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Frank Fried, 1927-2015, Presente!
Franklin Fried, who devoted more than 70 years to supporting and
fighting for freedom, justice, equality, and liberation for working and
oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world, died Tuesday, Jan.
13, at his home in Alameda, California. He was 87.
Frank Fried was the principal presenter of folk and popular music in
Chicago for a quarter of a century, but he always thought of himself,
first and foremost, as a revolutionary socialist. In his own view, his
signal achievement was a historic 1968 series of benefit concerts for
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he organized at the
request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also produced the Beatles’
1964 and 1965 Chicago appearances, along with innumerable concerts by
the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Miriam Makeba, Pete Seeger, Frank
Zappa, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and many other artists.
Frank was a radical, a socialist, and a labor and civil rights activist
throughout his life, and he took great pride in never having abandoned
his principles of fair play throughout his storied show business career.
“After shaking hands with some managers and promoters in the business,
you would have to check if you still had all your fingers,” he would
half jest. The colorful story of how he tried to be different, with
mixed success, is recounted on his website, showbizred.com.
Frank was born in 1927 on Chicago’s north side. His father, a lawyer in
private practice, died when Fried was a child. His mother, who worked as
a secretary for the Illinois State Athletic Commission, felt compelled
to send Fried to a military school for proper discipline. After military
school, he attended the University of
Chicago. He dropped out after two years to serve in the United States
Navy at the end of World War II.
After the war, Fried joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as a
teenager and worked as a welder in Chicago’s booming U.S. Steel South
Works plant. He was attracted to the SWP’s democratic vision of world
socialism. In 1947, he and his Chicago comrades helped lead a broad and
successful defense campaign for James Hickman, who was up on murder
charges. Hickman, an AfricanAmerican sharecropper who had recently
moved his family to Chicago from the South, was accused of shooting the
landlord who had burned his family out of their apartment, killing three
of Hickman’s children. With help from SWP organizers, community pressure
got the charges reduced and Hickman released. The dramatic story is
recounted in a recent book from Haymarket Press, People Wasn’t Made to
Burn, which is dedicated to Frank.
Frank called the campaign “perhaps the party’s finest hour” and credited
that organizing experience for much of his later success in building
broad coalitions for social justice. Frank had a remarkable ability to
collaborate with folks from across the left spectrum, and to help others
reach out and build in ways they would not have done without his help
and counsel.
A few years later, Frank was expelled from the SWP along with prominent
dissident Bert Cochran and many of the party’s foremost intellectuals
and labor activists. In 1954 Fried helped that group launch the American
Socialist, a magazine that aimed to free the idea of socialism from its
association in the American mind with Stalinist dictatorship, and he
traveled the country promoting it.
The magazine folded in 1959, a victim of the poisonous cold war
atmosphere, Frank said later. “The trajectory that we expected of
hooking up with militant sections of the labor movement and a new
beginning of the radical movement never happened,” he explained. “The
group did not leave much of a footprint, but individuals played an
important role in the labor and civil rights movement, and the
attractive style and open tone of the magazine did leave an imprint on
the New Left that came after us,” he added.
For Frank, the value of the American Socialist group lay in reaching out
and attempting to regroup with other socialists without rejecting its
Trotskyist background. “We attempted to bring our heritage to the
problems and radical language and organization of the modern world
without ever forgetting the legacy of Leon Trotsky, who had an
incredible impact on me as he stood up for workers democracy against the
tides of history,” he said.
Frank stumbled into show business when he met the Austrian folk singer
Martha Schlamme at the Gate of Horn, an early folk music venue in
Chicago, in 1958. In need of a job and intrigued by the power of folk
songs to move people emotionally and politically, Frank went to work as
an assistant to Albert Grossman, the club’s owner. On a trip to San
Francisco the following year on Grossman’s behalf, Frank met the Gateway
Singers, a racially integrated folksinging group, and managed the group
through their period of greatest commercial success. He had a knack for
managing, and by the end of the 1950s he was also handling the Chad
Mitchell Trio and numerous other prominent folk and popular music
performers.
Frank opened Triangle Productions in 1959, with fellow socialist Fred
Fine, in order to raise money for leftist projects through benefit
concerts. When folk music became a pop craze during the Kennedy
administration, the business took off. This was a major turn away from
the repression of the 1950s, both culturally and politically. Many of
the folk artists were unabashedly radical, and some, like Pete Seeger,
were still blacklisted. Frank took special pride in being one of the
first commercial promoters to book Seeger, whose soldout concerts on
Frank Fried’s stage in 1957 marked a defeat for the McCarthyite blacklist.
When Bob Dylan’s turn from folk toward rock resulted in an explosion of
psychedelic, blues and countryinflected music, Frank recognized that
the new groups would seize the spotlight from both acoustic folk groups
and more traditional, pasteurized pop. He moved quickly on his hunch. By
the early 1960s,
Triangle shows dominated live entertainment programming in Chicago and
the surrounding area. Triangle Productions ran tours and concerts for
the Rolling Stones, the Mothers of Invention, and many other major acts
of the time. Meanwhile Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mathis,
and Barbra Streisand remained regulars on his stages.
Throughout his career, Frank tried to weave themes of social justice
into his cultural promotions, paying special attention to Miriam Makeba
and other politically engaged artists. In 1963 Frank served as producer
for “We Shall Overcome,” the only commercial recording by the SNCC
Freedom Singers, on Mercury Records and he also took an active role in
the movement against the Vietnam War as a leader of Business Executives
Move for Vietnam Peace.
In 1977 he returned to his roots in the steel industry as a key backer
of Ed Sadlowski’s insurgent “Steelworkers FightBack” campaign. Frank
traveled the country with Sadlowski, working plant gates and union halls
in an attempt to divert the Steelworkers Union from what Sadlowski had
dubbed “tuxedo unionism” and toward a militant workingclass
perspective. He and Sadlowski became lifelong friends.
Frank sold his production company in the early 1980s and moved to Los
Angeles with his wife Françoise, hoping the weather might help ease her
congenital degenerative disease. After Françoise’s death in 1985, Frank
moved to New Orleans as the CEO of the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. He
remarried there in 1988 and moved to the hills above Oakland, California
with his second wife, the mystery writer Alice WilsonFried, and their
daughter Teasha.
Frank’s friendship with Miriam Makeba inspired him to active solidarity
with the fight against Apartheid in South Africa. After Apartheid, he
was a stalwart supporter of the struggle to build a Socialist
alternative as the only way to guarantee the promise of Liberation. He
helped launch Amandla!, a popular radical opinion magazine associated
with the Democratic Left Front, and remained a valued advisor to its
editors.
Frank met the writer Daniel Singer when they fought together to defend
Solidarnosc against the Polish and Soviet Stalinist parties and in the
1990s, Frank led the launch of the Daniel Singer Prize, an annual essay
competition for young people on topics related to socialism.
In 2011 Frank plunged into supporting the renovation of the Trotsky
Museum in Mexico City, organizing a U.S. tour by Esteban Volkov,
Trotsky’s grandson. He also recently joined the Solidarity chapter in
the San Francisco Bay Area as a means of being connected to the movement
he invested so much of his hopes in. His longtime comrade Carl Finamore
reported that even when Frank was too frail to speak, “he was still able
to muster enough energy to give us the middle finger and the raised fist
at separate points during our discussions.”
Preceded in death by his first wife, Francoise Nicolas, and his elder
sister, Vivian Medak, Frank is survived by his wife Alice, his children
Pascale, Isabelle, Bruno, Troy, and Teasha, and many grandchildren,
nieces and nephews.
Frank’s memorial celebration will be held January 24, 14 p.m. at the
Grand View Pavilion, 300 Island Drive, Alameda, California. In lieu of
flowers or gifts, the family requests that donations in Frank’s memory
be sent to Amandla! Magazine (in care of editor Brian Ashley,
br...@amandla.org.za) or to the Center for Constitutional Rights
(http://goo.gl/H4Cmcr).
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