Peter Wolf: A Rock and Roll Dinosaur Rolls On From the J. Geils Band to an overlooked solo career, Peter Wolf is keeping it all old-school
By Steven Kurutz
April 2, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 59766.html
During the eight years when Peter Wolf was putting together his new album "Midnight Souvenirs," he labored over which track should go where on the CD. His friends told him not to bother, nobody worries about that stuff anymore—everyone's shuffling playlists on their iPods anyway.
Mr. Wolf was adamant, and took great care to work out the best song sequence for the record, which comes out April 6. "I come from an era where an album is an album," Mr. Wolf explains on a recent afternoon at a chi-chi French bistro he's been coming to for years on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "Because things have changed, it doesn't mean my approach changed."
Mr. Wolf, now 64 years old and the former lead singer of the J. Geils Band, is a dinosaur. But he's a member of a select breed of dinosaurs, the few who wrote the history of rock and roll since the 1960s—and are still contributing to it. He's not as well known as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones or Van Morrison, but he's been a rock star for more than four decades and has crossed paths with all of them many times. He probably couldn't fill a medium-size concert hall, but he's still making music that goes beyond rehashing the greatest hits of yore. He's rock's elder Renaissance Man—not just as a walking encyclopedia but as an ultimate fan who, Zelig-like, lived through pretty much the whole thing.
The new album, which includes duets with Shelby Lynne, Neko Case and Merle Haggard as well as a tribute to the late Willy DeVille, is likely to be as highly lauded as its predecessor, "Sleepless." Like his other solo albums, the trademark R&B sound of the Geils days are present—horn swells, gospel-tinged vocals, bluesy guitar licks—but the music is less raucous, more seasoned.
Mr. Wolf is still trying to recover from the heartbreak of "Sleepless," which came out in 2002 and included appearances by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Steve Earle. Rolling Stone called the release "a superb work of soulfulness and delicacy" and named it among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. But the record sold a scant 40,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and remains subterranean.
"You at least hope it gets to have a day in the sun," Mr. Wolf says. "It was very disappointing."
There is speculation among Mr. Wolf's friends and collaborators that Artemis Records, which released "Sleepless," had a winner but mishandled the marketing. Danny Goldberg, the veteran music manager and record executive who ran the label, says it's more complicated.
"Rolling Stone has always liked him. But just getting good reviews doesn't translate; it's got to be cobbled together with touring," Mr. Goldberg says. He adds that Mr. Wolf's records don't fit into the current radio formats, making it difficult to get airplay. "'Sleepless' didn't sound like Nickelback or anything, and he's older," he says. "Maybe we could have marketed it better," he adds. "It's not productive for me to go back and look at decisions that were made in 2002." Mr. Wolf says he likes touring but added, people have to have an awareness of the record, "so that when you tour there's some meaning to the tour."
When Mr. Wolf discusses "Sleepless," it becomes apparent that part of the eight years between albums was spent confronting doubts. "When things crashed down with 'Sleepless,' the idea of me being out there and making a record—I'm telling you that seemed so remote," he says. "It just seemed like it was the end of the line."
Such a thought would have been unimaginable during the heyday of the J. Geils Band, when records came out every year during the 1970s and the band headlined sold-out concerts with acts like U2 opening for them. Casual music fans know the band from their chart-topping 1981 hit "Centerfold," but to serious R&B aficionados—and, let's face it, anyone who likes their parties loud—the J. Geils Band were not only keepers of the blues flame but one of the most full-throttle live bands of the era.
In the wake of "Sleepless," Mr. Wolf drifted, occasionally panicking that after 35 years spent in recording studios, there was no contract to fulfill, no album to make. He eventually got back to work. He toured with Kid Rock and Dickey Betts, narrated Stravinsky with the Portland Symphony Orchestra, pursued art projects—he's still an avid painter and did the cover art for the new record. Gathering his longtime cohorts—producer Kenny White, Oscar-winning songwriter Will Jennings and Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell—he wrote new material and recorded the album, mostly in New York and near his Boston home.
Born Peter Blankfield in the Bronx, the son of an opera singer, Mr. Wolf has lived in Boston since the mid-'60s, when he moved there for art school (he roomed with director David Lynch).
Before his music career took off, he was a DJ at WBCN, a station at the forefront of FM "underground" radio. When Mr. Wolf arrived, he says, staffers were throwing out old records. Duke Ellington, Sinatra—all the greats, headed for the trash. At the time, cultural divides lumped in those music icons with what rock and roll was rebelling against. "For them, it had nothing to do with Country Joe & the Fish and the Grateful Dead," Mr. Wolf recalls. "This stuff was archaic. Out of place, out of time. Something from an ancient world."
Dressed in his usual hep-cat attire of skinny black pants and black fedora amid Europeans eating frites, Mr. Wolf pauses to consider the idea of rich music being tossed aside: "To me, classical is classical."
Mr. Wolf has always been one of rock and roll's most enthusiastic fans. At his apartment, he nurtures what he calls his "wall of influences"—thousands of vinyl records dating back to his days as a teenager making weekly pilgrimages to the Apollo Theater. In Boston in the '60s, he befriended and jammed with artists like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and a young Van Morrison. Later, with the J. Geils Band, he mined his LP collection to revive semi-obscure R&B tunes like the Contours' hit, "First I Look at the Purse."
"Pete is a great promoter," says Mr. Jennings, who first met Mr. Wolf in 1988 when they stayed up all night in Nashville mourning the death of Chet Baker. "If he likes somebody, he wants to hip people to it."
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held recently at the Waldorf Astoria, Mr. Wolf paid tribute to the songwriter Jesse Stone by singing his '50s hit, "Money Honey." He takes these events seriously. Paul Shaffer of "The Late Show With David Letterman," who led the backup band, says Mr. Wolf was the only performer who sent him a demo of how he envisioned singing the song. "I love that," Mr. Shaffer said. "It means you will have a socko performance."
On stage at the Waldorf, Mr. Wolf threw off his gold blazer, jive-talking and hip-shaking to the beat. He's still a ham: In 2007 he took the stage at a Phil Lesh concert in Boston wielding a bottle of Maker's Mark and exhorting the crowd ("C'mon, what is this, a Barry Manilow concert?") before singing Big Walter's "Pack Fair & Square."
These cameos hark back to his brash J. Geils persona. Mr. Wolf met the other members while hanging out in the scene that developed around clubs such as the Boston Tea Party, and the band signed to Atlantic Records on the strength of their live shows. Mr. Wolf says the goal was to recreate the energy of James Brown's landmark "Live at the Apollo Vol. 1."
"We would come on stage at 99 miles per hour and stay there," he says. "Everything had an intensity and a syncopation to it that was constructed." He likened those physically demanding concerts to "a prizefight," but still recalls many of them. "I never did drugs or got drunk or anything before the gig," he says. "It was always after. That's a blur."
These were busy years for Mr. Wolf: a marriage to Faye Dunaway, then a huge star in the wake of "Chinatown" and "Bonnie and Clyde," at a time when the intersection between Hollywood and rock and roll was practically nonexistent. Then there was the subsequent divorce, endless touring and, in 1981, on their 12th album, the pop hit with "Centerfold" that finally broke the J. Geils Band into the mainstream. But after a long climb, the stay at the summit was brief; Mr. Wolf and the group parted over creative differences and in 1984 he released "Lights Out."
In his solo career, Mr. Wolf talks frequently about striving for what he describes as emotional honesty. "When I listen to a Hank Williams track. Or if I listen to a Merle Haggard track. Or a Ray Charles track—you believe the singer and the song," Mr. Wolf says. "And I think what I've tried to do is to learn how to make that more credible."
Mr. Goldberg says of Mr. Wolf: "I never made money on him but I was proud to be associated with him." He adds: "I think Geils was the ultimate party band, with a little wit. As Peter become older, he became a real auteur...I think he's one of those people who has internalized the essence of rock and roll and R&B. He reminds me of Patti Smith...a scholar."
At a time when Mr. Wolf is atop his game as a mature singer and songwriter, the music industry is in disarray. Mr. Wolf raised the money to make "Midnight Souvenirs" privately, then brought the nearly-completed work to the Verve label.
Even in recording an album, he encountered questions. "People say to me, 'Well, Peter, CDs don't matter. It's all about live shows. CDs are just an extension of merchandising,'" he says. "It bewilders me because the music is the root."
In the end, Mr. Wolf decided to treat an album like an album, to pull his hair out over the song order, to approach the music like the legends he admires would. "If you listen to a Hank Williams record, yes, it came out of an era where things were done in a certain way but there's something that prevails," Mr. Wolf says. "I think there's a certain naiveté I have because I almost don't accept the change. I just figure, this is the way it's done, and this is the way I'm going to do it."
