Roy Freid, AKA Roy Freedom, was a First Avenue DJ whose deep crates and openness to new music made him a club mainstay for nearly 60 years. According to people close to him Freid died on Tuesday, August 18. According to public records, he was 72.

The news was broken widely on Wednesday morning by artist manager PD Larson. “It’s always hard when you lose one of your best friends, but this one is especially tough,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “Roy Freedom (aka Freid) left us yesterday after a long struggle with a debilitating illness . . . Along with fellow DJs Kevin Cole and Paul Spangrud, he was part of the foundation of the groundbreaking ‘Danceteria’ format that kept the club packed throughout the 1980s, smack dab in the middle of one of the most exciting music scenes in the history of the modern rock era.”

Larson also mentioned “a longer announcement” as well as a “celebration of life” both “coming down the road.”

“Roy Freedom is the king,” Mike Wolf, a First Avenue DJ from 1991 to 1995, told City Pages’ Peter S. Scholtes in 2003. “I don't think there's a man on earth more equipped to DJ any show of any sort of music in the world. Afrobeat? Fine. Speed metal? No problem.”

Freedom had come up playing at mainstream discos — as well as at the pre-punk nexus, the Longhorn Bar, where DJs played before, after, and sometimes instead of bands. At the Longhorn, Terry Katzman would tell Cyn Collins in her book Complicated Fun, “The DJ booth was a big, high booth to the left of the stage. People would come up and make requests, a lot. Kevin Cole DJ’ed there a couple times. That set him up for First Avenue. DJ Roy Freedom did quite a few there as well.”

That’s when he came to the attention of First Avenue’s general manager, Steve McClellan. “Disco was dying, I needed to get an audience,” McClellan said in a 2016 interview. “I'm not a music guy. By that time, Roy had already spun at the Longhorn and I picked him up. Roy, I didn't discover — Dave Christian, he was one of those New York DJs that the Oz had, said, ‘You've got to come and meet his [DJ], Roy,’ and brought me to the Hog's Breath, where Roy Freedom was spinning. He was unbelievable.”

“Roy Freedom was hired basically to replace me when I was going to leave [in 1978],” Kevin Cole told Peter S. Scholtes in 2003. “But one day he came into the club when I was doing a rock set, and we just connected right away. We started talking about Brian Eno. I ended up staying because I dug Roy.”

When he joined the club as a DJ, Freedom told The Current’s Jill Riley, “It was a lot different than it is now. The DJ booth was actually on stage. The crowd was different. The music was different, because it was pretty much a disco place when I first started there . . . We had a lit [up] dance floor. We had male strippers there one time. It went by quickly, and there was a lot of changes. When I started there, all of the sudden, things were changing dramatically, it seemed like. We just tried a lot of different things to see what would work.”

Freedom was already on board when a pair of late-1979 bookings — the Ramones followed by Pat Benatar — would make Uncle Sam’s into something different and a lot cooler. As Kevin Cole said on an episode of The Current Rewind podcast:

“The Ramones were on November 28, Pat Benatar on the 29th, and then in the Mainroom, Roy and I presented, on Friday and Saturday, ‘A New Wave Experience,’ which is how it was billed at the time. And that was, in part, part of this big statement of like, ‘Hey, we're changing. Here's two national bands that we're really excited about.’ And, ‘Here’s what we’re doing on the dance nights.’ And Friday and Saturday nights were the bread and butter of Uncle Sam's and Sam’s and First Avenue. We were going from the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever to playing the Clash and the Talking Heads and Blondie and Iggy Pop and Gang of Four and Devo and B-52’s, and so it made for a really interesting challenge . . . I mean, early on we’d clear the floor.”

“When you think about how far it went in a short time from that to being known as a really hip place — I mean, the Entry was cool, the Mainroom was so not cool,” Chrissie Dunlap told Scholtes. One of the reasons it became so, she added, was its “reputation for having a good, crowded dance floor on weekends. That was really the club’s bread-and-butter.”

But so, increasingly, was the side room, where Freedom was the first stage manager. “Making the 7th St Entry was a big change for us,” Freedom told Riley. “One of the biggest changes was when we tore up the dance floor, which was that plexiglass whatever. We thought that it was just going to be rubble underneath, but it ended up being the best dance floor in the city. We didn't have to get a new dance floor or anything like that.”

He continued: “One of the biggest changes that's really never talked about much, that happened at First Avenue, was that we were the first ones, right when MTV came out with videos, to start showing videos on our big screen. People would be out there dancing, and we would put the video up, and they would just stop dancing and start watching the video. It took a while until they realized it was a part of the programming, and a part of the night.”

Paul Spangrud became the third of the early First Avenue DJ troika. He had been worked with Jerry Bonham — now in San Francisco, but then at Minneapolis’s Saloon — and Bonham in turn recommended Spangrud to Freedom, who recognized a kindred spirit.

“In December of 1980, they decided I was pushing the envelope down at the Saloon,” Spangrud said in a 2015 interview. “I was playing Devo, Madness. I was getting a little too new wave. Jerry was talking to Roy Freedom, and Roy got me an interview with what was Sam's at the time, with Steve [McClellan].” A year after he was hired, Spangrud says, “Roy taught me the ropes in the Entry as a sound man.”

Freedom took the club’s sudden rush of mid-’80s fame in stride. “We had a good time with the Purple Rain thing,” Freedom told Riley. “I was in charge of opening up the club early in the morning, and making sure his tea was ready, and things like that.”

In fact, Freedom’s defining night was directly inspired by Purple Rain’s success. Later in the ‘80s, Freedom became the don of a regular First Avenue Thursday-night event, More Funk — the “MF” obviously intended to connote a different, less family-friendly term, as well. On another episode of The Current Rewind, Urban Lights Music owner Tim Wilson recalled More Funk’s musical palette this way:

“You know, it was disco, funk, rap, kind of all mixed up into one hodgepodge. It was just a little bit of hip-hop at the time, because rap just hadn't really – hadn't really captured the imagination of the world, let's say it like that. It wasn't the Wall Street darling that it is today. So it was a record here, a record there, but it was just a lot of Minneapolis Sound stuff. Of course, you would get a lot of Prince and people like André Cymone, the Girls, Ta Mara & the Seen, Alexander O'Neal.”

The longtime First Avenue photographer Dan Corrigan remembered things more this way, in the same episode: “More Funk with Roy Freedom? We used to call it More Fights with Roy Freedom,” before letting out a big laugh. He further explained that More Funk’s fifth anniversary in 1990 featured “the biggest fight I've ever seen down there [at First Avenue]. It was just crazy. It started on the dance floor and kind of went around the right and spilled all the way out to the entryway.”

Freedom maintained consistent ties with First Avenue until close to the end. In April 2020, in the midst of early COVID lockdown, Freedom was a guest on the Morning Show with host Jill Riley. First Avenue, like everything else, was shut down.

“It’s very disappointing that it happened right now, this whole thing, right when we were coming up on our 50th anniversary,” Freedom said. “It's a little boring here at home, but I've been listening to a bunch of old music. There were some things I haven't listened to in a long time so I keep myself busy just listening to music, which is what I like to do the most, anyways.”

He added: “I was looking forward to playing music before the bands. That's my job there now as a DJ. I open up the night usually, play the first hour of music, and try to fit the music for the band.”

But Freedom’s legacy was a part of the club’s own. On the First Avenue website, his name tops the list of longest-employed (his hire date was 1978, four years prior to long-serving bartender Peter Rasmussen). And he was occasionally featured on nights such as the June 2016 More Funk reunion and, in 2023, Danceteria Through the Decades. For the latter, six DJs played in the style of each decade from the 1970s to the 2020s, and Freedom was the opener, repping the Depot-Uncle Sam’s decade.