If you’re like me, you love “Pirate Radio,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nighy. The film follows a group of rogue DJs who set up an outlaw radio station on a boat off the coast of Britain to broadcast rock ‘n’ roll to music-hungry fans.

Before pirate radio, however, there was border radio. The concept was the same: avoid regulation and censorship, broadcast music not covered by mainstream radio and avoid the long arm of the law.

The arrival of border radio

In the 1920s, the United States and Canada reached an agreement to share long-distance radio frequencies between themselves, leaving Mexico out of the agreement. Radio caused a stir in both countries as a new communication medium that brought entertainment into people’s living rooms. As a result, a long line of border radio stations – known as border blasters – emerged south of the Rio Grande.

The lack of regulations in Mexico allowed stations to operate at high power of 50,000 to 500,000 watts. This gave them access not only to listeners in the United States, but as far away as Canada, Europe and South America; their target audience was the US

In 1930, American businessmen – mainly con artists and charlatans – began building radio stations along the border. The first was Houston theater owner Will Horwitz, who founded XED radio in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Horwitz was eventually sent to prison by American authorities for broadcasting the Tamaulipas lottery via radio waves that reached the United States.

Another controversial border broadcaster was Iowan Norman Baker, who set up XENT radio in Nuevo Laredo and used it to promote his alleged cure for cancer. However, the most controversial and best known of the outlaw radio station owners was without a doubt John R. Brinkley.

The goat doctor

A failed politician, Brinkley graduated from an unaccredited medical school but eventually ended up practicing medicine in Kansas and Arkansas. One day a farmer presented himself in Brinkley’s office, complaining about his lack of “manly strength” and wishing he had the strength of a billy goat.

With those words, a plan formed in Brinkley’s mind that he called “goat gland rejuvenation surgery” as a cure for male impotence. He implanted a goat’s testicles into the farmer’s scrotum. It turned out to be the perfect scam – a quick operation that didn’t cost much to perform – but he needed a way to publicize his miracle treatment. Then he learned about the power of radio.

In 1923 he received a broadcasting license for his station KFKB in Kansas. Three times a day, between broadcasts of church services and music, Brinkley delivered his medical sermon on the wonders of goat gland rejuvenation. Thousands converged on the small town of Milford, Kansas, in search of the operation. Brinkley became so successful that he had to build a hospital to house all his patients.

The goat gland rejuvenation operations were brought to the attention of Morris Fishbein, president of the American Medical Association. Fishbein, knowing Brinkley was a quack, decided to shut him down for good. Ultimately, Brinkley lost his broadcasting and medical licenses and decided to try his luck south of the Rio Grande. He set up his radio station in Villa Acuña, across from Del Rio, Texas, so Texans could access his services. Mexican officials welcomed the wealthy entrepreneur and facilitated the construction of a 50,000-watt station.

XER’s programming was extremely popular and included yodellers, violinists, Mexican music, religious sermons, psychics and astrologers, but its main purpose was to attract patients to Brinkley’s goat gland rejuvenation business.

Who knows why men believed that goat gonads would restore manhood, but thousands flocked to Villa Acuna for the surgery. Brinkley did quite well and purchased several airplanes, a yacht, and a 40-acre estate called Brinkley Mansion.

Border radio spreads new genres across the US

As the station grew, Brinkley reached an agreement with Mexican officials to broadcast at 500,000 watts and restructured his radio empire under the call letters XERA. The United States was in the depths of the Great Depression and XERA was the only radio signal reaching rural listeners and taking them away from their troubles. He introduced country music to the rest of America when he discovered the Carter Family from the hills of Virginia, who played “hillbilly” music.

The Carter family became country icons. Their music influenced a six-year-old in Arkansas who would eventually marry the family’s daughter June: Johnny Cash. Many country icons, including Hank Williams, Johnny Horton and Cash himself, took advantage of the high-wattage frontier blasters and headed to the frontier to promote and perform their latest single.

XERA was not the only channel to usher in new music genres. XERF radio played a prominent role in introducing Americans to rhythm and blues, soul, rock and roll and blues. Young DJ Bob Smith grew up listening to frontier radio in New York City. In 1963, determined to get on the air at a border station, he arrived in Del Rio, Texas with demos of his radio performances and worked his way into CERF. He eventually became the station manager and was known to his listeners as Wolfman Jack.

As station manager, he included product sales and religious broadcasts in his programming, but after midnight he played jazz, rock and roll, soul and rhythm and blues. Wolfman Jack had a mysterious atmosphere that made him extremely popular. In the post-war 1950s, there was a sense of normalcy and strict moral standards in the United States. The thinly veiled sexual innuendos and new musical genres of Wolfman Jack, broadcast from Mexico, avoided extreme censorship at the time.

ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons was influenced by listening to the blues on border radio while growing up in Lubbock, Texas. The band even dedicated two songs to frontier music, including “I Heard It on the X.”

Border blasters continued to flourish in the 1960s. Then in 1972, Mexico and the United States reached an agreement on radio frequencies, which marked the beginning of the end of border radio. Television broadcasts eventually became the dominant medium.

Border radio, however, ushered in new ways of thinking about music and new expressions of creativity. It took locally popular music out of regional isolation and jettisoned it into the mainstream, changing the culture of the United States.