37th cleveland international film festival :: April 3 - april 14, 2013
Film Festival Blog
March 26th, 2011 @ 2:00pm

Moondog Who?

This evening, when you're waiting for the dinner-hour films to begin, you're probably going to see a whole lot of people passing you on the way down the Walkway, dressed in some pretty interesting outfits! They're going to the Moondog Coronation Ball.

The first few years I worked for the Festival, we were done and out of Tower City before the Ball, so I'd somehow never actually heard about it in spite of being a Cleveland native. It's coincided with the Festival since we moved to later dates, though, and I got curious about it and did a little digging to learn more.

So it turns out that, long before Woodstock, there was a major rock-and-roll event that would have had a similar impact... if it had gone off as planned.

The first Moondog Coronation Ball -- named after organizer Alan Freed's Moondog Radio Show -- took place on March 21, 1952. Historians consider it the first major rock and roll concert, which is fitting because Freed is the one who coined the term "rock and roll" in the first place. He and his friends in the Cleveland scene had epic plans for the event, and had scheduled more than half a dozen musicians and bands to play. It was highly anticipated... too highly anticipated. Ticket demand was so high that people started bootlegging counterfeit tickets. The night of the Ball, more than twenty thousand people showed up at the Cleveland Arena, which only had the capacity to accommodate about half of the crowd. Only one song was performed before the fire department, concerned that a riot was going to break out, shut things down and sent everyone home.

Obviously that wasn't the end of the story, and now every year, the event is commemorated by rock-and-roll fans from around Cleveland and even around the country. It's moved to the Q and held a lot earlier than the first event (which was scheduled to go from 10 pm to 2 am), but it still has the same spirit -- and a lot of the same outfits! People dress up in elaborate '50s costumes for the Ball, and everybody has a great time.

So you'll probably see a great many people heading to tonight's Ball while you're waiting in line for your film. You may have even known all of this already, but I was fascinated by it and had to look up the story and share it. Now that I know the story behind the event, I'm looking forward to seeing the attendees as they pass through the Walkway more than ever.

Posted by Lara Klaber

« previous entry   |   next entry »