THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 3, 1995 TAG: 9507020168
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Wolfman Jack seemed an anachronism in today's world, and not just because he played oldies on the radio. In an age of tightly formatted radio and faceless disc jockeys, there isn't much room on the airwaves for a freewheeling, jive-talking guy who howled like a wolf during songs and did between-songs banter in funny little voices. Or maybe it's that the Wolfman simply believed in having a good time, on and off the air.
Certainly that is the dominant theme of ``Have Mercy!: Confessions of the Original Rock 'n' Roll Animal'' (Warner Books, 362 pp., $21.95), the just-published autobiography of the late Wolfman Jack, co-written with Byron Laursen. Until his death Saturday of heart failure, the Wolfman, 57, stayed busy with a syndicated Friday night radio show and personal appearance, having slowed down, enjoying the quiet life on a plantation in Belvidere, N.C., with his wife, Lou. But what a life he led!
There was the time Mexican gunmen tried to close down a station at which he was working in Ciudad Acuna in the mid-1960s. A few years earlier, during his first radio job at Newport News station WYOU, he ran marijuana on the side and did some small-time pimping. He spent close to two decades doing serious drugs, throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars on cocaine. He was broke at times and jeopardized his marriage with years of carousing.
Plenty of other folks have done sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, though not on the levels the Wolfman describes in his book. But through it all, he became perhaps the most influential, widely heard deejay in rock history.
The difference? The Wolfman had talent - lots of it. But, even more, the key was the music he played - American rhythm and blues, so exuberant and joyful. As he writes: ``I did it because the music got me so excited - and I knew that kind of excitement could rock the radio world just as powerfully as it resonated in my own soul.''
That enthusiasm for the music, and what it promised, suffuses this book. He tells wonderful anecdotes: The section on his Newport News radio days is a warm and quite funny remembrance of an enterprising white deejay trying to ingratiate himself in black street life. But the strength of ``Have Mercy!'' lies not in the stories of the good times he had, and with whom, but in its frank depiction of the often unhappy times as well.
For before there was Wolfman Jack, there was Bob Smith, a kid from Brooklyn who had a painful childhood. His parents divorced when he was 5 - bizarrely so, as they essentially swapped spouses with another couple in the neighborhood. That parental breakup, and the entrance of a stepmother, Marge, whom he describes as an ``overbearing, manipulative person'' with ``a mean streak a mile wide,'' left an everlasting impression on young Bob, and propelled him toward rhythm and blues music and then radio. Behind the microphone, he could be happy, confident, popular.
And he didn't have to be Bob Smith. In 1960, listeners of WYOU started hearing a new voice in town - a young fellow who called himself Daddy Jules. For two years, the disc jockey played R&B records on the station, and even hosted an afternoon TV dance show much like ``American Bandstand.'' Then he headed west to try his luck at a station in Shreveport, La., where he began calling himself Wolfman Jack.
A decade later, as a top deejay in Los Angeles, he stopped answering to the name Bob Smith off the air. Smith ``went away somewhere, never to be heard from again. Wolfman Jack, the happy-go-lucky guy whose main concern is good times and rockin' music, took over on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis.''
What an astonishing decision! Bob Smith not only changed his name but tried to change who he was. And though the Wolfman assures us in this book that it was a successful transformation, one doesn't get the feeling that he really understood its implication.
Did he in effect kill off the young Bob? This is particularly intriguing, considering how he comments that his excessive drug use was in part due to not being able to ``confront my dragons.'' Is becoming someone else confronting a dragon, or running away from it?
Nevertheless, ``Have Mercy!'' is an immensely readable and often fascinating chronicle of the life of a rock 'n' roll original. If his candor could have used some accompanying introspection, Wolfman still emerges as a good-hearted person who believed in good music and good people. And there's nothing wrong with that. MEMO: Tim Warren is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The Wolfman's role as himself in "American Graffiti" revitalized his
career.
by CNB