It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways. Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing that can show up when you least expect it.
Remember that Treehouse of Horror episode from The Simpsons where Homer accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine? He travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making the tiniest mistake.
That episode is based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled A Sound of Thunder in which a man named Eckels goes back in time and kills a dinosaur. When it returns to the present, everything is different.
This story is something like that: how a small thing hundreds of years ago connects the term “rock ’n’ roll” with the firing of flaming rats out of small cannons.
Humans have been trying to blow stuff up for centuries. The Chinese came up with gunpowder sometime in the ninth century. They used it both for fireworks and as weaponry. This is where the rats come in.
An army would stuff live rats into long hollow tubes packed with gunpowder. The rats — now completely on fire — rained down on the opposite side. You can imagine the psychological freak-out factor that had.
Gunpowder also led to the concept of a bomb, an incendiary device that exploded with great force, destroying people and property. Such devices were also put to use in excavating mines to get at coal or whatever minerals were down there.
The trick was in setting off the bomb without hurting yourself. In 1745, a British physician named William Watson invented the first version of a blasting cap, which used a relatively small explosion to set off a larger one. It used an electric spark ignited from a distance to set off some gunpowder, resulting in a big boom.
Five years later, Benjamin Franklin refined the idea and over the next hundred or so years, various inventors figured out ways to safely blow stuff up using a version of Watson’s original design of a blasting cap.
But there were still dangers. Blasting caps could explode on their own. It wouldn’t be a big bang, but depending on the design, it could be enough to really hurt someone.
Over the decades, many blasting caps went astray, sometimes in places where they could be found by unsuspecting children — which is exactly what happened to Louis Hardin on July 4, 1932. What happened that day had a profound effect on modern music.
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Louis was out in a field near his home in rural Kansas and found a funny-looking thing on the ground. It turned out to be a dynamite cap. It blew up in his face and he was permanently blinded.
Fortunately, he had a loving sister who looked after him, reading him book after book after book; she read him philosophy, myths, legends, and plenty of science. Somewhere along the way, Louis vowed to become a composer of music.
He went to several schools specializing in teaching music to the blind. He got a scholarship. He learned music theory from books written in Braille. Through all this unimaginably hard work, Louis became pretty adept.
In 1943, he moved to New York, determined to meet the most famous conductors of the day. Standing outside stage doors, he eventually met Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini, Benny Goodman, and Charlie Parker. Many days were spent performing on the street and Louis became well-known and loved by the city’s jazz musicians.
Sometimes in 1947, he started calling himself “Moondog” after a beloved pet who loved to howl at the moon. He liked that imagery so much that Louis wrote and recorded an instrumental piece entitled Moondog Symphony with our hero playing drums, maracas, gourds, bells, Chinese blocks, cymbals, and even a hollow log.
Now let’s slide over to Cleveland to radio station WJW-AM where a fast-talking DJ named Alan Freed was making a name for himself by playing R&B records by Black performers for an audience of white kids. One of the records Freed loved was Moondog Symphony. It was raw, tribal, and had a beat that he could talk over. Freed co-opted it as a theme of sorts. But then it took it further.
Freed started referring to his radio show as “The Moondog House” and he was “King of the Moondoggers.” He also started hosting the world’s first rock concerts, events he called “Moondog Balls.”
The original Moondog didn’t know any of this until Freed got a job at WINS-AM in New York city where he continued his Cleveland “Moondogger” schtick. The real Moondog was incensed and in 1956 filed a lawsuit against Freed and the radio station for infringement.
“You can’t call anything Moondog! I’m the original Moondog and I have been since 1947, long before that Freed character started using my name!”
Louis Hardin won his case. Freed had to pay $6,000 in damages — about US$70,000 today — and had to promise he’d never utter the word “Moondog” again.
This created a professional crisis for Freed. He needed a new catchphrase. After calling together some buddies for a drinking session, someone — maybe freed himself — suggested that he go back into the history of R&B records, specifically a 1951 release by Billy Ward and The Dominoes called Sixty Minute Man, released on the Federal Records label in the spring of 1951. Freed would have certainly played this on his show in Cleveland.
And yes, this record was all about sex, specifically the boast to be able to go for sixty minutes — or in the African American slang terms, “rockin’ and rollin’ them all night long.”
Freed also had to have known that this Black slang term went back as least as far back as the 1920s — at least on record — and probably had been in used for much longer. He knew what it meant. The musicians knew what it meant. The kids in his radio audience were hip to it. But white parents? They didn’t have a clue. It was the perfect bit of secret code.
And so the story goes that Freed decided to call what he did and the music he played “rock ’n’ roll.” It worked better than he could have ever dreamed.
Freed was monstrously popular in New York. And because he declared that he played rock ’n’ roll records, all this new music coming out was branded as “rock ’n’ roll.” He even tried to trademark the term so no one else could use it. (Spoiler: That didn’t work out.)
The term spread everywhere from Freed’s radio show. Thus, a new genre was born that endures today.
Next time you go to a rock concert and they have pyro, just remember that all this began with the Chinese firing flaming rats at their enemies.
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