Creating alanfreed.com was largely
a matter of happenstance for Judith
Fisher Freed, but now she is fully committed to maintaining the website
and educating people about the legendary disc jockey.
Judith's interest in the Freed legacy had actually begun in 1978, when
she started collecting rock 'n' roll memorabilia connected with the movie
"American Hot Wax," a fictional account of Alan's life. Her friend Kenny
Vance produced the music and co-starred in the picture.
"Later I found scrap books of mostly news articles and family photos,"
she says. "When I started shopping at Chic-A-Boom on Melrose in L.A. the
collection began to take shape."
When a PBS producer visited Judith's Los Angeles home to inspect some
Alan Freed memorabilia for a music-related program, he opined that a goldmine
of education was available and inquired as to whether Judith had a better
means of preserving it. She called rock archivist Michael
Ochs and in turn connected with webpage designer Victor Bornia, which
led to long sessions of scanning photographs and articles by Jim
Kennedy to put up on the web.
The establishment of alanfreed.com led directly to VH1's interest. "Once
the website was up it gave me more credibility as far as who I was and
what I was doing," Judith says. "My objective for 1999 was a biography
of Alan. I saw what was being shown on television, and I knew that we
should take a few steps back to set the record straight."
Born at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark N.J. in 1956, Judith Lois Fisher
was raised in South Orange, N.J. She is the youngest of four children,
Judith studied theatre in college but found herself drawn more to the costuming
end of stagecraft. Once she had relocated to California, she opened a
clothes shopping service called Clothestrophobia, and soon was costuming
musicians for rock videos, album covers and "Soul Train" appearances.
Indeed, working with the Internet has opened her eyes to just how much
information is available: once when she was trying to locate a particular
New York Times story on Alan, she discovered that the paper had 1,481
relevant articles.
"My vision to have all information accessible on the website has been
realized," she says. "NARAS has bestowed the National Trustees Award to
Alan Freed, as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame displaying a permanent
exhibit in Cleveland. My future goal is to see the Rock Hall open a library
in conjunction with the Alan Freed Radio Station."
— Kevin Zimmerman
Photograph by Barb Levant
"One
of my motivating factors in creating the website was being approached
by several teenagers and students who had been studying Alan Freed in
high school and college," she says. "At first I was surprised, and then
I came to understand that he was being studied in terms not just of music
but also of his importance to the civil rights movement."