Customer Reviews

Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves

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We're all familiar with infomercials promising miracle diets, TV preachers promising salvation, and e-mail spam promising riches. Although their transmission means are modern, the scams themselves aren't new. They were a born out of the radio age, through stations sometimes called "border blasters." These were high-power AM broadcasters set up just over the Mexican border to beam music, medical miracles and merchandise to the U.S. in a way never heard before on domestic radio.

BORDER RADIO is a wonderful history of the border blaster stations. Fowler and Crawford have compiled an exhaustive history of the stations and personalities in a way that captures the flavor of the times. Some of the radio personalities, like the Goat Gland Doctor, were outright frauds, others, like Wolfman Jack, were the purveyors of the exciting, underground culture of rock-and-roll. All hawked their wares on the border stations, making an impression on American broadcasting, popular music, advertising and merchandising that is still felt today.

Superbly detailed, BORDER RADIO covers the evolution of the medium from the early days of the 1930s when hillbilly music and medical quacks ruled the airwaves, to its demise in the 1960s when television and broadcasting treaties silenced the border stations for good. If you love radio and Americana, you won't be able to put this book down. Highly recommended.

Most books about US radio history are written like a doctoral thesis or ex-dj's gossip gabfests. The non-fiction book tells true tales of tall characters, with enough information sprinkled through to make radio geeks interested. If this were fiction, you'd swear the characters were invented by Kinky Friedman. After reading several books on radio history in recent years, this stands as one of the most informative and entertaining.

"Border Radio . . ." was featured on the radio program "Fresh Air with Terri Gross" and the interview with the author piqued my curiousity enough to buy the somewhat hard to find book.

While most of us born later than the 1960's have probably never heard border radio, we nonetheless have at least heard of it thanks to ZZTop's classic "Heard It On The X". By Mexican law, all radio station call letters had to begin with the letter "X", hence the title. These stations were situated just across the U.S. - Mexican border and blasted the North American continent with as much as 500,000 or even a million watts! Perhaps the funniest part of the story is the anecdotes by people not far from the tower in southwest Texas near Del Rio, particularly who reported picking up transmissions off barbed wire fences, fillings in teeth and, in the last portion of the book that feautures the late Wolfman Jack, his recalling of birds flying too close to the towers and frying in mid-flight!

It's a wonderful history of preachers, the forerunners of today's televangelists, quack doctors, some genuine musical genius, including a young Bob Wills before founding the Texas Playboys and, of course, the Wolfman himself.

Claims of these AM radio giants being heard world-wide can truly be considered a direct ancestor to the world wide web, complete with its own spam in the form of wild commercials and hawking some truly bizarre health products, prayer cloths and just about everything under the sun.

"Border Radio . . . " is well researched and written with obvious great admiration for a lost chapter in broadcast history. A fine read.

Take a trip back to radio's beginning. I've wanted this book for a long time and if you are like me and still get a thrill listening to distant am stations at night this book is for you. This book covers it all with forward by Wolfman Jack. Well worth your time. A great read!

Anyone who thinks that instant virility claims and easy money offers got their start with the Internet should read these tales of super salesmen broadcasting from South of the Border at 200,000 watts. Everything from goat gland "male rejuvenation" to religious salvation was available for a price and with little or no FCC interference.

Add in a few "psychics" and some country & western music and you have a formula that the legal stations in the US couldn't (or wouldn't) match. It was outlaw radio.

Go get this book, friends and neighbors, and keep those cards and letters coming in!

If you have been or know someone who is in the radio business, this book will be a fascinating read. I couldn't put it down after the first chapter detailed the famous radio quack who surgically placed goat glands into human males for renewed vigor! It goes to show us that the masses will believe anything radio and all the media purports to be true. Preachers-fake doctors, wayward singers and hucksters were the programming content of these stations. The book details the stories of almost all the AM stations that dotted the Mexican-U.S. border with higher power than what stateside stations were allowed to have. This caused great consternation with U.S. broadcasters and the FRC (FCC) at the time. I was lucky enough to experience Wolfman Jack on XERF all the way up in Maryland one late night in the 60's. This book quenched the curiosity I always had about the station(s) and its now famous DJ who details driving over sand dunes to work at the station that he eventually became General Manager of. Read it. You'll laugh for hours.

As I read Border Radio, I had to keep reminding myself that this really qualified as a scholarly history well sourced and footnoted. The story is so surreal and hilarious at times, it's hard to keep from falling out of your chair. One improbable character after another beginning with Dr. John R. Brinkley, with dubious medical credentials, transplanting goat testicles in men as a cure for impotence. Other quacks offered cancer cures. Psychics and ministers made pitches that created a snowstorm of mail with checks and postal money orders.

Nowadays, we forget how important radio was in the history of the 20th Century. America had a largely rural population in the 1930's AM radio not only produced entertainment in the cities, it opened up the world to people living isolated lives on farms. Before Radio, people in rural America would get their news weeks later. Radio was important for other reasons. National leaders such as FDR, Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini used radio to communicate their message, often with astounding success, and to consolidate power. It was said that women in Germany would weep with joy at the sound of Hitler's voice. Radio had immense emotional power and significance from 1924 to 1956.

Border Radio arose out of an informal alliance of outcasts. When Canada and the U.S. negotiated agreements on the allotment of radio frequencies, Mexico was excluded from the agreement. John R. Brinkley was being hounded and harassed, for very good reasons, and yet had the resources to fight back and brought with him the money and know how to set up these border blaster radio stations in Mexico. At the time, the American clear channel stations were limited to 50,000 watts. The Border stations transmitting from Piedras Negras, Acuna, and Tijuana were transmitting at night between 3 and 4 times that much wattage. Birds that flew too close to the transmitters were knocked stone dead out of the sky. The stations received mail from as far away as Sweden claiming to hear clear reception. This was an uneasy, unstable, and unpredictable alliance that involved everything from red tape to pitched gun battles. The lawyer, Arturo Gonzalez, was kept busy on both sides of the border for many years.

In the 1930's and 40's, Border radio introduced all kinds of outcast or marginal music to a broader audience and created new stars. Hillbilly music became Bluegrass acts like the Carter Family, Western swing artists like Pappy O'Daniel (who later became a Governor of Texas), Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and the Delmore Brothers. On the Spanish language side, Tejano musicians such as Lydia Mendoza brought her fine voice and 12 string guitar to the night time radio and audiences as far north as North Dakota. What all the music had in common was a gut level passion sometimes lacking in the polished popular music of the era.

Border radio afforded a platform for nondenominational preachers who had otherwise been driven off the air by organized religious groups. As with the music, these preachers tapped into the passionate needs of the audience and were vital for the financial success of the border radio stations. The most familiar of these figures would be Reverend Ike "Get yourself outta the Ghetto and into the Get Mo."

Last but not least of the characters was Wolfman Jack (Robert Smith.) Wolfman Jack was the only Border Radio act I heard live. He was broadcasting on XERB from Rosarita Beach, Mexico. With three rock and roll stations in Los Angeles in the early 1960's (KHJ, KFWB, and KRLA) competing for the same listeners, they pretty much sounded the same. There was also an R&B station (KGFJ) that played for South Central audiences their top ten records. Wolfman Jack played a wider range of music and weaved his bad boy act into the records; an act that went way beyond what was permitted on U.S. stations at the time. Border Radio tells the story of how Robert Smith became Wolfman Jack.

I really enjoyed this book.

This is a fun book for anybody with an interest in the history of radio or of media in general. It describes a lot of the crazy broadcasters, pitchmen, politicians and quacks who, along with a lot of very good musical artists, appeared on the pirate radio stations located just over the U.S. border in Mexico from the 1930s to the 1960s. These stations were able to avoid regulation and use very powerful transmitters, allowing music, political messages or ads for goat gonad transplants and patent medicines to broadcast to huge sections of the U.S. The music played ranged from country, cowboy and Spanish folk tunes, to early rock n' roll. My edition of this book even contains a forward by the legendary Wolfman Jack, who is briefly discussed in the book.

Although some of the political messages being broadcast were quite serious, the book focuses on the wackier side of border radio, devoting significant space to characters such as Dr. Brinkley who transplanted goat gonads into humans as a prostate cure, ex-vaudevillian Norman Baker whose downfall came when his mail-order clerks mixed up the shipments of pile salve and pills being sent to his listeners, and Pappy O'Daniel, a rich flour salesman and sponsor of "hillbilly music" radio programs who successfully ran for governor of Texas. The book also discusses lonely hearts clubs, radio psychics, and radio evangelists (clearly the precursors to today's televangelists).

After reading this book I was sorry that these stations were pretty much legislated out of business by the time I was old enough to tune in, and even more sorry that I couldn't even go visit the border towns mentioned - they sound like wonderful romantic places, but are more likely to be in the news these days for drug murders than anything else. My one minor criticism of the book is that it's not a light read. It's very dense and goes into a lot of detail about the entire border radio scene. My copy also had quite small type (perhaps this was remedied in later editions). So, while the stories recounted are for the most part interesting and enjoyable, I would not recommend it for the casual reader.

Great book if your are 50+. Other wise you won't know what great entertainment the Mexcian border stations really were.

Border Radio chronicles the "quacks, yodelers, pitchmen, psychics and other amazing broadcasters" that populated the high-powered radio stations once arrayed just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The characters profiled, including the goat-gland transplanting John Brinkley, the cancer treating Norman Baker, the flour peddling soon-to-be Texas governor Pappy O'Daniel, and a parade of singing cowboys, astrologers, patent medicine salesmen, soul-saving preachers, and late-night DJs, are colorful, to say the least. So to were the battles fought over, around and between the stations, owners, operators, performers, competitors, politicians, and regulatory agencies, both within Mexico and between Mexico and the U.S.

Yet as rich as is the book's subject matter, the authors' historical account isn't nearly as engaging. The book's timeline meanders back and forth, failing to provide a through-line of the medium's development, and there's insufficient context to really understand how border intertwined with its more conventional brethren and within depression, war and post-war society. At times the narrative wanders from the primary subject, such as a lengthy discourse on Pappy O'Daniel's career as a politician, and the same material pops up in different sections. For the most part, the failure is in the hands of the book's editor, who failed to mold the author's extensive research into a compelling story with a coherent structure.

Though the authors conducted extensive new interviews, the copy still reads like a patchwork of researched sources, seeming to fall into recitation without offering specific quotes. The narrative feels detached, rarely getting inside the characters. None of the writing, for example, communicates the intense creepiness displayed in the photo of Dr. Brinkley in a 1930s operating room. The authors have done their research and know their subject, but their knowledge is inadequately served by their writing. That said, as the only book in print on the subject, this is worth reading, even if it doesn't always live up to its promise. 3-1/2 stars, if allowed fractional ratings. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]