The Great Moondog Coronation Ball: How the world’s first rock ‘n’ roll show descended into a disaster
Rock and roll has always been known as a fairly rowdy genre. Unless you’re going to a Steely Dan concert, there’s usually not a single person in the audience who won’t get up on their feet and never sit down until the last note of music rings out. When the genre was just getting born, though, The Moondog Coronation Ball weren’t exactly ready for what a rock and roll crowd had in store for them that night.
Then again, there was a good chance that rock and roll would still be looked at as a passing fad in 1952. For all of the great artists that got their start in the 1950s, there were just as many disgruntled parents taking rock records by people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard and splitting them in half the minute they saw them in their house.
For kids, this wasn’t just a genre of music. This was a religion, and The Moondog Coronation Ball seemed to be their first opportunity to descend on a place of worship. Put together by radio DJ Alan Freed, the show would have been the first of its kind to showcase everything rock and roll had to offer, with artists like Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers set to perform.
It’s not like the place wasn’t equipped for a larger amount of people…they just grossly underestimated how enthusiastic the crowds were. They anticipated having tickets for 10,000 people to show up, but what they got that night ended up being nearly double what they anticipated, with nearly 25,000 showing up looking to get in.
A velvet rope and barricades can only do so much against a crowd that big, and it didn’t take long for the kids to break through the barriers and rush into the venue. While no one suffered any significant injuries, the concert was quickly brought to an end as police came on and shut down the racket.
Looking back, even Freed was dumbfounded at how they even set up something that big, saying, “If anyone…had told us that some 20 or 25,000 people would try to get into a dance—I suppose you would have been just like me. You would have laughed and said they were crazy”. Freed wasn’t just selling a fun new genre of music, though. For kids, this was the kind of freedom they had been waiting for.
No matter how many times their parents disciplined them, nothing would stop rock and roll from becoming the next major musical revolution. Since artists like Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers have been lost to history, imagine the kind of hysteria that came out of Elvis Presley when he first started shaking his ass on live television.
If anything, The Moondog Coronation Ball also acted as a lesson in how to promote shows properly. As the years went on, many rock and roll acts ended up having to enhance the security at their venues and make sure that their fans weren’t being put in any danger when performing. Because for all of the lucky breaks that Freed got that night, the dark side of that would continue to happen for years, like fans getting trampled to death at shows as far-ranging as The Who in Cleveland or Travis Scott during the Astroworld tour.
Regardless of the amount of security precautions put in place, the sheer volume of people was enough to cement what rock meant for the next few years. The genre that artists like Bill Haley and Chuck Berry pioneered was here to say, and it wasn’t a matter of whether you could stomp it out. It was about whether you could contain it.
