Clap for the Wolfman
By 
This going to be a rambling Andy Rooney type post so sue me if I blog too long.
I spent the weekend in Buena Vista, Colorado, which is located between the south end of South Park and the northern border of the San Luis Valley, in an area of extreme natural beauty and sparse but growing population. Buena Vista — which the locals pronounce byoonee vista, to let everybody know they’re not Mexicans I guess (side note: I’ve noticed the English traditionally made it an absolute point of pride to never pronounce foreign words correctly; I don’t know if that’s still the case these days what with all the rootless cosmopolitanism and Indian restaurants), features a medium security prison as almost the only employer of any size outside the tourist trade. The latter has taken a big hit this summer, since the flow of the Arkansas river is so low that all the rafting companies skipped the whole season, which normally runs from May through September.
The other thing about the town is that the population seems REALLY old, because besides the people working at the prison and the seasonal tourist trade workers a large portion of the rest of the residents are retirees, since until recently land was cheap, and the climate was actually quite good for 8,000 feet above sea level — it’s in a valley that’s much warmer than much of the surrounding topography.
The cost of housing has gone through the roof this decade, as what my brother the historian refers to as “the white plague” has struck the town, and a fairly ordinary house is now pushing a million dollars (does not include a real green dress — that’s cruel).
ANYWAY . . . one symptomatic glimpse into the demographics of any area is how old the music on the radio is. Buena Vista features a station which styles itself quite absurdly as “Hippie Radio.” “Hippie” here just means pop music from the 1960s and early-mid 1970s, not twenty-seven minute Grateful Dead jams, which I suppose indicates how the term “hippie” has degenerated into a vague metonym for anything related at all the youth culture of the 1960s, the vast majority of which of course had nothing whatsoever to do with the hippie counterculture.
Moving right along, I was listening to the station on my way to purvey some cheesy comestibles, and who should the DJ be but none other than Wolfman Jack, whose unmistakable voice I hadn’t heard in many a moon. My first thought was “Wolfman Jack is still here in this dimension?” My second thought was I need to google that, and what do you know he’s been dead since 1995 (this naturally made me think of the line from Pictures of Lilly. Oh how I cried that night . . . ). The thing that struck me about the show I was listening to was that it was a repackaging of a Wolfman Jack broadcast from the 1970s, which was dominated by his playing of many nostalgic tracks from . . . five to ten years earlier. This reminded me of how George Lucas made American Graffiti in 1973 about the long-lost world of Modesto, California of . . . eleven years earlier.
Also . . . I learned that “Jack” was 1950s hipster slang, as in “hit the road Jack,” or “that’s a fact Jack,” which is how the Wolfman got his name. One cool thing is that he played a version of “It Don’t Come Easy,” Ringo Starr’s big solo hit, by George Harrison, that was exactly the same song, in the sense that it was almost exactly the same instrumental and vocal tracks, mixed just slightly differently, except with George’s rather than Ringo’s voice taking the lead (Neither of those guys could sing at all, or I guess can, since Richard Starkey is still very much with us).
Then I saw a kid walk across Main Street wearing a Lamine Yamal jersey and I thought it’s a small world after all. And the next song was Those Were The Days My Friend by Mary Hopkin, which I literally hadn’t heard in thirty or forty years, which made for quite a Proustian moment I suppose. Which reminds me that there’s a plaque at the top of the Kenosha Pass, which is at the other end of South Park, that quotes what Walt Whitman had to say when he gazed upon the buena vista from that very spot 150 or so years ago, and that really blew my mind as they used to say.