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Published
June 16, 1995: DEL RIO — Nearly four decades later, lawyer Arturo Gonzalez
can still clearly picture the polite, dark-haired East Coast disc jockey
who showed up without notice at his Pecan Street office back in late 1963.
'He introduced himself as Bob Smith, and he wanted to know who was the
owner of radio station XERF," recalls Gonzalez, 94, who at the time sold
advertising contracts in the United States for the super-powered station
in nearby Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. "I said 'What can you do?' and he
said 'I'm a radio announcer and I can sell whatever you have to sell.'
And I think he was on the radio station that same night, selling baby chicks
— 100 for $2.98," Gonzalez said, chuckling. Once on the air, the mild-mannered,
clean-cut Smith became howling, growling Wolfman Jack, and the rest, as
they say, is rock 'n' roll history. Now, nearly 40 years after he left
XERF for another super-powered station in Tijuana, Mexico, and seven years
after his death from a heart attack, the Wolfman is coming back to Del
Rio. If all goes well, at this time next year, a larger-than-life bronze
statute of the great caped howler will loom over a downtown intersection.
A Wolfman Jack museum and a music festival will be in the works. During
his six months in Del Rio, the late-night XERF DJ mesmerized teenagers
across America and beyond with his radio antics, ultra-hip delivery and
anything-goes playlist. His border broadcasts were powered by a 250,000-watt
transmitter — five times the juice allowed on the U.S. side."Wherever ya
are, and whatever ya doin', I wancha ta lay ya hands on da raydeeoo, lay
back wid me, and squeeze ma knobs. We gonna feel it ta-night... OOOOOO
WWWWOOOOOoooo. This is Wolfman Jack down here with da donkeys. Gonna get
you some soul," he would howl. "Get naked, blow da evil weed, kiss your
teachers. Wolfman play the best records in the business and then he eat
'em," growled the lupine mystery man, according to the book "Border Radio,"
by Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford. The Wolfman was an instant sensation.
Gonzalez recalls that soon after he hit the airwaves, hawking everything
from chickens to virility pills, advertising sales boomed, and he had to
hire another dozen young women to handle the flood of orders. "He was bringing
in a lot of money, and when he left, sales went way down," he said. But
in the grand visions that Del Rio mover and shaker Jay Johnson has for
this dusty border city, the Wolfman can still make cash registers ring.
"Del Rio deserves to be a hotshot town, and it will be, and Wolfman Jack
will seal the deal," he said. "This thing is going to be flat-out explosive.
Wolfman Jack was really the catalyst who pulled together the world of rock
'n' roll. He was heard in Australia, in Asia, in Europe and Canada," said
Johnson, who owns a bed and breakfast and several restored buildings here.
So far, all systems are go. A nonprofit foundation is being formed, and
Del Rio officials have signed on to the project, as has the Wolfman's widow,
Lou Smith of North Carolina. "I'm just tickled pink that they want to do
that. Del Rio is the place where Robert W. Smith became Wolfman Jack,"
she said. Michael Maiden, a nationally known sculptor, is already at work
on a model, and former Wolfman publicist Mike Venema is looking up old
buddies from James Brown to Alice Cooper to help out. Three weeks ago,
Venema and Maiden, who is based in Oregon, came to Del Rio and met with
Johnson and other local boosters. Both came away sold on the project. "We're
committed to Del Rio. It's the perfect place, and Acuña was fantastic
as well. It was very reminiscent of an earlier time," Venema said. Maiden,
appropriately best known for his wildlife sculptures, grew up on a ranch
near Walla Walla, in eastern Washington, and had his first encounter with
the Wolfman when he was 13 or 14. "I'd listen to him late at night on my
little Montgomery Ward transistor radio. He would fade in and out," recalled
Maiden, 52. "And I thought he was a black man. Most people did, and he
kind of perpetuated that. He was one of the DJs who made black music popular,"
he said. "Until late in his career, no one knew what he looked like. I
most certainly didn't until 'American Graffiti,'" the 1973 hit movie by
George Lucas in which the Wolfman played himself. The sculptor is coy about
exactly what the bronze Wolfman will look like. "My job is to try and make
this icon recognizable. He was a wild and crazy guy, and kind of a whimsical
character, and he's not going to be standing straight up and down like
Jefferson Davis," he said. Both Maiden and Venema say they are confident
the $130,000 needed for the sculpture will be easily raised once the word
gets out. For Del Rio, a quiet border city on U.S. 90 known to most travelers
as no more than a gas stop on the way to West Texas and the Big Bend National
Park, a hip tourist attraction is sorely needed. With mild sarcasm, some
locals refer to Del Rio as "the gateway to Ciudad Acuña," the much
larger Mexican city across the river that offers a more glamorous nightlife.
The Wolfman project has surfaced just as Del Rio is launching a revitalization
of Main Street, a dowdy thoroughfare of retail shops and fading classical
buildings. The city recently won backing for the Main Street project from
the Texas Historical Commission, and coordinator Ginger Lyons said Wolfman
Jack fits right in. "Including him in our Main Street plan is vital. We
could use any tourist attraction we can get. Everyone here knows the story
of Wolfman Jack, and we're very proud of him," she said. If Wolfman Jack
does for Del Rio what another rock icon has done for Lubbock, the project
could prove a real magnet. Each year, 35,000 to 40,000 people visit the
Buddy Holly museum, which opened in 1999. "Many people come here because
Buddy Holly was from here. They make pilgrimages to Lubbock, Texas, for
that reason alone. We get people from Britain, Australia and all over Europe,"
said Connie Gibbons, museum director. The official launch of the Wolfman
Jack project in Del Rio is set for March 15, and at that time a model of
the statue of rock 'n' roll's most famous DJ may be unveiled. The museum
would feature Wolfman artifacts and photos to tell his life story. But
given the Wolfman's love of invention and hyperbole, exactly what happened
here 40 years ago may never be known. In his autobiography, "Have Mercy,"
the Wolfman gives a lurid, action-packed account of his arrival at Del
Rio and his armed takeover of XERF, later known as "The Wolfman Jack Radio
Shootout Saga." According to this somewhat apocryphal account, the Wolfman
and a buddy arrived in Ciudad Acuña to find XERF in receivership,
and quickly engineered a coup to reclaim it from hostile hands. With guns
and bribes, lawsuits and hustle, according to the Wolfman's tale, he took
over XERF. He then remade its programming from a loony collection of huckster
preachers and hillbilly music (the original Carter family, "Johnny Cash's
future in-laws," had broadcast to the nation from Ciudad Acuña's
high-powered towers) to become the hottest rock station in the world led
by the most notorious underground DJ. "I was truly glowing in those days
on XERF, because I was a young buck doing my thing right where I always
wanted to be, hitting the airwaves with gale-force blues, rhythm and blues,
and the most soulful rock 'n' roll, all sent your way through the treetop
tall platinum-coated driver tubes of the most powerful commercial station
on the planet," Wolfman wrote. According to the book, the final battles
for XERF were won in a shootout in a cheap Del Rio hotel between the Wolfman
and "Montez," the evil Mexican who wanted to reclaim the station, and a
follow-up ambush in the Coahuilan desert. "I've still got a little crease
on the end of my nose from that first bullet. The second one dug into the
back side of the van's door frame, six inches behind where my head had
been," wrote the Wolfman about the late night ambush. Lou Smith also has
vivid memories of Del Rio as a cowboy town with a Spanish flavor. She said
the men who met her husband on the Mexican side of the bridge wore guns
and cartridge belts crisscrossed on their chests. And much of what the
Wolfman wrote about actually happened, including problems with rival factions
and the federales, and a late night on-the-air cry for help from XERF,
Smith said. "We were staying in the Del Rio Hotel, and as we were falling
to sleep, listening to the radio, they broke right into the show and started
yelling 'pistoleros, pistoleros.' They were calling for the police and
for help," she recalled. "Wolf jumped up and went over there to help those
guys, and I don't know exactly what he did." Arturo Gonzalez only chuckles
when told of such accounts. Forty years later, he remembers no lawsuits,
no shootouts and no armed takeovers, only a polite and reliable guy named
Bob Smith who, when seated behind the microphone, became a jive-talking
crazy man. "If you met him, you probably wouldn't think that much of him,
but on the radio he brought out a lot of excitement, and a lot of people
were happy to listen to him," he said. "He was very impressive, very dedicated
and very reliable. We believed everything he would tell us. That's the
kind of relationship it was," he said. And, said Gonzalez, a Del Rio memorial
to the Wolfman is long overdue. "He was my friend, and I think he deserves
it. He put Del Rio on the map. And he was a good man. If he could help
someone he would. That's the kind of man I remember," he said.
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