Wolfman's Jack Long Slow Rise to Popularity
A lot of radio people listened to distant radio stations while they were growing up in the '50s, '60s and '70s. Hearing different stations from different places further increased our desire to get into Radio and helped us on the way by educating us to the wide variety of creative options successfully being used on the air.
As a result, many of us had heard Wolfman Jack before he gained main stream popularity. Making it easy to forget how long it took before he gained the kind of mainstream Name Recognition that he was known for in later years.
The earliest national (U.S.) media mention of Wolfman Jack that I've been able to find is from February 6, 1968, when the fourth episode of the first season of "It Takes a Thief" was aired nationally on ABC-TV in the U.S. Series star Robert Wagner speaks the throw-away line "If I get bored, I can tune into Wolfman Jack." while using a hearing aid to crack a safe.
I've checked with other Wolfman fans and no one has yet come up with an earlier national mainstream media mention. In fact, despite Wolfman's Hollywood studio location, even those living in Los Angeles could hardly be expected to know the name. Tuning across the dial, you would be more likely to find 5000 watt KGB in San Diego, KHJ's predecessor in the Bill Drake-consulted Much More Music format, than you would XERB with Wolfman on the air.
Despite a nice 50,000 watt signal from not far from San Diego, with a directional pattern that greatly favoured Los Angeles both day and night, XERB had two big problems sandwiching in The Mighty 1090: KNX-1070 and KRLA-1110. Both with 50,000 watts in the day, though KRLA did drop to 10,000 watts at night. Very few radios of that era would have protected XERB from an unbearable amount of "slop" from the two stations only 20 KHz away. I visited cousins in suburban Norwalk the previous summer and found Wolfman barely listenable in the late afternoon among the electrical noise of the neighbourhood and slop from KNX. Slightly uptuning the radio to try and get away from KNX made the KRLA slop unbearable.
When I got to San Diego, however, in the one block walk from the motel to the pool hall, I saw a Wolfman Jack poster in a barber shop window.
Most sources that I found refer to the 1969 movie "A Session with the Committee" as his first mass media appearance. Even that hardly got noticed.
Not that the Robert Wagner mention would have made much of an impression. Nor was it intended to. Episode Writer/Producer Leslie Stevens seemingly had a love for "in the know" jokes as the same episode featured a rock band called The Raspberry Wristwatch to make fun of the then- (when he wrote the script) popular group, The Strawberry Alarm Clock.
When did you first become aware of Wolfman Jack? And when did your friends?
For me, it is tough to nail down an exact date, though I know for sure that I was already a fan by January or early February of 1967. That is when another Burnaby DX'er showed me his Wolfman Jack calendar on his wall, and told me about this new KJR late evening DJ who did very good impressions of Wolfman Jack. I can't be sure, but I don't think I heard Wolfman before he appeared on XERB. Other than DX'ers, no one that I knew had heard of The Wolfman until American Graffiti hit the screen.