BOOK REVIEW : Alan Freed: Rock ‘n’ Roll ‘n’ Hype : BIG BEAT HEAT Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock and Roll <i> by John A. Jackson</i> , Schirmer Books/Macmillan $24.95, 416 pages

“This is your old Moondog here,” raved the young deejay from Cleveland on his first broadcast in New York City in 1954, “with rhythm and blues records with the big beat in popular music in America today. . . . “

“Oh my God,” said one of the staff announcers in horror. “I give him three months.”

“You’re crazy,” said another. “I give him one week.”

They were both wrong. Alan Freed and the music he played were just catching fire, and “Big Beat Heat,” John A. Jackson’s definitive biography of Freed, shows us that the trajectory of Freed’s career was sharp, hot and high.

By 1956, he was playing himself in the myth-making rock movie “Rock Around the Clock.” By 1958, he was charged with inciting a riot when the kids ran wild at one of his rock concerts. A year later, he was consumed by the fireball that he had ignited, a target (some say scapegoat) of the witch hunts of the payola scandal. By 1965, at the age of 44, the self-styled King of Rock ‘n’ Roll was dead: “payola’s first fatality.”

As Jackson points out, Freed was both the practitioner and the victim of the white-hot hype that energized the early years of rock music. He was among the first deejays to popularize rock ‘n’ roll when he started playing “race” records over a “white” radio station, and he took credit for inventing the very term itself.

His notorious rock ‘n’ roll shows at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn helped to create the outlaw image that the music industry now enshrines.

More often than not, Jackson reveals, the game was a hustle. Freed was not only a deejay but also a concert promoter, a manager, a song plugger, a copyright rustler. Freed managed some of the artists whose records he played, and he credited himself as co-author of the songs that he produced or merely promoted.

Still, Freed was only the most visible of the hustlers, and when he took the fall over payola, the indignation of the music business over his supposed crimes was strictly phony. When he died, he was a broke and broken man.

Jackson sets out to correct some of the cherished oral traditions of rock ‘n’ roll. He tells us, for example, that the “hepcat” with the cowbell and the machine-gun delivery had a passion for Wagnerian opera; Bach rather than R-and-B was played at his funeral. The simple notion that was Freed’s only real claim to fame--playing records by black artists for white audiences--was suggested to Freed by an enterprising Cleveland record-store owner who wanted to move his inventory.

Jackson, a public-school teacher, has certainly done his homework, and what’s most impressive about “Big Beat Heat” is the sheer accumulation of detail.

For a book about rock ‘n’ roll, though, there’s not much heat in “Big Beat Heat.” Jackson is patient and workmanlike in his presentation of the facts of Freed’s life and work, earnest but not ardent.

Jackson proclaims himself to be a man on a mission: he wants to restore Alan Freed to his “rightful place in the annals of American musical and social history.” But Jackson never hypes his material, never plays for cheap thrills, and--perhaps as a result--never quite captures the color or drama of the story that he is telling.

Still, the absence of hype is hardly a failing, and the scrupulous, even meticulous scholarship of “Big Beat Heat” may be regarded its own reward.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Wartime Lies” by Louis Begley.