Wolfman Jack Big Broadcasts question

[Lkeller]

Thanks, Michael.  Good information.  I obviously wasn't listening when Wolf was on The "Soul Express.".  Mostly, I remember Tom Reed "The Master Blaster" - a handle you can have all sorts of fun with, but I won't go there.  I also seem to remember many hours of brokered programming for Art Laboe's "Oldies But Goodies.", which at that time, were 50's hits - some of them totally obscure and unknown...to me, anyway.

Llew: Art Laboe's stuff is a great example of how much local and regional influence there was in Southern California...songs the rest of the country never heard were huge hits on KPOP in the 50s...and are absolute classics to English-speaking Hispanics of a certain age from the Southland.

---Michael Hagerty

Yes - I remember The Art Laboe Oldies But Goodies Shows at the El Monte Legion Stadium.  I never went - I was more of a Jefferson Airplane at the Pauley Pavilion type (hippie) at the time. And I was a bit young for 50s concerts. But I always had an image in my head of hundreds of custom low-riders (51 Mercurys, etc.) pulling up to the stadium for the concerts.

Radio commercials for those shows could be heard on many stations. Laboe seemed like quite the entrepreneur.

[melan8tr]

Always tempted to order a box of baby chicks from Wolfman during his heyday at XERB.  Around 1983 I was doing a Weekly Oldies gig at the local Disco Warehouse size club called "Grahmn Central Station" and they brought in Wolfman Jack for one night to work the booth with me.  After about an hour into the gig I turned to Wolfman and asked If there was a paticular song he wanted to play.......in his inimitable voice he replied "No baby you're doing great" ...that was my biggest thrill in 32 of live DJ work.  He slammed down a dozen Rum and Coke that night and we had a ball, but I can't remember a thing we talked about, I was In complete awe of my booth-mate that night. Oh by the way, those dozen rum and coke, came back to haunt the Wolfman later that evening.  An Oldies station I was at recently, carried the syndicated "Wolfman Show", a paid show, not bartered.

[Bud50]

There's some good audio here:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Wolfman%20Jack%22

Enjoy, I do!

[Icangelp]

I can remember listening to XERF during the 60's while out cruising Indianapolis with my friends. XERF is the first place I heard the Wolfman.

I also remember the signal being much weaker than I expected, what with 250KW, a high frequency and having the night pretty much to itself. Most US stations on 1570 were still daytimers only. Though, I do remember CFOR and CHLO in Ontario did their best to interfere.

[Basnya]

Everything you ever wanted to know about XERF, Border Blasters, and the Wolfman Connection:

http://www.modestoradiomuseum.org/story%20of%20xerf.html

A quack doctor.  A million watts. Goat testicles. Hitler. Wolfman Jack.   Now THIS is radio!

[JON BRUCE]

Michael is right about electrical noise degrading AM signals these days compared to what they were decades ago.  I visited the 1090 site and they only had a very old 50kw transmitter there.  However, as mentioned in past posts the fact that it was directional into L.A. would increase the field strength well beyond what a non-directional 50kw would provide. In addition to that, they were modulating at about 300% !

[elchupacabras]

Great article on electrical noise in the current Radio World. Worthwhile checking it out.

[radioman148]

I can remember listening to XERF during the 60's while out cruising Indianapolis with my friends. XERF is the first place I heard the Wolfman.

I also remember the signal being much weaker than I expected, what with 250KW, a high frequency and having the night pretty much to itself. Most US stations on 1570 were still daytimers only. Though, I do remember CFOR and CHLO in Ontario did their best to interfere.

I also tried to listen to XERF in the midwest. It was very tough with the competition.

[RadioFan2J3]

.  I've heard of the power being as high at 250,000 watts, but whether that was true or not, I don't know.  Some have said the stations were pumping so much power that it was actually dangerous.  Any truth to that? 

There are numerous MW stations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia running 500 kw and more and a handful at 2000 kW.

These are transmitter output power levels, not ERP on gain MW arrays. 

At these power levels, the operating staff stays away from the antenna systems and particular care is taken to ground everything which isn't supposed to be hot.  In some cases, the fences around the tower structures are tied into the transmitter interlock circuitry, and in almost all cases, the doors for the tuning shelters are also tied into the interlock systems.

[cyberdad]

I can remember listening to XERF during the 60's while out cruising Indianapolis with my friends. XERF is the first place I heard the Wolfman.

I also remember the signal being much weaker than I expected, what with 250KW, a high frequency and having the night pretty much to itself. Most US stations on 1570 were still daytimers only. Though, I do remember CFOR and CHLO in Ontario did their best to interfere.

I also tried to listen to XERF in the midwest. It was very tough with the competition.

XERF was a little rough to listen to in the Chicago area...primarily due to CFOR and CHLO (more so the latter).  But still it was do-able most nights.  A couple hundred miles to the west where I was in college in Iowa in the late '60s it was a different story.  The signal there was pretty good...but still not exceptional.   

Wolf would come on the air around midnight which basically coincided with when the girls had to be back in their dorm rooms.  The result was you could go up and down the halls in the guys' dorms and here XERF and Wolfman coming from just about every room.  My favorite "moment" in all of this was him one night introducing a new 45.  "You're gonna like this next record so much, you're gonna run out into the street and bang your head into a tree"! 

The record?  Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools".  To this day I can't hear that without thinking of late nights listening to Wolf on XERF.   

The program was always on tape.  Or "The Man is on Tape" as the Richard Dreyfuss character in American Grafitti discovered.