Ashes of Alan Freed get new home at Cleveland cemetery

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

The ashes of Alan Freed, a seminal figure in the history of modern music, have found a home in Cleveland, where Freed coined the term rock ’n’ roll and organized what’s considered the genre’s first concert more than 60 years ago.

A monument was unveiled Saturday at the Lake View Cemetery during a ceremony to celebrate Freed’s colorful and tumultuous life. E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt and others spoke about Freed’s legacy.

Freed, while a DJ in Cleveland during the early 1950s, took his initial steps to synthesize a new musical form that blended jazz, blues, pop, rhythm and blues and country music into what’s known today as rock ’n’ roll.

He had grown up in Salem and graduated from Salem High School in 1940.

He died in Los Angeles in 1965 at age 43 of liver failure. His son, Lance Freed, said Friday his family moved back East after his death and his ashes were interred at a cemetery in New York, where they remained for 30 years.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, built there in part because of Freed, asked to bury the ashes outside the museum as part of a cornerstone. Those plans were thwarted by a city law saying human remains can be buried only in a cemetery.

An urn containing the ashes spent time beneath an escalator inside the museum before being put on display around 2002. Freed’s family was asked to take the urn back in 2014 after a new chief executive decided the display was inappropriate.