Peter Wolf, has always been one of the great rock & roll raconteurs, ever since his days as the loudmouth singer of the J. Geils Band. But the Boston blues madman has finally written the book everyone always hoped he would write, with Waiting for the Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and
Goddesses. It’s a music memoir like no other — instead of chronicling his rock-star career, Wolf tells stories about the characters he met along the way, from Muddy Waters to Andy Warhol, from Alfred Hitchcock to Bob Dylan. “I didn’t want it to be a book about me,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I wanted it to be about these people that I was so privileged to get to meet.”
It’s a wild ride, because this guy crossed paths with everybody. As a young painter from the Bronx, studying at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, his freshman roommate is a mild-mannered student named David Lynch. He befriends blues giants like Howlin’ Wolf. He bonds with Van Morrison in the late Sixties, when the Irish bard is hiding out from the mob. He marries Hollywood movie star Faye Dunaway, at her Chinatown peak and talks Soul Train with Fred Astaire. Marilyn Monroe, Julia Child, Tennessee Williams, Aretha Franklin — they’re all in here. Every chapter has wild revelations and head-spinning tales, told with a painter’s eye, a poet’s wit, and a rock & roll sage’s heart.
You don’t even have to know his music to connect with Waiting for the Moon, because Wolf is a born storyteller, whether onstage or on the page. He blew up in the Seventies with the J. Geils Band, the Boston garage-blues ruffians, holding center stage as the “Woofa Goofa Mama Toofa.” The Geils gang scored Eighties anthems like “Love Stinks” and “Centerfold” — but shocked everyone by abruptly ditching Wolf at the peak of their fame. (“It was not my decision,” Wolf told Rolling Stone at the time, “nor am I pleased with the decision.”) It’s still a traumatic wound for him. In the book, when Wolf describes getting kicked out of the band, he titles the chapter “Fratricide.”
Wolf went on to solo stardom, from Eighties hits (“Lights Out,” “Come As You Are”) to rootsier, introspective albums like Sleepless and (his best) Long Line. But Waiting for the Moon is a tribute to all the kindred spirits he’s encountered, like a rock version of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast — “I still read that once a year,” Wolf says. At 79, he’s as garrulous and funny as ever, whether discussing arcane blues singers or recommending Chekhov stories in a specific translation. He spoke with Rolling Stone about writing the book, making music, and how these pursuits collide.
Congratulations on the book. It’s amazing how you cross paths with people from all different worlds.
I wanted to write a book where each chapter is a short story, about these different artists, painters, poets, musicians. Basically, it’s like a fan’s notes. I’m a great fan of all these people, and I encountered most of them through just chance meeting, or serendipity. But that’s the inception of the book — observing these people I admired or idolized.
Were you trying to avoid the usual cliches of music memoirs?
A lot of memoirs do follow the same formula. They’re only interesting if you’re already interested in that person — what his first guitar was, or the first record he bought or something. But I was trying to make a book where each chapter tells a story, so you can pick the book up and read a chapter about Bob Dylan, say, or Robert Lowell or Andy Warhol or Peter Sellers. The key thing was I didn’t want it to be about me. I wanted it to be about them.
I was so enamored by these people I happened to meet, and my job in this book was to try to bring them to life. Instead of just saying, “I sang a duet with Aretha or Merle,” I wanted to present their personality, as an observer. What was Aretha like? Or what was it like living with David Lynch? We were roommates back in art school — we were the odd couple for sure. I was so sorry to hear about his passing.
Muddy Waters really comes off as the hero of the book. What was it like for you as a young art student, meeting one of your blues idols?
You have to understand — he was a hero, and he was so noble. His band adored him. And here’s this punk little kid in this little tiny apartment, and the whole band is over at my place for dinner. Muddy’s stretched out, sitting down with his T-shirt on, do-rag on his head, me playing blues records for him, while James Cotton is in my kitchen cooking all sorts of down-home food. Just the culture difference between where I grew up in the Bronx, and a man who grew up in Mississippi on a plantation. He called me “Little Wolf.” I would just become his valet, shall we say, whenever he was in town.
There’s a great story in the book where you’re with Howlin’ Wolf, getting a bite after the show, late at night in Cambridge.
Wolf was this amazingly imposing figure, and when he walked into this all-night cafeteria, he just took over the place. He was just enormous, in his overalls. And there were these Harvard students at the next table, cramming for an exam. They all had their blue blazers, very formal, probably all in a fraternity together, and he asked what they were studying. When they said “Agriculture, sir,” he just couldn’t believe it. “Why you studying that?”
He and Muddy had this great competition, like the Red Sox and the Yankees. They just were both in the South Side of Chicago. Each one was trying to outdo the other, and they recorded for the same label, so they were both trying for hits—like what Motown artists had to go through. So getting to meet the two of them was a great experience.
Bob Dylan calls this book “Pete’s great painting.” How did you discover Dylan?
Hearing Dylan, that was like when I was ten years old, sitting on my stoop in the Bronx, hearing from the window, this voice on the radio. “Since my baby left me’…singing about this something hotel. I remember rushing to the record store saying, ‘You got this song? It’s about this hotel.”’ The owner said, “You’re about the 35th kid that came in today asking for that record.” That began my lifelong obsession with Elvis Presley. I hadn’t seen what he looked like, hadn’t seen what a great performer he was, but there was something mystical in the voice that made me a convert. And the same thing happened with Bob.
I was in this place called the Folklore Centre, going through some Sing Out magazines, but in the back, behind a curtain, this guy was singing—just three or four songs. I heard that voice, and it totally captivated me. That started my quest on Bob, and I became a fan in the same way as Elvis. Seeing him in the early days at the Gaslight, first hearing ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’—it was like an explosion in the mind. So I kept going to see him. Not a stalker, but I was…yeah, I guess, a stalker. He’s also one of the funniest, wittiest people I know—he could have been a comedian, the way Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor were comedians.
You describe a hilarious moment at a folkie party where Dylan sings “Dancing in the Streets.”
He was in the epicenter of the folk world at that point [October 1964]. He had just finished playing at Symphony Hall, in Boston, and there was this party afterwards with all the folk musicians of Cambridge—Jim Kweskin, Eric Von Schmidt, the Charles River Valley Boys, everyone gathered in the kitchen. Maria Muldaur handed him a guitar. Everybody thought he’d do “Polly-O” or “Peggy-O”—some folk ditty. But no, he goes into the Number One hit at the time, “Dancing in the Streets.” Martha and the Vandellas. Nobody could pull that off like Bob. And there’s a LOT of lyrics in that song, but he remembered every one.
Van Morrison is such a mysterious character—but you really bring out his human side. He’s down and out in Boston, in the late Sixties, writing the songs that became Astral Weeks.
People see Van as a very moody, self-absorbed character, which perhaps he is, but we never had that relationship. I just saw him several months ago, playing this jazz club. He used to listen to my radio show on WBCN, midnight to 5 am. His wife, Janet Planet at the time, would write me postcards, saying, “Play more Van Morrison!” I didn’t know he’d moved to Boston until one night at this club, where he came to see my first band, the Hallucinations, which was full of art students. He walked in saying [thick Belfast accent] “I’m lookin’ for some gigs.” I certainly knew who Van Morrison was, because I was a big Them fan. But it turned out he was a big fan of the radio show I did, telling me about “the Woofa Goofa show, with this old Black fellow” he listened to. Once he found out that I was the DJ, and I found out that he was Van Morrison, we walked home all the way to Cambridge from Boston. And from that point on, we became very good friends.
He had no money—he was living with a mattress on the floor, in the midst of trying to get out of all these bad business deals. He would come up to my apartment to use my phone—he didn’t have one. He’d make long-distance calls to New York. I didn’t have any money, either, but I certainly wouldn’t turn him away. We would spend hours listening to records, things like Billy Stewart and Gene Chandler, the John Lee Hooker song “Solid Sender.” For some reason, Van was fixated with that—we played it over and over.
And fortunately I brought a tape recorder the first time he debuted Astral Weeks, which was in a small little subterranean club, the Catacombs—maybe a quarter full, maybe a third full, but not very many people. It was Van on guitar, a flute player, and an upright bass player. He performed the entire Astral Weeks album, then some John Lee Hooker songs and “T.B. Sheets”—all amazing. Next time John Lee was in town, I took him and Van out for lunch at a soul-food place. Van had his accent, Hook had his, so I wasn’t sure they would understand each other, but they became really close. John Lee did a hilarious imitation of Van.
Lots of rock stars have stories about running wild with Mick, Keith, and the Stones. But I think you’re the only one who can claim he got punched out by Charlie Watts.
Charlie was a gentleman, but he had his limits. We got into an argument over the greatest jazz drummers. He said Philly Joe Jonas, I said Art Blakeley, until he finally socked me in the jaw and knocked me off my barstool. He apologized the next morning, in an impeccable tailored suit, but I told him it was all my fault.
For people who’ve been listening to you for a long time, one of the big surprises in the book is that you don’t talk much about the J. Geils Band, until the break-up. Why is that?
I didn’t want this to be a kiss-and-tell book. The two things I decided were I wasn’t going to write about my marriage, and I wasn’t going to write about the Geils band. But I would tell stories to my friend Grace O’Connor, and she said, “I fell in love with Faye. She sounds like an amazing person.” I said, “Well, she WAS amazing. That’s why I married her.” Grace said, “You got to share some of that.” I said, “I don’t know,” but she said, “Look, just start writing it. Start that story. Start when you first met. How did that happen? How did you fall in love?” We had a very great marriage, and we both were so absorbed with each other, but we had this unspoken rule that our careers came first. We were supportive of each others’ careers. But I was so committed to the band, just like Faye was so committed to her career in film, that it became my life.
With the Geils band, the whole thing came down to the break-up of the band, and the emotional catharsis of that, after 17 and a half years of devotion. It was fratricide. Many people might not know what that means, but it comes right out of the Book of Genesis: Cain slays Abel, and goes to the land of Nod, east of Eden. It was brother-killing right there. That’s how I took it. That’s how I still feel about it. There’s two sides to every story, I’m sure, but that’s the way I experienced it, and I stand by it. Many people thought I’d quit the band to pursue a solo career, which wasn’t the case at all. So I tried to at least set that record straight, in as dignified a way as I could.
It’s one of the most bizarre band break-up stories ever. These guys spend all these years toughing it out, they climb their way to finally being a success, but that’s when they suddenly blow up. It’s always been a mystery to fans.
It’s funny—when I told the story to Mick Jagger one evening, he said, “Come on, Peter, that couldn’t have happened. Whose girlfriend did you have an affair with?” I said, “Mick, maybe that might’ve been the problem with you, but it certainly wasn’t the problem with me.”
We really did tough it out for so long. But now the people at Rhino Records are releasing a remastered Full House, the live album, with me doing the linter notes. That’s my favorite Geils record—it really captures in the decisive moment the interaction between us and the audience, and our commitment to the stage. One of my favorite recordings is James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, Volume One—I happened to witness it being in the audience, and I’d never seen anything like it. But the energy of our live show was so different than what was captured in the studio. After listening to “Looking for a Love” live on Full House, it’s hard to go back and listen to the studio version.
I love that live record because it reminds me of a city that adopted us as our second home, Detroit,. Playing in Detroit was the apex because they were a blue-collar city that took their rock and roll serious. We were just made for each other.
You made another classic live album in Detroit, Blow Your Face Out.
My favorite moment on that is the “Musta Got Lost” rap, obviously. You can hear me ask the drummer, Stephen, ‘What’s the name of that gal with the long hair?” And he’s yelling out “Rapunzel!” Every night I would just make up these raps. I would tell stories while Jay or somebody was tuning up, and it was a way of getting ready for the next onslaught, bam-bam-bam-bam. And then we’d have to tune again. So during the tuning, I would do a stage rap. And the funny thing is once the record came out and started getting played on radio, people started yelling for it. “Hey, Reputaaa the Beautaaaa!” They wanted the whole story. So I sat down in a hotel room with a cassette, trying to memorize the entire rap. But I never got it right. It always was a spontaneous thing.
The show is the thing. It’s not just the song. It’s one for the money, as Carl Perkins said, but it’s two for the show. And I always gravitated to the artists that put on a show. Even performers like Bobby “Blue” Bland and Van Morrison—they don’t move very much at all on the stage, but yet they create an inner-absorption charismatic thing, so you can’t take your eyes off of them. Dinah Washington at Birdland, good God—all she had to do was open her mouth and it was totally mesmerizing.
You tell your stories in this book the way you always did onstage. Where does that came from
That came out of seeing the first generation of rockers onstage: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Chantels with Dion and the Belmonts—all these great doo-wop groups. I was witness to all that because my high school was on 135th Street in Harlem, and the Apollo was on 125th Street. So every Wednesday I would go to the Apollo. I got to see people like Wilson Pickett and Billy Stewart and Joe Tex. I saw the great comedians like Flip Wilson and Moms Mabley. But the point is, all these artists had an ability to communicate. The audience didn’t want just the record—they wanted to hear the hits, but they wanted something more. Since so many of the R&B artists came out of the church, they were familiar with the need to make that connection with the audience, to have some kind of rap or interplay.
I remember once seeing Bobby Womack there—he said, “Man, there’s so many beautiful women in the house tonight. I want to kiss each and every one of you.” And he walked up the stage, sat down on the edge, and lo and behold, all the women got in line like it was church. And he kissed every one of ‘em. Like Don Covay says in the book, man, when you play the Apollo, the audience is your congregation, and you got to get ’em. And if you don’t get ’em, you ain’t doing your job.
