld (the WWII-era alliance between the
military and the Mob to sabotage the Italians under Mussolini) on the
domestic front, a natural since gangsters already dominated much of the
popular music industry "The music business," Albert Goldman acknowledged
in 1989, "has always been a dirty business with strong ties to organized
crime and a long tradition of corrupting the media. One of the dangers
that researchers in this field run is that they will stumble across
something that will alarm the crooks, who are paranoid from the jump."
Goldman reported that the lesson was driven home when Linda Kuehl, a
friend writing a book on the life of Billie Holiday, was killed in
Washington, D.C. by a plummet from the terrace of her hotel room.
Goldman phoned police and learned that they had ruled suicide out as the
motive (she'd been cleaning her face with cold cream when she fell). He
also "learned that she had been running scared because she was getting
calls from strangers who kept admonishing her, 'Why don't you just write
about the music?"' [1]
In the mid-'60s,
CHAOS officials and the Mob both eyed the rising tide of political rock
music askance. Each had an incentive for exercising control over the
industry. The CIA was in the business of decimating the New Left
and popular music had, in the wink of a half-note, been transformed into
a viper pit of long-haired "communards" screaming for revolution and an
end to the war in Vietnam. The Mafia, of course, wanted more
constrictive financial control over the recording industry, the
artists it signed, everything from production to distribution.
It's not as though
these two powerful entities, the CIA and organized crime, were unknown
to the industry. Top 40, the reigning broadcast format in America, owes
its very existence to the NSC-CIA-Mafia combination.
In the beginning
there was Morris Levy. Morris began his career as an appendage of the
Genovese Family and rapidly rose through the ranks. He was enlisted by
the Mob as a juke box promoter in the 1940s. His brother was gunned down
by business rivals who mistook him for Morris -- who lived to become one
of the most feared men in the business. He was the owner of the famous
Birdland jazz club in New York City, and a partner, with George Goldner,
a seedy record promoter, for the Rama label (home of R&B doo-wop
group The Crows) and a subsidiary, Gee Records (Frankie Lymon & the
Teenagers, The Regents). [2] These labels and further subsidiaries
(Roulette, End) pumped out apolitical bubblegum (Tommy James, Little
Anthony, The Shangri-Las) through the 1960s.
Gee Records was
founded by Levy and Goldner specifically to draw in Alan Freed, then a
rising R&B concert promoter in Cleveland (he oversold one concert and
thereby incited the first rock 'n' roll riot), to New York. Freed was
hired at Gee in the Fall of 1954 to work his promotional genius, and
from the gun he and Goldner were close allies. Levy did not entirely
trust his new partner, however, and schemed to bring him under control,
eventually arranging a meeting in which Alan Freed -- drunk at the time
-- was convinced to sell his share of the label to Levy. The Mafioso now
had a controlling interest in the company, one of the first to enter the
rock 'n' roll market.
John Elroy McCaw,
another early kingpin in the genre, was also instrumental in bringing
Alan Freed to New York. McCaw was a veteran of the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. After the war, McCaw
bought a New York radio station, WINS at Seven Central Park West, and
geared the station's programming to hockey and basketball games. But by
the early 1950s, the station pioneered the very first disk jock format,
twenty-five minutes of Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Steve Lawrence and
other popular crooners of the day, followed by five minutes of news. It
soon became clear to the programming directors at WINS that the jock was
the radio personality of the future. When Freed arrived in New York, he
found himself in the historically unprecedented position of shaping not
only the music youth would dance to (under Mafia control), but the
medium that delivered it, as well (at a station run by a veteran
intelligence agent).
Freed, at a
starting salary of $75,000, was expected to boost the ratings, and
toward this end he had no use for Perry Como. Rick Sklar, then an
apprentice copywriter and producer, reports that when Freed arrived in
New York, along with him "came hundreds of 45-RPM singles that he piled
helter-skelter in an old five-shelf supply cabinet in our office. That
chaotic, uncatalogued collection would become the most influential
record library in commercial radio, imitated by stations everywhere. It
would change the sound of popular music in America and the world for
generations."
The WINS jocks
couldn't know that in ten years time the invention of rock radio would
inspire a subculture of anti-war activists and flag-burning
bohemians to "tune in." Dissent inevitably died with a drugged whimper.
Drugs would enter the equation of music plus youth with the politics of
heroin and LSD. Hallucinogens fragged organized resistance to the
war, but they were only one of many dubious contributions the Agency has
made to American culture. Strains of drugged hedonism found their
way to Top 40 radio with tambourine men peddling magic swirling trips,
pink-eyed adolescents wringing their hands at mother's little helpers.
The surf wave of Top 40 radio was transformed into a spawning
ground of counter-cultural self-medication, and with the escalation of
the Vietnam War, quasi-Marxist politics infused with strains of mystical
idealism.
JOHN ELROY
MCCAW, A SCION OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL DURING THE EISENHOWER
REGIME AND THE PROPRIETOR OF WINS IN NEW YORK, THE ORIGINATOR OF THE
'HIT PARADE.' FORMAT. MCCAW TOOK OVER THE STATION WITH A MEAGER DOWN
PAYMENT, PAID A TOTAL OF $450.000 FOR IT, AND THE NEXT DECADE SOLD
WINS FOR $10 MILLION, THEN A RECORD BUY-OUT FOR A RADIO STATION
Ironically, "Top
40," the pied piper of rebellion, owes its very existence to McCaw, Alan
Freed's boss, the entrepreneurial brains behind "big beat" radio and an
old covert warrior at ease in the closed chambers of Washington's
national security "elite". "Elroy's government contacts were extensive,"
writes Sklar. "He had maintained many of his OSS connections after
the war and was quite prob-ably still engaged in government intelligence
work during the time that he owned WINS. McCaw associates tell of saying
good-bye to him in New York, with plans to meet him in Chicago the next
day, only to have McCaw call from Cairo and cancel the meeting ... He
was a member of the Advisory Council of the National Security Council,
placed there, along with other key industry figures, by his old boss,
Air Force General Hap Arnold." [4] Elroy McCaw was the "unauthorized
civilian" whose inadvertent admission to an NSC meeting at the White
House, chaired by John F. Kennedy -- who had never met the man and
thought him an intruder -- caused a press furor in 1961. (The NSC and
General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold commanding general of US Army Air Forces
during WWII, both played significant roles in seeding the
prevailing Cold War culture. The NSC was patterned after Hitler's
security council, and its jurisdiction was to oversee the CIA by dictate
of the National Security Act of 1947. [5] McCaw was therefore
instrumental in determining CIA policy.)
The yawping,
warbling, mind-numbing repetitions of Top 40 radio were given trial runs
first in Omaha, Kansas City and New Orleans. The format was fine-tuned
at WINS under McCaw, and the radio industry would never be the same.
"WINS hit the air in September of 1957," Sklar recalls, "with sharp
jingles, screaming contests and promotions, and Top 40 music. The city
had never heard anything like it." The jocks had personalities, an
unprecedented development. "News was introduced with ear-splitting
sensationalist effects ... A different sound was played each hour. One
newscast would be introduced by a woman screaming, another by a fire
engine siren, and still another by the sound of machine guns." [6]
The station lured
more listeners than any other radio station in New York within a month
of breaking out the hit parade format. But corruption thrived behind the
DJs mindless bluster, whistles and the latest "Pick Hit of the Week."
Alan Freed, the
godfather of hit radio, was scapegoated by Orrin Hatch's House
Legislative Oversight subcommittee probe of payola in 1959. He was also
very nearly a target of assassination the year before. In 1958, McCaw
called Freed into the WINS owner's office and announced his intention to
fire him. The DJ was so shocked that he canceled a concert and spent the
entire day pleading for his job. Freed was still in McCaw's office
when a rock promoter, enraged by the sudden cancellation, exploded
through the rear entrance to the radio station, gun in hand, searching
for Freed. Sklar's pregnant wife, Sydelle, and Inga Freed were standing
at the Coca-Cola machine. They immediately bolted into the record
library and locked the door behind them. The gunman was unable to find
Freed, who was still pleading with McCaw in the latter's office, and
stomped out of the station in a cloud of disgust. [7]
NOTES
1. Albert Goldman,
"Rock's Greatest Hitman," Penthouse, September 1989, p 222.
2. Marc Eliot,
Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music, New York. Citadel, 1989, pp
47-48.
3. Rick Sklar,
Rocking America: How the Al1-Hit Radio Stations Took Over, New York, St
Martin's, 1984, pp 11, 17 and 19.
4. Sklar, p 54
John E. McCaw died in 1969. He sired four sons, including Craig McCaw,
who has been as influential in the molding of media and culture as his
spook father. McCaw, Jr. entered the cable industry early. A Craig McCaw
timeline: 1973: Craig takes over the daily operation of a small cable
television operation in Centralia owned by him and his three brothers.
1974: The company enters the radio common carrier (paging) industry.
1982: The company is granted spectrum licenses made available by the
FCC. 1986: The company buys out MCI's cellular and paging operations.
1987: Deciding to invest heavily in the emerging wireless industry, the
company sells its cable holdings. 1990: McCaw Cellular purchases 52
percent of LIN Broadcasting stock -- LIN owned interests in five of the
top ten cellular markets. 1991: McCaw initiates an upgrade of its
systems from analog to digital. 1992: The Wireless Data Division
contracts with UPS to track packages throughout the US. 1994:
McCaw merges with AT&T (Source 1995 AT&T press release). The
latest Forbes Four Hundred report notes that in 1994, the McCaw
family "agreed to invest up to $1.1 billion in Nextel Communications."
All four brothers are exceedingly wealthy. Bruce R McCaw, Forbes
reports, is worth $800 million; Keith W. McCaw, $775 million; John
Elroy McCaw, Jr., $750 million.
5. Mae Brussell,
"Why is the Senate Watergate Committee Functioning as Part of the
Cover-Up," Realist, August 1971, p 22 .After WWII, a Nazi base was
established in the Caribbean. The NSC, "patterned from German
intelligence, provided the espionage framework inside the White House
for our political assassinations as well as the Watergate 'Plumbers' and
election manipulations."
6. Sklar, p. 28.
7. Sklar, p 46.
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