{"id":2132,"date":"2021-03-13T20:24:12","date_gmt":"2021-03-13T20:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2132"},"modified":"2021-03-13T20:26:41","modified_gmt":"2021-03-13T20:26:41","slug":"ftv-robert-weston-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2132","title":{"rendered":"FTV: Robert Weston Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Robert Weston Smith.\u00a0 Does the name ring any bells?\u00a0 No?\u00a0 How about Big Smith and the Records?\u00a0 Daddy Jules?\u00a0 I will give you a couple of hints:\u00a0 If you have seen the movie <\/span>American Graffiti <\/span><\/i>or reruns of the TV show <\/span>The Midnight Special <\/span><\/i>or heard Bob Smith\u2019s, \u201cHave Mercy!\u201d catch phrase, then you might know where this is leading.\u00a0 Okay, I will let you off the hook because prior to reading his autobiography, I had no idea that all of the above can be attributed to the one and only Wolfman Jack.\u00a0 Robert Weston Smith (1938-1995) was a nationally recognized radio personality forty plus years into his career when he collaborated on his book (<\/span>Have Mercy!\u00a0 Confessions of the Original Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll Animal <\/span><\/i>– Wolfman Jack with Byron Laursen – 1995 – Warner Books).\u00a0 The Wolfman\u2019s story began in New York, took him to Newport News, Virginia, Shreveport, Louisiana, Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, back to Shreveport, on to Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, and back to L.A.\u00a0 He rose from local DJ to national treasure before landing back east in North Carolina for good.\u00a0 We might remember the bug-eyed, behatted, howling Wolfman Jack from his TV gigs, but there was a lot more to Bob Smith\u2019s story than one could imagine.\u00a0 The Right Reverend Bishop Wolfman Jack who presided over one of Beach Boy Mike Love\u2019s multiple marriages?\u00a0 Yep, that is another part of the story we won\u2019t even have time to get to in our limited space.\u00a0 Let us go back and start where all good stories should, at the beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Born in New York City in 1938, young Bobby\u2019s family was struggling financially.\u00a0 His father had been doing quite well until the stock market crash of 1929 revoked his membership in the \u2018almost a millionaire\u2019 club.\u00a0 Eventually, he was able to claw his way back financially, but the family would come unhinged as his mother and father grew apart.\u00a0 Their long time housekeeper Frances (called Tantan because his sister Joan could not pronounce her name) provided stability at home when things went south.\u00a0 Tantan was also Bobby\u2019s introduction into Black culture and music. \u00a0 Joan, ten years older than Bobby when their mother and father took up with new spouses, would be his other anchor.\u00a0 When they lived on Long Island, father Weston had rigged up their garage with a classic 78 RPM Wurlitzer jukebox for Joan and her friends, the kind with bubbles rising through multicolored tubes on each side.\u00a0 Ten year old Bobby was charged with punching in the numbers and it was there that he got his first glimpse of how to pick songs that would set a mood for the dancers.\u00a0 It was at these homegrown dance parties that the seeds of his future DJ identity were sown.\u00a0 Wolf recalls, \u201cThose times are always in the back of my mind whenever I do a live show.\u00a0 If people have as much fun at the gigs I emcee nowadays as we all had in those jukebox dances in the family garage, then I am satisfied.\u201d\u00a0 The seeds may have been sown, but there would be troubling times ahead before any harvest would come from the crop.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bobby\u2019s mother and father got to know another couple socially and about the time he was five, his parents separated.\u00a0 Ma and Pa Smith swapped spouses with this other couple.\u00a0 Bobby and Joan would end up spending summers with their father and the school year with their mother.\u00a0 Bobby\u2019s sister grew to be an attractive young woman who did some modeling before settling down to raise her own family.\u00a0 Weston Smith and his new wife added son Stewart to the family.\u00a0 Wolfman later said his step mother\u2019s stifling ways turned Stewart into a creepy kid who rebelled when he got older.\u00a0 In this case, \u2018rebelling\u2019 meant signing up to a military prep school against his mother\u2019s wishes and straightening out his life.\u00a0 Bobby\u2019s mother also added another son, Gary, who shadowed him and provided the future Wolf with a purpose (protecting his little brother).\u00a0 Landing in a tough technical high school in the pre-<\/span>Blackboard Jungle<\/span><\/i> era in Brooklyn\u2019s Prospect Park West neighborhood, teenage Bobby began running with a gang called The Tigers.\u00a0 If this brings to mind the Sharks and Jets from <\/span>Westside Story<\/span><\/i>, that isn\u2019t far off from the early 1950\u2019s environment Bobby lived in.\u00a0 If he couldn\u2019t get attention on the home front, the future Wolfman would find it on the street.\u00a0 In the end, he avoided a hardcord gang life when another path called his name.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bobby and a couple of his closer friends in The Tigers began listening to music in the old coal bin in the basement of the Brownstone building where he lived with his father.\u00a0 When his step brother Stewart got a new record player, Bobby hauled the old one down to the bin.\u00a0 The 45 RPMs came courtesy of his pal Klepto who made an art form out of leaving the record shop listening room with more records in his coat pockets than he returned to the shelves.\u00a0 When Bobby\u2019s father got him a Transoceanic model radio for Christmas, they guys in the listening bin bergan absorbing cool DJ patter from all over the place.\u00a0 For example, John R. from WLAC in Nashville would kick off his program with, \u201cYeah, It\u2019s big John R., the blues man!\u00a0 Whoa.\u00a0 Have <\/span>mercy<\/span><\/i>, have mercy, have mercy.\u00a0 John R., way down south in the middle of Dixie.\u201d\u00a0 The coal bin crew assumed many things about John R. because of\u00a0 his warm-toned black accent.\u00a0 The boys could pick him up in Brooklyn because WLAC had gotten permission from the FCC to broadcast a signal strong enough to reach rural areas around the south providing programming rural Blacks wanted to hear.\u00a0 The sounds may have come from what Bobby called \u2018the heartland of hillbilly\u2019 and John R. was\u00a0 as caucasian as the future Wolfman, but the music was just as cool as what they heard coming from Harlem, Bed-Stuy and Hell\u2019s Kitchen.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0George Carlin grew up on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge from Bobby and the coal bin boys, but he later put into words what Bobby\u2019s crew were picking up on:\u00a0 \u201cThe black people, even though they\u2019d been denied their freedoms in the worst possible way, had more freedom in them than the people who had enslaved them.\u00a0 They had freedom with their bodies, freedom to speak and move beautifully.\u00a0 They had an ease with each other that white guy didn\u2019t have.\u201d\u00a0 It was in this environment that young Bobby Smith began to absorb elements of black culture that led many who heard (but had not yet seen) Wolfman Jack to assume that he too was of African-American heritage.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bobby and his step mother clashed enough that\u00a0 when he dropped out of school, she finally gave his father the \u2018he goes or I go\u2019 ultimatum.\u00a0 With $300 in seed money from his dad, he and a buddy bought a used car and set off to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune as actors.\u00a0 They made it as far as his sister\u2019s home in Alexandria, Virginia where they became part of a household that included his sister, her husband and four young boys.\u00a0 A relative of his brother-in-law came down with a serious illness which added two more youngsters to the mix. \u00a0 Bobby\u2019s friend went back north and \u2018Uncle Bob\u2019 settled into a happy family life he had never really had before. \u00a0 He did his share of the chores and worked as an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman and later as a Fuller Brush Man.\u00a0 While writing his biography, Bob remembered first becoming \u2018the Wolfman\u2019 while chasing his nephews around the house growling and howling to keep them entertained.\u00a0 He also set up his playroom digs with homemade studio equipment so he could practice reproducing what he heard other DJs doing on the radio.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A fatherly talk with his brother-in-law made Bob think about what he really wanted to do.\u00a0 It was suggested that surely there was a school of some type that would teach what he needed to know to have a career in radio.\u00a0 There was:\u00a0 The National Academy of Broadcasting.\u00a0 He finally summoned the courage to call his father and ask if there was any way for his dad to float him the $3000 tuition.\u00a0 Assured by the brother-in-law that this is something that would be good for Bobby, Weston Smith sent him a check.\u00a0 Bob Smith may have failed at his previous attempts in school, but the one year course\u00a0 at NAB soon produced \u2018Daddy Jules\u2019.\u00a0 After graduation, he recorded a promotional show of R&B music and was preparing to send it to stations across the country.\u00a0 Wolf was the only student at NAB who was into that type of music so it was only natural that the school introduced him to Richard Eaton, the president of the United Broadcasting Company.\u00a0 Eaton needed to double the staff at his small Newport News, Virginia station.\u00a0 WYOU was conceived as the first station to broadcast specifically for black listeners.\u00a0 Back in New York, Bobby had spent time volunteering around a radio studio (ditching school to do so led to his last blowout with his step mother).\u00a0 He knew the territory and already knew what it took to run all the aspects of a station.\u00a0 Bobby also loved the music so he never did mail out his audition tapes.\u00a0 He signed on to what was then considered a low rent station:\u00a0 One that had a weak signal, crummy facilities, or both.\u00a0 In this case, Eaton had turned this low revenue (and later his whole network of stations) into a radio success story.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t pay much and there were only two guys running the whole WYOU operation, but it gave Bobby Smith, aka Daddy Jules, a purpose and profession in his life.\u00a0 It was called radio.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ironically, his first partner, a 350 pound African American named Tex Gathings.\u00a0 Tex sounded like the Harvard grad he was when he spoke and Bobby was hired because he sounded like a black DJ.\u00a0 Tex became his mentor and father figure guiding Daddy Jules through a graduate course in radio, sales, and Black diction.\u00a0 Knowing Bobby had a great fondness toward Black culture (and a record collection leaning heavily on those influences thanks to Klepto), Tex made sure that his partner did not come off as some white guy mangling the lingo.\u00a0 Wolf later said it was like his graduation from a Master\u2019s program when Tex let him take over his Sunday jazz show.\u00a0 Mr. Eaton came down from Washington, D.C. once a month to collect from the ad accounts that were in arrears.\u00a0 He would also slip Tex and Daddy Jules a C-note each, which was great as Bobby\u2019s salary was only sixty dollars a week.\u00a0 He was light on cash, but heavy on experience by the time he moved on from WYOU.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mo Burton started working at the business end of WYOU and then bought up another poorly performing station in Shreveport, Louisiana.\u00a0 Mo convinced Bob to go there to work for him.\u00a0 It was a country station, so Bobby became \u2018Big Smith and the Records\u2019 in honor of the favored Big Smith brand overalls worn by the local farmers.\u00a0 During his time in Shreveport, he and Mo decided to take a pilgrimage to visit the 250,000 watt \u2018border blaster\u2019 station across the US\/Mexico line near Del Rio, Texas.\u00a0 Bobby had been able to hear XERF at 1570 AM back in Brooklyn and it had inspired him.\u00a0 The transmitter was so powerful, the headlight filaments in the cars parked outside the studio would vibrate and glow.\u00a0 The whole \u2018X-radio\u2019 thing (as in ZZ Tops iconic song <\/span>Heard it on the X<\/span><\/i>) is a story for another day.\u00a0 It was on XERF that the real \u2018Wolfman\u2019 began his storied radio career, only no one ever saw him.\u00a0 Bob Smith the radio guy pulled the strings, but \u2018Wolfman Jack\u2019 was only heard and not seen.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Having more or less taken over the station in what can only be described as a \u2018coup\u2019 (and not a \u2018bloodless coup\u2019 at that).\u00a0 Bob found himself in what can only be described as a \u2018range war\u2019 with real bullets flying when the old ownership took umbrage at being pushed out by Mo and Bob.\u00a0 When he ended up facing not one, but two flaming crosses (one at the studio, one at home) back in Shreveport (the KKK was unhappy with the racial mix that Big Smith would attract to some of his live events), it was time to move on.\u00a0 Bob\u2019s wife, Lou, and their two children landed in cold and snowy Minneapolis, Minnesota.\u00a0 His successful stint there led to an offer to try his hand at running another border blaster (XERB located in Tijuana, Mexico, adjacent to San Diego).\u00a0 The difference was the location:\u00a0 The XERB home office was set up on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and all of the Wolfman\u2019s programs were sent to the station on tape via Greyhound bus.\u00a0 Eventually, the money that XERB was pulling down caught the attention of the Mexican authorities who strong armed Bob and Mo aside, leaving the Wolfman (and radio businessman Bob Smith) deep in debt.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bob had a nice home in Beverly Hills, a wonderful little family, and not enough income to continue living the life.\u00a0 When he hit rock bottom, a couple of new opportunities dropped into his lap.\u00a0 One was the chance to play himself as the connecting plot device in a cheap little movie being made by a young, unknown director.\u00a0 Universal Studios were not sold on George Lucas\u2019s little coming of age story called <\/span>American Graffiti<\/span><\/i>, but in the end, it became a huge hit and put Bob Smith back in the black.\u00a0 Universal was so unsure of the film, they passed on the second outing Lucas was trying to get them to fund –\u00a0 a little saga called <\/span>Star Wars<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 The scene in <\/span>American Graffiti<\/span><\/i> where Bob Smith\u2019s DJ character offers Richard Dreyfus\u2019 \u2018Chris Henderson\u2019 a melting popsicle is a snapshot reflecting Smith\u2019s radio career at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The second opportunity was an offer to become the permanent host of a series of live concert performances called <\/span>The Midnight Special<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 By the time he was recommended for the job by the host of the first episodes, Johnny Rivers, Bob Smith had decided that his path to stardom was to fully embrace his alter ego \u2018Wolfman Jack\u2019.\u00a0 Bob Smith was a solid radio business guy, but it would be the Wolfman Jack character that would be hired to face off against the biggest DJ in New York City, Cousin Brucie.\u00a0 The Wolfman\u2019s wild and crazy persona rubbed some of the brass at WNBC\u2019s home base in the Rockefeller Center the wrong way.\u00a0 Regardless, he brought the goods and gave NBC the number one radio program they were seeking when they pried Bob Smith out of Los Angeles by waving big money at him.\u00a0 Being in what he called \u2018the happiness business\u2019, Wolf found the party life afforded him by being the number one radio jock in New York City a full time job.\u00a0 The excesses he indulged in were not healthy for his person or his marriage.\u00a0 When his wife left him for a time and moved back to her native North Carolina, the Wolfman had some tough choices to make.\u00a0 In the end, he gave up his New York gig (he got NBC to hire Cousin Brucie away from WABC as his replacement) to go on tour with The Guess Who.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There have been many songs that include references to Wolfman Jack.\u00a0 The Guess Who\u2019s <\/span>Clap for the Wolfman<\/span><\/i> (their first hit in over four years) led the band to offer Wolf $10,000 per show to come along on a 37 date tour to perform his part in that one song live.\u00a0 The six week gig paid more than he earned in a year at WNBC but there was the small problem of his contract with NBC.\u00a0 When he offered the Wolf for Brucie swap, it was fine with the suits at NBC who were just as happy to see him go as Bob was to get out of NYC.\u00a0 It also cemented the idea that Bob Smith could run his Wolfman Jack enterprise from home while continuing to tape <\/span>The Midnight Special<\/span><\/i> and do other live gigs.\u00a0 He and Mo were the first to come up with the concept of syndication, allowing him to record shows, be heard in markets all across the country, and still have time to be Bob Smith, family guy.\u00a0 The one constant throughout Bob Smith\u2019s life in career was his native Brooklyn penchant for being a hustler.\u00a0 He had ups and downs, but he was always on the lookout for the next opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Things were going along great for Bob\/Wolfman Jack until July, 1995.\u00a0 Living in North Carolina, he had just finished recording one of his syndicated shows when he collapsed and died from a heart attack.\u00a0 He is buried in a family cemetery in Belvidere and is survived by his wife Lu Lamb and children Tod Weston Smith and Joy Rene Smith.\u00a0 Twenty six years in the grave and his name still brings a smile to anyone who had the pleasure of hearing him do his Wolfman Jack thing.\u00a0 If you are not familiar with his work, find a couple of episodes of <\/span>The Midnight Special <\/span><\/i>on line or watch <\/span>American Graffiti.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>The Wolfman is a cultural time capsule all by himself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Piece Video –\u00a0 The Guess Who sing the Wolfman Jack song!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Robert Weston Smith.\u00a0 Does the name ring any bells?\u00a0 No?\u00a0 How about Big Smith and the Records?\u00a0 Daddy Jules?\u00a0 I will give you a couple of hints:\u00a0 If you have seen the movie American Graffiti or reruns of the TV show The Midnight Special or heard Bob Smith\u2019s, \u201cHave Mercy!\u201d catch phrase, then you might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-from-the-vaults","category-humor","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2132"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2135,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions\/2135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}