Wolfman's New Lair

"Heah comes da Wolfman!" the voice rasps in rural black accents. "Don't touch dat dial!" High-pitched giggles lacerate the air, quickly followed by a rough approximation of a wolf howl. "We gotta whole lotta soul comin' atcha," the voice promises. "Rock V roll wid da Wolfman. Lay yo' hand on da radio right now 'n' feeel me!"

Millions of radio addicts have been "feeling" Wolfman Jack's palpable patter for many years and have made him perhaps the nation's most listened-to disk jockey. He puts together an attractive package of rock, rhythm and blues, gag tunes and whatever else grabs his fancy. His specialty is zany mike antics and having telephone conversations with listeners. He grunts, growls, thumps, sings along with a record. By modulating his voice to low, suggestive intimacy, he squeezes juice from anemic wisecracks. As he plays the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, he confides: "The only difference between Mick Jagger and myself, baby, is that I can get satisfaction."

Some of the performance is wasted on radio. Eyes popping, goatee aquiver, paunch abounce, his whole body keeping time with the music, he seems to live every song as a new experience.

In a swirl of cigarette smoke, he gets up to dance with himself. "Oh, mercy, baaabeh--riiight onnn!"

Now Wolfman's sound is coming from new directions. This month he moved from Los Angeles to New York, where he is doing a live program five hours a night five times a week and recording a sixth show. His new station, WNBC, reaches 37 states at night. Meanwhile he is continuing a syndicated package heard on 1,453 stations. For a change of pace, he flies back to L.A. to appear on NBC-TV'S weekly rock series Midnight Special. In the new movie American Graffiti he plays himself --rather well, in fact. WNBC imported him to compete with WABC's Bruce ("Everybody is my cousin") Morrow, the reigning rock jockey of New York nighttime radio. WNBC's ad series puts the challenge bluntly: "Cousin Brucie's days are numbered! Wolfman Jack is on the prowl." Replies Morrow: "Wolfman who?"

No Pictures. The question is not quite as disingenuous as it sounds. Wolfman has had a number of guises in his 17-year career, and now, at 35, he is a far howl from his earlier images. Many listeners once believed that he was black or Mexican. "Nobody knew if I was white or black or whatever, and I kept the mystique up," he has said. "No pictures, no interviews. I turned down some heavy cats." When he did make public appearances, he painted his face assorted colors and wore a huge wig and sunglasses. "And these crazy long fingernails. You dig? People knew I had makeup on, but they didn't know what the hell was underneath it."

Partly it was whim--his gimmick.

Partly it was the fact that Wolfman Jack, the zany soul brother, happened to be Robert Smith, a white man who was working on his first fortune by pitching mail-order records, burial insurance, chickens and whatever else could be sold on the air.

Nor did he spring from some desert in old Mexico. Wolfman recalls being shunted from relative to relative as a child: "You see, I was left out in the breeze, born in Brooklyn amongst the garbage cans and roaches and poor Italians and poor blacks. We all emulated the black culture. There wasn't any other." He became a radio freak hooked on black deejays like Dr. Jive, and dropped out of high school.

While still in his teens, he moved south and made a meager living working for gritty rhythm-and-blues stations.

Then, in 1957, he discovered the megawatt possibilities of broadcasting from just south of the Mexican border. Certain Mexican stations were then allowed far higher wattage than their American competitors, and therefore could be heard across large stretches of the U.S.

Smith settled at XERF, just south of Ciudad Acuna, where he served as the businesslike station manager during the day and developed the Wolfman routine as the nighttime star. Control of the station was being contested by a rival faction, which at one point tried to take over by using hired gunmen. Wolfman says that he and his own pistoleros recaptured the station in a shootout that killed one of the bad guys. Later he ran a second station in Rosarito Beach, near Tijuana.

His luck and his bank account, however, had a way of dissolving under him. First the mail-order business went bad. Then, by his account, he ran into problems with Mexican authorities who did not like some of the station's programming. Wolfman lost his fortune, but not his audience, and was able to start anew at KDAY in Los Angeles. By this time he was a well-established figure, a power in the pop-music field, himself the subject of admiring songs. (Sample, from Leon Russell's Living on the Highway: "He taught me how to sing the blues/ Yes, he's the reason why I choose/ To live on the highway now.") Wolfman installed his wife Lucy and their two children in a Beverly Hills house that became an all-night gathering place for stars like Johnny Rivers and John Lennon.

Wolfman had to launder his routines as his audience grew. Still, his nutty patter, the conversations on the "Wolfman telephone," have remained a steady feature. He loves to talk about them: "If a guy calls me and says, 'I had a fight with my girl friend, what should I do?' I'll say, 'Get naked and run around your bedroom,' or I'll say, 'Stand on your head.' " He also talks about love and life, coming across as quite sincere to many of his young listeners.

Now he is in Manhattan, the self-appointed guru of "personality radio," vowing to stay on top this time, to "bring back the old days of radio." He invests radio with almost mystical powers: "On TV, you're as big as your budget. With radio, you're as big as the imagination of the listener. You can be as big as you want to be." For which statement Wolfman Jack is Exhibit A.

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