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Boston Globe
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
John Peck, underground cartoonist known as The Mad Peck, dies at 82
'To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 DJ, a Top 10 rock critic,' Kenton said. Advertisement Mr. Peck illustrated one of the first scholarly works on the importance of comic books. And he was perhaps the first cartoonist to write record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with literary commentator Michael Macrone about the evolution of television; its title, 'How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,' playfully referenced phallic symbolism in the oil-soaked prime-time soap opera 'Dallas.' Mr. Peck once called it his 'crowning achievement.' His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone, and other music publications, and in The Village Voice. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and '50s and wrote with sardonic humor ('Is There Life After Meatloaf?'), while offering trustworthy criticism. 'As far as I know, he was the first to do it,' Kenton said. 'Some people were drawing cartoons with people from the Grateful Dead in it, but John was reviewing the records. He wasn't just making a joke.' Advertisement Peter Wolf, former lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for whom Mr. Peck designed a T-shirt that became the group's logo, said in an interview: 'I can't think of anybody else who did it, that 'Ripley's Believe It or Not!' style. For me, he was an original.' A 1971 J. Geils Band T-shirt designed by Providence artist "The Mad Peck" (aka John Peck). David Bieber Archives Mr. Peck also made concert posters for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and, most notably, for the final concert in the United States by British supergroup Cream, in Providence in November 1968. The poster featured the band's name in a faux advertisement for unfiltered Camel cigarettes, which Mr. Peck smoked for 50 years. The Providence Journal reported that one of the posters sold for more than $3,000 in 2016. 'To me he was an important figure of that era,' cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman said. 'I thought it was fascinating how he was going back and forth between modern times and the past.' In Providence, Mr. Peck was most popular for a noirish 1978 poster commenting on the city, which at first seemed snarly but was ultimately sanguine. It remains popular. The poster's comic-book-style panels, referencing actual street names, read, in part: 'And Friendship is a one way street. Rich folks live on Power Street. But most of us live off Hope.' Mr. Peck illustrated 'Comix: A History of Comic Books in America' (1971), written by a friend, historian Les Daniels, which was among the first serious appraisals of the subject. And, in an embrace of low art and a critique of what he viewed as the snobbery of television criticism, Mr. Peck became a TV critic himself. Advertisement In a 1987 interview with Terry Gross of NPRs 'Fresh Air,' Mr. Peck said he believed that all forms of popular culture were connected: 'When you get down there on the street level or on the consumer level, people don't really make the distinctions between one medium and the other.' In that same interview, Mr. Peck mused about the cultural absurdities and contradictions of television. While humans worried about too much exposure in front of the screen, he dryly noted, the pig named Arnold Ziffel, a porcine couch potato seen on the 1960s sitcom 'Green Acres,' was held in 'very high esteem' for watching TV constantly, 'because watching television is such a breakthrough for an animal.' Mr. Peck's lack of widespread recognition was partly by choice. He sometimes wore disguises and claimed not to have allowed himself to be photographed for half a century. Wolf, who became a friend, described Mr. Peck affectionately as a phantom in a hat and trench coat, pale and with nicotine-stained fingers, who 'always seemed to appear out of the dark end of the street.' When Friedman included an illustration of Mr. Peck in his book 'Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix' (2022), he first had to figure out what he looked like, whether that was his real name, and whether he was a single person or a group of people. 'He was the Keyser Söze of underground comics,' Friedman said, referring to the evasive character at the center of the 1995 movie 'The Usual Suspects.' Mr. Peck acknowledged to The Providence Journal in 2016 that he worked with a clip-art ethos of 'don't draw what you can trace, and don't trace what you can paste,' and that he had 'an inability to draw anything more complex than psychedelic hand lettering.' Advertisement His ideas relied heavily on retooling the work of Matt Baker, who was among the first Black cartoonists to gain success in the 1940s and '50s, whose characters included scantily dressed female crime fighters and who also worked on romance comics. Such extensive borrowing 'probably put him at odds with some of the more serious underground cartoonists,' said Steven Heller, co-chair emeritus of the Master of Fine Arts Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. 'In the broader picture, now that we're talking about history, it mattered.' John Frederick Peck was born Nov. 16, 1942, in Brooklyn and grew up in Connecticut. His father, Frank Peck, was assistant superintendent of public schools in Fairfield, Conn., and then in Greenwich. His mother, Eleanor Mary (Delavina) Peck, was a teacher. Mr. Peck came to cartooning via an unconventional path, after receiving a degree in electrical engineering in 1967 from Brown University. Engineering was a career choice more his parents' wish than his own; Mr. Peck instead went underground, forming a publishing collective known as Mad Peck Studios, whose cartoons, rock posters, humorous advertisements, and reviews were anthologized in 1987. As a disc jockey with the moniker Dr. Oldie, Mr. Peck, who referred to himself as 'the dean of the University of Musical Perversity,' hosted a weekly radio show in Providence called 'Giant Juke Box' for more than a decade until 1983. He played doo-wop, R&B, early rock 'n' roll, and novelty songs, and he became an early proponent of mixtapes. Advertisement Mr. Peck leaves his sisters. His marriage to Vicky (Oliver) Peck, a humorist who had helped create his cartoons and who went by the comic persona I.C. Lotz., ended in the late 1970s. Mr. Peck scoured flea markets, yard sales, record stores, and discount emporiums for records and other cultural ephemera, which occupied two floors of his house, a cluttered domicile that did not always have heat or running water. His record library was said to include roughly 30,000 singles and several thousand albums. Some might have considered him a hoarder, but his friends called him an archivist, because his collections were organized and labeled. 'For a guy who smoked a lot of pot, he didn't forget anything,' said Jeff Heiser, who co-hosted Mr. Peck's radio program for five years. 'He had this stuff down cold.' This article originally appeared in
Forbes
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Peter Wolf Goes From Rock Star To Author With Magical Memoir
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 11: Singer Peter Wolf, founding member of the classic rock band J. ... More Geils Band, performs onstage during the Jim Irsay Collection Exhibit and Concert at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on January 11, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by) Painter, successful radio DJ, solo artist, lead singer of the chart-topping J. Geils Band Peter Wolf has led an extraordinary life that he's now turned into a magical memoir, Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses. As the extended title suggests, the book is structured around the fascinating people Wolf has encountered in his life, from Bob Dylan to ex-wife, actress Faye Dunaway. As a successful rock star/frontman of the '70s and '80s many of Wolf's encounters are expected – Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards and The Rolling Stones, Van Morrisson. What makes the book such a joyful surprise are the unique stories Wolf shares – meeting first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as a schoolkid, his tenure living with future Hollywood icon David Lynch. I spoke with Wolf about how the book and its unique structure came to be. Steve Baltin: It is a process to write a book. Peter Wolf: It is quite an undertaking. Baltin: At what point in the process of this, and the book is wonderful, did you know that you were going to be able to see it through? Wolf: Well, that was thanks to the ladies that I dedicated the book to, the O 'Connor sisters, Grace and her sister Nora, who really were fundamental in acting as editor in chief in the sense of, "All right, you got one story, or one chapter finished, where's the next one and where's the next one? Come on, come on, come on." And so it was that collaborative push that helped me move along because I like to work in collaboration. Not that this was an as told to or a written-by book, it was written by me, and they helped organize it and made very valid suggestions and things like that. And the impetus of not procrastinating came from them. Baltin: You say it started with like one chapter and then another. It flows very well given the fact that the different people that you meet almost makes it read like a short story collection. It's like when you're writing songs, and then eventually you put the sequence into an album. Was there a point where you started to realize that this format would work for you, that you could tie together meeting Eleanor Roosevelt and your experiences with Dylan? Wolf: That's a really good question. What happened was I had seen a photograph, and I'm not comparing this in any way, of William Faulkner. I forget which exact book it was, it'll come to me. And he was in his study, and on the wall, he had these cards all printed up with the different characters. I think it was As I Lay Dying. And he had all the different characters and some ideas about the plot, and they were all pasted on little index cards on his wall. I thought that would be a really good idea because they do that on TV shows and movies, scenes and stuff. So, I started writing out all the chapters I thought I might do because I had been thinking about this book for over a decade. And actually, I had made an outline maybe 20 years ago and with some of the stories I thought I would tell. But when I finally started, I then decided to write these index cards and then Grace and Nora, both helped me move them around because at first Steve, I wasn't going to do any chronological order. When I started out, the two things I thought I was not going to write about were my marriage and the J. Geils band. Because I considered this book to be just chapters containing short stories and each chapter would be contained to itself. Meaning if you read the Alfred Hitchcock chapter or the Bob Dylan chapter, you can pick up the book and read any chapter and it didn't necessarily interfere with any timeline. But then the editor insisted that there might be some timeline and my agent, Andrew Wiley, who's a very notable agent, suggested if you eliminate the J. Geils band or your marriage, people will be disappointed because they will be curious about that. Now, if you choose not to do it as a formal memoir, you still should include those in the chapter. So, I finally did. Once I got to the Faye chapters one rolled into another, because I enjoyed writing about it. Then with the Geils, a lot of music memoirs go into so much detail about the band and the inter-conflicts and what guitar they bought and this and that and the trip over to Japan and this happened and that happened. I find that not to be too interesting unless I'm really interested in the band or the artist or musician. So, my dealings with J. Geils Band run throughout the chapters, but I kept one chapter for J Geils about what I thought most people were curious about was that after 17 and a half years, and once we achieved our biggest popularity the band breaks up and people, I realized, didn't know why. So, I thought it would be of interest for me to write that out and the same was true of my relationship with Faye so that all started coming about. Once I had all the different cards that were written at different periods like Eleanor, which might have been written after Bob Dylan. So, I had to frame it in some kind of timeline. That's the order that you see in the book itself. Baltin: That's interesting on a lot of levels because it's funny. You have the Dylan chapter. You talk briefly about hanging out backstage at the Stones Coliseum show with Keith Richards. I'm going to be honest, there were a couple places where I felt like his memoir was a little dry because it was so technical. So, it's interesting that you say that, to me, the most memorable chapter in this book and the one that gutted me was the Edie chapter. Was that difficult to write? Wolf: Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the sadness that encompasses and the great loss and that sense of like, what if that never happened? What would it be? Because we had a great bond. Then the other side of that there was something uplifting about realizing what an amazing relationship it was and how to this day it still stays with me. So, the song that I quote, "The Wind," which was our song, is a haunting song and when I listen to it today it has what the magic of music can do which is bring you right back to a certain incident or a moment and so it has its pros and cons. I think generally it was melancholy, but it also had the idea to re-engage and think about the relationship; the person she made me, it was an uplifting one rather than a morose one. Baltin: When you do a memoir, you're thinking of things from a whole different perspective. You're 50, 60 years older than you were so you have a whole different perspective on it. So, were there things that emerged in the writing of the book in general that really surprised you? Balin: I don't think so because just they stayed with me and as I said I had an outline written so long. I think what surprised me is the surprise that people got when they realized the arc of the book, how many people I encountered. To me it's something I lived through. So, meeting Eleanor Roosevelt or Tennessee Williams was something that happened. It wasn't a surprise, and so it didn't strike me as that weird. Baltin: When you look back on it, you're a musician. It makes sense that you met Dylan, Stones, Springsteen, whoever. But that you would be at a school thing with Eleanor Roosevelt, or being a kid seeing Louis Armstrong well before you became a musician, do you appreciate that was just surreal in a wonderful way to have these experiences? Wolf: No, thinking about my dad taking me to see Louis Armstrong meant so much to me. I revere him so much because as time goes on, his importance becomes even greater and more acknowledged. That's for sure. Baltin: I'm taking it that you mean Louis, but I imagine that's also the case with your dad. Wolf: Oh yeah. Similar to the Edie chapter, that was a bit of a sweet thing, realizing how indebted I was to him. Him being such a gentle person, how much he shaped me and offered me in such a kind, generous way without being dictatorial or anything. He loved Louis Armstrong. So, he assumed I would love it and there was certain art that he loved, and he would just share it with me. Some things he turned me on to took me 25, 30 30 years before I even could understand why he liked it. For instance, the painter Miro, who's an abstract painter from Spain that moved to France, he loved Miro and called her the Miro mobilist. I didn't understand it until much later then it kind of hit me over the head. He was a great opera fan. And I certainly didn't enjoy opera when I was growing up. I was a rock 'n' roller. But now I can hear certain arias and parts of operas that he used to play and know how magnificent they are. So, yeah, his influence still penetrates me.
Boston Globe
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Peter Wolf is ready to look back
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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 .
Washington Post
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Rock forgot one of its wildest front men. He's got a story to tell.
BOSTON More than 20 years ago, Peter Wolf, the former front man of the J. Geils Band, drove across town to see his buddy David Bieber, a local media figure known for his equally nocturnal habits. It was past midnight when they hopped into Wolf's car, and he put on a song he had just finished for his next record. A wash of gritty guitars gave way to that voice, raspy and melodic, delivering the opening lines of 'Nothing but the Wheel.'
