Monday, May 15, 2023

Did anything connect more car drivers in the early 60s than Wolfman Jack?


there were no distractions for drivers and passengers on the roads in the middle nowhere from cell phones, I pads, video games, touch screens, etc. There was just radio to listen to, and only AM radio had any distance. 

Why? Strict religious censorship. KKK. Good ol boy network... whatever it is that makes the govt do irrational freedom smashing nonsense, the FCC (a govt dept) has been right there to prevent free speech, to tighten the leash on the invisible air waves, and prevent the English language from causing aneurisms in the Gladys Kravitz types looking to be offended anywhere they stuck their unwanted nose.

And for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, we were an apartheid nation, with separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate schools.  Ricky may have loved Lucy, but in TV Land, they slept in separate beds. 

Elvis was freaking out the Pat Boone type parents, and the Beatles were causing swooning screaming teen girls by the tens of thousands to lose their little minds. The Doors were told they couldn't use the word "higher" on the Ed Sullivan show.

But where there are strict moral standards there are inevitably underground movements against them, and Wolfman Jack was broadcasting out of TiJuana - on a radio that put out 5 times as much power as anything the FCC would allow in the (land of the free, home of the brave) USA., The Wolfman was the renegade DJ on a border blaster that could be heard in New York City...

Society couldn’t legislate what you listened to in your car.

Imagine you’re a black kid living in segregated St. Louis, if you listened to the Grand Ole Opry of the old, weird America, you might grow up and not become Chuck Berry.

In 1960 Wolfman Jack, made his way onto XERF, a border blaster in Mexico, eventually becoming station manager and turning a profit of $150,000 per month.  A car driving from New York to L.A. would never lose the station.

The Wolfman after midnight put on jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, and of course, rock. Why? Poodle skirts and sock hops in Disney cartoons caused push back, and the greasers, the rebels without a cause, the bikers, etc etc ate it up. Elvis made jailhouse rock, for a reason. It was hip to be counter culture, like Roth, the Munsters, and the Beatniks.

The thinly disguised sexual innuendo coupled with a diverse format of rich and new music enhanced Wolfman Jack's popularity in a time of extreme censorship. 

Ultimately, Wolfman Jack left XERF and ended up speaking through 50,000 watts out of Tijuana, Mexico.


Born in Brooklyn in 1938, parents divorced while he was a child. To help keep him out of trouble, his father bought him a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio, and he became an avid fan of R&B music and the disc jockeys who played it in Philadelphia, New York and Cleveland.

XERB was the original call sign for the border blaster station in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, which was branded as The Mighty 1090 in Hollywood, California. The station boasted "50,000 watts of Boss Soul Power". 

That station also had an office in the rear of a small strip mall on Third Avenue in Chula Vista, California just 10 minutes from the Tijuana–San Diego border crossing. The Wolfman was rumored to actually broadcast from this location during the early to mid-1960s. 

Wolfman opened an office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in January 1966. He recorded his shows in Los Angeles and shipped his tapes across the border into Mexico, where they would then be broadcast across the U.S.

In 1971, he moved to station KDAY 1580 in Los Angeles, which could only pay him a fraction of his former XERB income. So Wolfman capitalized on his fame, by editing his old XERB tapes and selling them to radio stations everywhere, becoming one of the first rock-and-roll syndicated programs. He also appeared on Armed Forces Radio from 1970 to 1986. At his peak, Wolfman Jack was heard on more than 2,000 radio stations in 53 countries.

5 comments:

  1. Great article. Wasn't much on in those days. Wolfman was always a treat.

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    1. thank you! Yep, he was a treat, he was a wonderful unique icon, and one of those special people that made themselves into a legend in their own lifetime, like Knievel, Elvis, and John Wayne. I wish I had the time to do a better article.

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  2. "Clap for the WolfMan...He gonna rate your record high"...... Thanks to the Guess Who!

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  3. Great article! I didn't know Wolfman broadcast from Mexico and his signal could be heard that far away. His story sounds similar to the pirate radio in the English Channel.

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    1. thank you! In one of those links I show:
      Radio Caroline
      When the one surviving ship in what had originally been a pirate radio network of Radio Caroline North and Radio Caroline South sank in 1980, a search began to find a replacement. Because of the laws passed in the UK in 1967, the sales operation needed to be situated in the U.S. For a time, Don Kelley, Wolfman Jack's business partner and personal manager, acted as the West Coast agent for the planned new Radio Caroline, but the deal eventually fell apart.

      As a part of this process, Wolfman Jack was set to deliver the morning shows on the new station. To that end, he recorded a number of programs that never aired, because the station did not come on air according to schedule. (It eventually returned in 1983 from a new ship, which remained at sea until 1990.) Today, those tapes are traded among collectors of his work.[

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