Peter Wolf is ready to look back

Boston Globe

07-03-2025

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But as the subtitle suggests, music is just one of Wolf's many muses. In his private life, which he guards carefully, Wolf is an aesthete of the first order. His home is packed with books, and he loves talking about classic films — a passion for art and culture that imbues the whole memoir.
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'Waiting on the Moon' regales readers not only with tales from the rock 'n' roll trenches, but also encounters with Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, Julia Child, and Martin Scorsese, to name a few. Yes, there are a couple of chapters about his five-year marriage to Faye Dunaway. But he had little interest in writing a 'kiss and tell' or a standard rock-survivor memoir, as he explained over a long, leisurely interview at his house.
'I would almost call it a fan's notes, [about] my experience with these artists that I really admire,' Wolf said, nibbling on French bread and cheese in his open-plan kitchen. His aim, he said, was to 'make it about them, not about me.'
It's almost as if he's still channeling that moonlighting DJ, the young man who enthused to the point of bursting on the airwaves until the wee hours of the morning about his favorite performers, the wiry kid who grew up revering Alan Freed, Symphony Sid, and the other mid-century radio personalities who made the music come alive.
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A chronic night owl, Wolf was born for that kind of connection — 'that nocturnal aspect of being out there, alone in a studio, not knowing who might be listening. But you're putting all this energy into some spirit out there, some imaginary person.'
A Bronx native, he came to Boston
The Hallucinations sounded like a combination of Van Morrison's hard-edged garage band, Them, and the Yardbirds, Wolf said.
'We would have been classified as a punk band in a certain sense,' he said. For his next solo album, which he claimed is 'about 80 percent finished,' he has recorded a new version of 'Love's Not So Easily Had,' one of the originals the Hallucinations recorded with Tashian but never released.
From left: lead singer Peter Wolf, J. Geils, Stephen Bladd, and Danny Klein perform with the J. Geils Band at the Boston Garden on Feb. 11, 1979.
Janet Knott/Globe Staff
Over nearly 20 years beginning in the late 1960s, the J. Geils Band brought Wolf's lifelong love of deep-cut soul music to hard-partying rock 'n' roll crowds. After meeting guitarist John Geils and harmonica player Richard Salwitz (better known as 'Magic Dick') in a Boston coffeehouse, Wolf became the band's lead singer.
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Signed to Atlantic Records ahead of their 1970 debut album, they shared the stage with some of the all-time greats, including the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, and Chuck Berry. Renowned for their relentlessly energetic live show, the Geils Band reserved opening slots for up-and-coming acts that included the Eagles, Tom Petty, and U2. In the early '80s, after a move to EMI Records, the band scored major hit albums with 'Love Stinks' and 'Freeze Frame.'
But although the Geils Band has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame five times, most recently in 2018,
'Blindsided, I walked out of that meeting in shock,' he writes. 'It was one of the coldest days of my life.' That chapter is called 'Fratricide.'
Yet he quickly found his footing as a solo artist, scoring an immediate hit with 'Lights Out' and recording a song with the legendary Aretha Franklin (yes, there's a chapter on that). Because of those successes, Wolf figures that 'probably 90 percent' of the Geils Band's fans to this day assume he left of his own accord.
The band, meanwhile, imploded after one Wolf-less album. They reunited periodically over the years, including a show-stopping set at the all-star Boston Strong event at the TD Garden after the Marathon bombings in 2013. But it was never the same for Wolf.
Wolf in 1990, before the release of his third solo album following his 1983 departure from the J. Geils Band.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Instead, he devoted his considerable energy to crafting a solo career that has drawn on a more laid-back brand of Americana and country soul, featuring a band led by the impeccable Boston-based guitarist Duke Levine. Wolf's friend Mick Jagger joined him on the 2002 track 'Nothing But the Wheel,' and one of his biggest heroes, Merle Haggard, cut a duet with him in 2010 called 'It's Too Late for Me.'
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'When I first heard that, I listened to it over and over,' said Guralnick, who has known Wolf since the late 1960s. 'I can't imagine a deeper truth.'
Wolf, said Guralnick, is 'entirely motivated by his own interests and impulses, and he has been from the start.' His unusual memoir, Guralnick said, is 'a realization of a total vision, his fascination with the world around him. He always has this inquisitive sensibility.'
While explaining his approach to writing the book, Wolf is quick to reference some of the vignette-filled nonfiction writing that inspired him — Truman Capote's 'The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places' (1973), for instance, or the editor Michael Korda's 'Another Life: A Memoir of Other People' (1999).
'It was based on [Christopher] Isherwood's quote, 'I am a camera, with its shutter open,'' he said.
In conversation, he told several stories that didn't make the final cut for the book. Like the time the Geils Band, frustrated by their inability to get booked as the musical act on 'Saturday Night Live,' instead
Or like the time Wolf hung out with the great Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard (he's the guy who famously described country music as 'three chords and the truth'). When Howard mentioned how much he loved Dunaway's role in 'Bonnie and Clyde' (1967), Wolf let him in on a little secret (to Howard, at least): He'd once been married to her.
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To prove it to his incredulous drinking partner, Wolf dialed up his ex-wife and put her on the phone. Howard had written 'Pick Me Up on Your Way Down,' which was Dunaway's favorite song, and she told him so.
Even in the final draft of the book, Wolf is judicious about his memories. He's been friendly with another notoriously private rock star, Bob Dylan, for decades. But he doesn't reveal any of that: Instead, he recalls their earliest encounters, back when Dylan was a newcomer on the Greenwich Village folk scene and Wolf was still Peter Blankfield from the Bronx. (He took on his stage name after having his picture taken with the blues giant Howlin' Wolf.)
'Rather than beating his chest,' as Guralnick noted, 'he talks about how he was stealing drinks from Dylan as a young punk. It's one of the things that's so winning about the book.'
As a rock 'n' roll frontman, Wolf epitomized the wild man, getting lost in the music. As a DJ in his early years, he was always full-steam ahead: 'Riding through the motions of the oceans, having fun until the midnight sun.'
But now, as he turns 79, he has finally found the time to look back and capture some memories that are worth preserving.
PETER WOLF
In conversation with Peter Guralnick. Presented by Harvard Book Store. Tuesday, March 11, 7 p.m. $38 includes a copy of the book 'Waiting on the Moon.' First Parish Church, 1446 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge.
James Sullivan can be reached at
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