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Published
June 16, 1995: The Wolfman howls again. This time the world's most famous
disc jockey is the teller of a wild tale - the story of his own life -
only slightly tamed to soothe the vengeful. It brought him to open the
Canadian Booksellers Association trade show yesterday, and not a few veteran
authors were star-struck. In his mid-50s, Wolfman Jack is many kilos leaner
than he was, and claims to be saner, but the familiar rasp is intact, reinforced
with unfiltered Camels and undiluted espresso. "We are put on this earth
to have a good time," he tells me. "This makes other people feel good.
And the cycle continues." Although the former Robert Weston Smith admits
to enough other closet skeletons "to build my own dinosaur," plenty are
on display in Have Mercy! Confessions Of The Original Rock 'N' Roll Animal
(Warner, $27). Blame his delinquency on abuse, broken home, cruel "stepmonster,"
whatever, the Wolf proves to have a curiously fierce sense of honor - he
has pranked, pimped, whored, scammed, stolen, dealt drugs, even hired his
own private army in Mexico, but he wouldn't accept payola. He also mated
for life - 35 years and counting. The army was to protect the Wolfman's
original lair, a studio with a 250,000 watt transmitter in the Mexican
desert - the most powerful commercial station on the planet. He paid for
it by extorting $350,000 out of a bunch of mail-order preachers one weekend,
and it gave him enough muscle to supppress an armed uprising. When Mexico
finally pulled the plug bureaucratically, he patched his ego with cocaine,
his talent with the world's first 32-track studio, and his business with
radio's first nationally syndicated show, and with late-night live-TV Midnight
Special, 587 of which he says he hosted. At one time he was on 2,200 radio
stations in 43 countries. "My fake Japanese was smooth enough to earn me
the title of `The Emperor of Pleasing Graciousness' in that country," he
says. "And some German magazine gave me the title of `The Laughing Chancellor
of Comedy.'" Still, he claims he didn't know how he could afford to pay
for the exposure George Lucas was offering in American Graffiti, that he
was delighted to be paid $3,000 to play himself in the film, and astonished
to be granted an unsought percentage in perpetuity after the movie made
$20 million. Soon it was biggest-ever hit of any film in its price-range,
and it gave him the clout to hold up WNBC for $350,000 - plus a secretary,
a chauffeured limousine, a bodyguard, and a well-ventilated private room
at Rockefeller Center for the smoking of dope in - before he would agree
to be a professional looney in the east. Then after the Guess Who's Clap
For The Wolfman was a hit, he quit to go on tour with the band. And to
do his own TV series out of Vancouver. People forget: He isn't a clown.
"I started out as an opportunistic renegade. By now, I've lasted long enough
to become sort of an American Original Respectable Renegade." But if he
is the only white Honorary Temptation, it is because he did much to integrate
pop music. "I've never understood where bigoted people got the idea God
is just as small-minded as they are," he says.He is also the reason Howard
Stern got into radio. He doesn't much like the new trends in music, but
he still deejays and hosts concerts of the old stuff, and will soon be
heard singing on his own blues album. He thinks he is in "the happiness
business."
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