During the peak of the pandemic, when many musicians spent their time writing songs, Peter Wolf did nothing but read. During that prolonged period of isolation and uncertainty, he comforted himself by devouring shelves full of books, including memoirs penned by other musicians. “After a while all those memoirs started to seem the same,” he said. “And I came to the realization that, unless you were a huge fan of that musician, the details of their story wouldn’t seem particularly captivating.”
Such thoughts had a major impact on Wolf when he was approached to tell his own story. As a result, his new book, titled Waiting on the Moon, threads the outlines of a memoir – highlighted by his years fronting the hit group J Geils Band – through a host of colorful anecdotes about what he describes as the “artists, poets, drifters, grifters and goddesses” he met along the way.
One such goddess happened to be Faye Dunaway, to whom he was married for five tumultuous years in the 70s. Initially, Wolf was so reluctant to include any details of his personal story that he didn’t even want to mention his band, which topped the charts in the 80s with songs like Freeze-Frame and Centerfold, or his marriage to one of Hollywood’s biggest and most controversial stars. It took the combined force of his editor and agent to throw cold water in his face. “They told me it would seem odd if I left those things out,” he said. “It would only wind up bringing more attention to them.”
The balance Wolf eventually struck makes much of his book read less like the work of a memoirist than that of a raconteur, eager to revel in the quirks of the characters in his orbit. “In writing the book I found that people reveal themselves best in the little details,” he said. “That’s where you see what they’re really like.”
The more unexpected the detail, the better – like discovering upon meeting Fred Astaire that he was utterly entranced by the dancers on Soul Train. Or observing that Aretha Franklin, with whom Wolf cut a duet in the 80s, would only speak to him in a British accent due to her love at the time of the delicious bitchery of Joan Collins on Dynasty.
The book begins as conventional memoirs must, with Wolf’s childhood. But unlike the legion of rockers who rebelled against their square parents, Wolf echoed their love of the arts as well as their countercultural politics. During his childhood, his parents’ leftist affiliations were pronounced enough to put them under surveillance by the US government.
“When we got a TV, which was a really exciting thing for a kid in the 50s, it wasn’t for entertainment,” he said. “It was so my parents could watch the McCarthy hearings.”
As a child, Wolf was so hyper-active his mother used to tie a leash around him to stop him from running wild. “I remember how horrified the neighbors were by that,” he said with a laugh.
His parents encouraged his interests in both music and painting, which soon attracted interesting company. As a teen, Wolf took his paintings to Washington Square Park, where he wound up meeting Edward Hopper, who would stop by to chat. “Here was this great artist,” Wolf said, “but at the time he was considered passé because it was the age of the abstract impressionists.”
Wolf’s parallel obsession with music led him to early shows by Bob Dylan soon after he arrived in the Village in the early 60s. The visionary scope of Dylan’s work convinced Wolf that this wasn’t just a great artist but a seer. He was so convinced that one day he cornered Dylan with a demand to know “what is truth?” The question elicited from Dylan a pitched screed about the unknowability of all things, which Wolf recounts in two burning pages in the book. “I think I got what I deserved,” the author said with a laugh.
To develop his painting skills, Wolf attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his first roommate turned out to be a young David Lynch, who also aspired to an art career. “There was no talk of cinema whatsoever then,” Wolf said. “We were truly the odd couple. David came from the preppie world and was into the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons while I was this debauched person from Greenwich Village who listened to Thelonious Monk.”
Despite Lynch’s buttoned-up demeanor, elements of his future feel for surrealism poked through one day when he was brushing his teeth. Unfortunately, Lynch had failed to notice that a dead cockroach had become entangled on the brush, resulting in a rash of insect remains strewn across his teeth.
During his time in Boston, Wolf began to perform with an R&B band called the Hallucinations, who opened shows for idols of his like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Wolf and Waters became especially close. “Muddy came from a totally different culture, but here he was sitting on my futon telling me that as a young man he sang the songs of [country legend] Gene Autry,” he said. “To me, that was mind-blowing.”
Besides Howlin’ Wolf’s genius, Peter Wolf was drawn to his determination to sustain a career with little financial reward. “He stayed in these cheap hotels with yellow window shades and beds that sagged like you see in noir films,” he said. “But he still kept going.”
Wolf was with Waters that horrible night in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, a night that also happened to be the blues legend’s birthday. “While Muddy was blowing out his candles, sirens blared in the background,” Wolf said. “The whole country was on edge.”
By that time, Wolf had begun working as a DJ at WBCN, which became the city’s best champion for cutting-edge music. In that capacity, he began to receive a steady stream of anonymous notes that begged him to “play more Van Morrison”. Only after befriending the Irish singer a while later did he discover that the notes were written by Morrison’s girlfriend and sometimes by the man himself. “He signed them Mongo Bongo,” Wolf said. “I still have them.”
That was during a fraught time in Morrison’s life when he was hiding out in Boston to escape a rash of legal issues with his record company in New York. “Van had absolutely no money and was feeling so lost,” Wolf said. “I provided a shelter for him.”
At the same time, Morrison was developing the revolutionary sound of Astral Weeks, an album that would become a gamechanger not just for him but for music itself. As much affection as Wolf brings to his descriptions of Morrison, he also captures the famously difficult side of him, replete with random outbursts and last-minute refusals to go on stage. Rather than label him difficult, however, Wolf sees him as “moody”. “Van doesn’t deal with bullshit,” he said.
The tolerance Wolf had for such things would come in handy when he met his future wife, Faye Dunaway, another artist known for her fast-moving moods. A mutual friend introduced them after a J Geils show in 1972. By that time, she’d become a gigantic star, having broken through five years earlier with her role in Bonnie and Clyde. By contrast, Wolf’s band then drew a cultish crowd. As stark as the power imbalance was between them, Wolf recalled the 70s as an era “when all movie stars wanted to be rockers, and all rockers wanted to be movie stars”.
Moreover, Dunaway was a huge Otis Redding fan and she adored hanging out with the band and crew, regardless of their sometimes ratty circumstances. It helped that she could drink them all under the table. “She really was two people,” Wolf said. “There was Dorothy Faye [her birth name], who was this sweet southern girl, and Faye Dunaway, this very cultured actress.”
The book chronicles her moods without judgment but, in a new documentary about the star, she herself ponders on camera the possibility that she might be bipolar. “That term didn’t exist when we were married,” Wolf said. “But when people are graced with an artistic gift, there are things that come along with that. Maybe I just have a gift for being able to deal with those things.”
However, even he could reach a breaking point, like the moment during the filming of Chinatown in 1974 when Dunaway and co-star Jack Nicholson met to talk about the film, with Wolf in tow. At one point, the movie stars excused themselves to go upstairs for what Wolf eventually realized was an impromptu assignation. Though that made him far from happy at the time, he now advises readers to consider “the era in which this was happening. The climate was ripe for that.”
Soon after the ensuing blow-up, the two reconciled and, out of nowhere, Dunaway proposed to him. As exciting as their subsequent marriage was, it was far from stable. Several years into it Dunaway left him for photographer Terry O’Neill.
Meanwhile, Wolf’s band continued to coast commercially, despite the mountain of critical respect they’d amassed. The songs J Geils cut in the 70s, captured most searingly on their live album Full House, forged an entirely new brand of R&B, fired by hard rock power and delivered at the speed of a runaway train. However, their contract with Atlantic Records was so onerous that profits were nearly impossible to realize. Their turnaround didn’t occur until they moved to EMI Records in the early 80s, resulting in a No 1 album for Freeze-Frame. With that win came an invitation to open a Stones tour that also featured the first stadium appearances by a young Prince. Shockingly, the purple one often got booed off the stage. “It wasn’t a racial thing,” Wolf said. “It was just that seeing Prince sing songs like Jerk U Off in a trenchcoat was just too outlandish for the generic AOR rock fan of the day.”
Though J Geils went down well with that crowd, their success caused most of the band members to want to lean further into the slick, synth-driven sound that gave them hits. By contrast, Wolf wanted to use their new exposure to lead the audience back to their core R&B sound. At an impasse, the band unceremoniously fired him in 1983.
In the years since, Wolf has released eight solo albums, all of which finely balance his root R&B style with more mature and poignant lyrics. (He’s in the process of recording a new solo album now.) He brought that same mature perspective to his book. If the anecdotes he offers along the way often outweigh the personal details he reveals, the end result makes a powerful point: sometimes the story of who we are can best be told by the things we love.
“The work of all those people I’ve admired so much has defined a lot of my life,” Wolf said. “Because I was lucky enough to spend so many private moments with them, my mission was to be an observer and to share all that I got to see.”
Waiting on the Moon is out on 11 March
