The Big Bad Wolf
On a Saturday night in June, Howard Wolff, known as “The Big Bad Wolf” when on the air, came home after his weekly Nothing But the Blues show on listener-sponsored FM. As always, he brewed himself a cup of green tea. Then, as he did most late nights, he sat down in front of his computer. But instead of pulling up the short story he’d been trying to finish for over a week, he opened a copy of John Updike’s Too Far To Go. Settling on a tale called “Your Lover Just Called,” he started typing away, changing the location from the East Coast to the West, while also renaming the characters and dubbing the finished product “Guess Who Called.”
Far from plagiarism or fraud, this was to be the first step in a test. Convinced that the upper echelons of the literary world judged submissions more on an author’s cachet than on narrative or prose – that like Hollywood moguls they were starfuckers – Wolff was going to submit modestly altered classics under a series of aliases.
Though he sometimes referred to his own writing as an avocation – something to fill his spare time instead of golf or pickleball – the truth was it gave him significant satisfaction. Nor did he take it lightly when he received an acceptance email, or when a piece appeared, whether online or in actual print.
But it rankled Wolff that the prestige publications preferred what seemed like a mediocre or tossed-off piece by a name writer over a better one by somebody with neither name recognition nor a powerful agent.
Worse, in Wolff’s eyes, was the highhanded treatment by the New Yorker or the Paris Review, often not even deigning to send rejection letters. That, sadly, also seemed to hold true for the self-styled upper tier of lit rags, the likes of Granta, Ploughshares, and The Three Penny Review.
To his chagrin, that same double-standard existed in the source of his livelihood: music. It irritated him that people who revered Stevie Ray Vaughan rarely acknowledged Stevie’s idol, Albert King. Or that Eric Clapton was far better known than the great T-Bone Walker. Though a champion of Otis Redding, it irked Wolff that Otis’s fans knew little, and cared less, about James Carr, Joe Tex, or Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Accused of willfully overstating the importance of artists like Slim Harpo, Solomon Burke, and Irma Thomas because of their limited commercial success, Wolff always countered that despite their stardom, two of his favorites were Ray Charles and Duke Ellington.
Once his reworked version of the story was finished, Wolff emailed it as an unsolicited submission to the New Yorker, ostensibly written, with a wink to an under-appreciated Soul singer, by Howard Tate. For a moment, he pondered adding other recipients, then decided to stick to his plan of sending individual modified stories to different publications.
Eschewing authors whose work or style was too familiar – Hemingway, Salinger, Raymond Carver – Wolff also chose to stay away from women, including one of his favorites, Pam Houston. Left untouched as well were minorities like Junot Diaz, plus singular voices like Borges and Kafka.
Next Wolff selected someone whose writing he appreciated, James Salter. Making the same kind of changes – relocating the story to SoCal, changing the names of the characters, and adding some up-to-date dialogue – “There Will Never Be A Night Like This” morphed into “A Night Most Singular,” with Don Covay, a talented singer-songwriter, lending his name as the putative author. Off it went to The Paris Review.
Two days later it was an “adaptation” of Nathan Englander’s “The Reader,” which Wolff re-dubbed “Book Lover.” This time the supposed author carried the name of the guy who recorded “Chicken Shack Boogie,” Texas singer-pianist Amos Milburn. The recipient: Granta.
Then came Charles Baxter’s “Loyalty,” renamed “Fidelity,” and now bearing the name of the artist who recorded the original version of “Merry Christmas, Baby,” Charles Brown. Off it went to The Threepenny Review.
Weary from relentless typing, Wolff decided to hold off temporarily on other submissions.
What ensued was suspense. First days. Then weeks. Then months. All the while Wolff wondered whether anyone would call him out either on the appropriation of other peoples’ writing or, less likely, on the names he playfully appropriated for the credited writers.
Still there was silence – no accusations, no recriminations, no rejections of, and above all no acceptances.
Wolff flirted with doing another round of “adaptations” – maybe something by Tobias Wolff, or Joe Meno, or Robert Olen Butler – then decided to hold off in the hope he could finish the new draft of his not yet finished new story.
Or maybe he could try his hand at nonfiction, since he’d been wanting for some time to write a couple of pieces again for Britain’s Blues & Rhythm. The first would be about New Orleans Rhythm & Blues, which would allow him to express his affection for Huey “Piano” Smith’s great “Don’t You Just Know It,” while the second would be an appreciation of Charles Brown, who influenced many others, including Ray Charles.
When asked how he learned so much about Blues, Jazz, and what used to be known as R&B, Wolff always gave a surprising answer: “I didn’t.” Then he would explain that the reason he didn’t learn about it was that because his formative years were spent in a Black neighborhood in Newark, it was simply there, like the air, or the playground, or the soul food restaurant where he took refuge from his mother’s smoke-filled kitchen while enjoying the jukebox filled with records by everyone from Big Maybelle and Wynonie Harris to Little Richard and Gene Ammons.
Music then was ubiquitous. It could be heard through people’s windows, from car radios, and in virtually every store. That made Wolff the living proof that the music one appreciates up through the age of fourteen is the music that’s cherished all through life.
Initially Wolff envisioned a career in the style of Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis – pounding the keyboard and singing in a distinctive style.
That dream hit a wall with the recognition that while he was pretty good, pretty good wasn’t good enough. The next step seemed to be producing. Though that was unlikely to be an entry-level position for someone with little money and even fewer connections, Wolff talked his way into an opening at a recording studio in Manhattan. His title was intern, which in actuality meant go-fer, as in “Go for this” or “Go for that.”
While soaking up as many the tricks of the trade as possible, Wolff came to two realizations. First, for the most part the music he cherished was no longer being produced. Worse, with the possible exception of Daptone in Brooklyn, most of the action had moved west.
So loading up his beat-up Volvo, off Wolff went to Los Angeles.
Lean years followed as he cobbled together some semblance of a living, all the while becoming part of a network that he and the others playfully called “music geeks”: people with one or two key obsessions. There was Harvey, the world’s foremost authority on Cincinnati’s King Records. And Dave, an authority on Southern Soul. Plus Audrey, whose fixation was free jazz: Ornette Coleman, Bobby Bradford, Horace Tapscott, etc. As well as others whose focus was Doo-Wop, or sounds from LA’s historic Central Avenue scene, or honking saxophonists including Big Jay McNeely and Joe Houston, etc.
It was through that group that Wolff heard about an opening at the listener-supported radio station in nearby Long Beach. Starting as a fill-in when other DJ’s fell sick or took a vacation, he worked his way first to a midnight to 2AM slot on weekends. His diligence, coupled with attrition – one DJ retired, then another moved to Bakersfield – led initially to a Wednesday afternoon show, then to prime-time evening slots on Saturdays and Sundays.
Wolff’s Saturday show, You & Me & R&B, ran the gamut from Joe Liggins and Jesse Belvin to Ernie K-Doe and Irma Thomas, while Nothing But The Blues ranged from Bessie Smith to Bobby “Blue” Bland, and from Howlin’ Wolf to Percy Mayfield.
That new-found exposure opened unexpected doors. Wolff was named co-promoter of a Blues festival, then two years later rose to head promoter. That led to a gig teaching a course on the Blues at Long Beach City College. Next came something even more unexpected: an overture from a commercial station. Recognizing that would mean a leap financially, but far less freedom, Wolff cogitated for a couple of days, then declined. Then came an opportunity that pleased him far more: writing liner notes for reissues and compilations of records he adored.
Those liner notes, plus an occasional introductory essay about an artists or a genre, were the revelation that led to Wolff trying his hand at short stories. Not surprisingly, it was his love of music that first sparked his interest in literature, when he learned that Kerouac often read while accompanied by Slim Gaillard – and that Jean Shepard did the same while accompanied by Charles Mingus.
Smitten with the written word, Wolff starting haunting used bookstores. Raymond Chandler became an early love, then Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the first few novels by Thomas Pynchon.
Following the adage about writing what you know, Wolff’s initial efforts at fiction were inspired by his childhood. Not given to sharing, it was awkward at first, then strangely liberating. He wrote about growing up white in a largely Black neighborhood. He wrote about finding a refuge where there was not merely food with taste, but also great music, at the soul food restaurant on the corner. He wrote about time spent with his Edinburgh-born paternal grandmother, who provided solace from the repressive atmosphere at home. Then he moved on to works of the imagination instead of thinly-veiled autobiography.
Though the writing remained daunting, Wolff persevered, ultimately finding homes for some of his efforts thanks to small online publications.
But when he submitted to the so-called elite magazines? Nothing, nada, zip.
When another month went by without a single response – positive, negative, or even an accusation – Wolff shrugged and wrote off his experiment.
Two days later a strange email arrived. Identifying herself as a lowly reader assigned to unsolicited material for a high-profile magazine, Amy Mangino – who chose not to name the magazine – said that it was the credited writer of the submission that first caught her attention, since her father had introduced her to music from that era.
The story itself, Amy Mangino continued, seemed strangely familiar, so she ran it through AI and quickly discovered why that was so.
Though she was tempted to contact the so-called writer immediately with an accusation of plagiarism, Amy Mangino instead followed a hunch and reached out to her equivalents at several other magazines. Having including a list of other singers who were contemporaries of the one credited as author, she was not entirely surprised to receive two positive responses.
“So tell me,” Amy wrote. “If this is an attempt to find out if there’s star-fucking, while I’ll never say it publicly, you bet.”
Pleased, Wolff replied immediately. “If I write about this, can I quote you as ‘an insider’? Or as ‘a person in the know’?”
“Okay, as long as you don’t mention my name or where I work.”
“I don’t know where you work. But one other favor. Any chance you can get me quotes – which will remain unattributed – from not just you, but also the people you reached out to at the other publications?”
“I can try,” wrote Amy Mangino. “And even better, if you write an expose of sorts, maybe I can help you get it published at one of the big name lit rags.”
“That’d be amazing!” wrote Wolff.
Wolff was happy when when Amy sent her own quote: “The system is rigged.” He grew happier still when he received one from a second source: “The fix is always in.” Then came another: “There’s an in-group, and everybody else.” And the fourth was a bombshell: “Unless you’re a name – or have a powerful agent – to get accepted you better be a radical feminist Albanian ex-nun or else a gay POC.”
Seeing this as an opportunity for a qualitative move on the writing side of his career, Wolff spent night after night ruminating not just about the how and why of his experiment, but also his feelings about not being fully accepted.
That meant that sleep was often a problem while his mind raced with ideas, notions, and possibilities.
By the time Wolff finished a rough draft, a request arrived from Amy Mangino. Could she take a look at the work-in-progress so as to start thinking about where best to place it?
Though initially elated, Wolff began to have doubts. From a reputation standpoint, finding a home at the so-called top tier would be a significant boost. But wasn’t he the one who’d spurned an overture from commercial radio not just for freedom, but also out of loyalty to the listener-sponsored that gave him a chance? Using that reasoning, would it be fair to the publications that had been welcoming him when he was new to storytelling?
Realizing that jilting those lit rags would be even more hypocritical in light of his championing of artists like James Carr, Joe Tex, and Irma Thomas, Wolff made some revisions, did a polish, then allowed the resulting draft to sit for a week.
Upon re-reading the manuscript, he sent it to the online magazine that was the first to publish one of his tales.
Alan Swyer is an award-winning filmmaker whose recent documentaries have dealt with Eastern spirituality in the Western world, the criminal justice system, diabetes, boxing, and singer Billy Vera. In the realm of music, among his productions is an album of Ray Charles love songs. His novel ‘The Beard’ was recently published by Harvard Square Editions. His newest film is “When Houston Had The Blues.”
