Features

By Paul Robicheau

Illustration Credit: Antony Hare

Peter Wolf can understand the genius behind Rob Reiner’s rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. But as he watched the comedic film at the Cheri Cinema in 1984, the freshly disposed J. Geils Band frontman found it more and more depressing.

In contrast to the chuckling masses exiting the theater, Wolf recalls, “I see this guy coming out of the other door, and it’s Steve Tyler. And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both felt like we got hit by a truck, because we had both lived those dynamics. This wasn’t funny. This was our life.”

A quarter of a decade later, Wolf’s life is better and broader. For one thing, the 64-year-old singer is back with the J. Geils Band, at least for sporadic reunions that include a sold-out Aug. 14 double bill with Tyler’s Aerosmith at Fenway Park.

Revered alongside Tyler as one of the ’70s most dynamic showmen—he used to leapfrog stages as a dancing dervish—Wolf still encounters fervent fans around town. “I’m gratified that people enjoy the music,” he says, “but the celebrity thing is something I don’t spend much time thinking about.”

People in today’s local music scene know another side of Wolf. For starters, the singer maintains a rich, if more modest, solo career that includes this year’s roots-rocking gem Midnight Souvenirs. Before that came 2002’s Sleepless, which Rolling Stone named one of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

“He won’t ignore the history and what he’s done, but he doesn’t want to rest on it either,” says guitarist Duke Levine, who has played on Wolf’s last three albums and tours, and takes a backup role with the Geils Band onstage. “His main focus is growing.”

Indeed, Wolf is a legend who doesn’t act the part, coming off as more of a Renaissance man than a rock star. In Boston, he’s known as a Zen-like scenester who casually cruises the city’s clubs, concerts and restaurants in his trademark all-black attire, fedora hat and shades. “It’s a Bronx thing,” Wolf says of where he grew up. “The rockers wore black.”

Wolf occasionally sits in with visiting national acts (he’s performed at Fenway Park with Bruce Springsteen) and local talent alike, hopping onstage with musician friends like Levine and Dennis Brennan, at places like the Lizard Lounge and Atwood’s Tavern. But he also seems to catch every touring act worth seeing—usually as they’re just emerging.

“The first thing that got me into music as a performer was that I was a fan,” Wolf says, sinking into a couch at the House of Blues’ Foundation Room, across from the ballpark where he’ll play weeks later. “I don’t consider myself a musician, just a music fan.”

Speaking over a sound check by Seattle rockers Modest Mouse, Wolf mentions he saw them at the Paradise when they were touring for their first record. “I’m pretty opinionated, or selective I should say, but I’m always open to being moved. So that’s the reason I like to go out.”

Current bands only scratch the surface. Wolf seems to have personal experience with every prominent musician from the past 50 years. The first concert he ever saw was an Alan Freed bill that boasted Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. “You get an induction like that, you become baptized into rock ’n’ roll immediately,” Wolf says. During high school, he walked to the Apollo Theater, where he saw R&B greats James Brown, Dinah Washington and Jackie Wilson. He caught Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane in the New York jazz clubs. And he met a fresh-to-town folksinger named Bob Dylan.

During his years in Boston, Wolf went on to develop more personal relationships with Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, whose “Serves You Right to Suffer” became a live staple for the Geils Band.

Instead of using the tiny dressing room at Club 47 (now Club Passim), blues greats frequented Wolf’s Harvard Square apartment. He says he made the first recording of Morrison’s Astral Weeks on a reel-to-reel deck at Fenway club the Catacombs, but the Irish singer would stop by Wolf’s to use the phone.

“My telephone number was Flip 313, so even when Van moved to Woodstock, he’d pass it on, ‘Hey, if you’re in Boston, call Flip 313,’ and I’d get calls from Dr. John and Delaney & Bonnie, Mose Allison. They’d all drop by my place, and it was a cool hang.”

Another friend who crashed on that couch was Harvard law student Ray Riepen, who asked Wolf to help him purchase FM station WBCN and convert it to rock in 1968. Wolf didn’t have the cash, but he became WBCN’s first overnight DJ, the “Wolfa Goofa Mama Toofa.”

“I just did it ’cause I loved it, and I could play anything,” says Wolf, who soon moved on to focus on the fledgling J. Geils Band. “TV went off at around 12:30 in this town and bars closed everywhere at 1, so people were home. There was nothing going on and once people discovered there was this crazy show on the FM dial, the phones started lighting up, and it started building.”

He explains his Zelig-like presence on the music scene by equating it to personal relationships among historic painters. “Think of Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne and all the painters they had interaction with,” says Wolf, himself an artist who studied as a youth with Norman Rockwell and attended the Museum School of the Fine Arts (filmmaker David Lynch was his roommate). “We consider them sacred, but they were all doing work. And it’s the same thing for myself, just coming up as Van Morrison or Dylan were coming up or the Stones were hitting.”

Wolf went beyond the music and art worlds with his four-year marriage to actress Faye Dunaway in the late ’70s. “Again, that was two people who cared for each other,” Wolf says, noting they avoided the media. “It really was nothing to do with celebrity.”

Degrees of separation never accumulate much for Wolf. When his assistant Stu Berk takes delight in stumping Wolf to name that band as the Foundation Room’s sound system blasts “Time Stand Still,” a 1987 hit for Rush, the backing vocal emerges, and it’s Aimee Mann, an ex-girlfriend of Wolf’s who cowrote two songs on his 1996 CD Long Line. The Geils Band shared ’70s bills with Rush, as well as Yes and the Mahavishnu Orchestra—and most any other band that toured that decade.

Oddly, their Fenway show with Aerosmith has been touted as the first time the two Boston institutions have shared a bill. Yet Wolf says he remembers playing with Aerosmith (maybe in New Hampshire) when guitarist Joe Perry had temporarily left the band.

“Everybody has different memories, and it gives you a reflection of the haze that the era had for us all,” Wolf says. “I knew Joe [in the early ’70s] when they started. I remember him picking me up and taking me to his house, and I met Steven early on.”

Things changed when Aerosmith began touring constantly, much like the Geils Band, which had a few years’ jump on Aerosmith. “We didn’t really have the interaction and Boston didn’t have, like London, certain clubs where a lot of musicians hung out,” Wolf says. “It was only later that places started to open up.”

Despite Aerosmith’s turmoil over the years, including Tyler’s recent hiatus from the band, Aerosmith has more or less kept a-rolling. The Geils Band folded camp in 1985, two years after asking Wolf to leave over creative differences in the wake of commercial hits “Love Stinks” and “Centerfold.”

“Putting together a group is easy, keeping together a group is an art form and a great challenge,” Wolf says, quoting his friend Springsteen. “I admire that [Aerosmith] was able to get through a lot of storms and resolve a lot of conflicts and keep it together. Unfortunately, with the Geils Band, that wasn’t the case. That’s what sort of left me to become a solo artist. It wasn’t by choice.”

Still, Wolf made the best of it, starting with his 1984 solo debut Lights Out, produced by Michael Jonzun of electro-funk group the Jonzun Crew, and including Mick Jagger and guitarists Elliot Easton (the Cars) and Adrian Belew (Talking Heads). A year later, Wolf found himself in Detroit, recording the duet “Push” with Aretha Franklin for her album Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

In turn, the Geils Band ultimately patched up their differences. The group launched a 13-date reunion tour in 1999 and played several one-off concerts (many of them charity events) in recent years, including last year’s opening of the new House of Blues.

“What I enjoy about [Geils] is I get to revisit a body of work that I helped create and was part of my life for 17 years, and people still have the interest,” Wolf says, suggesting it’s like an actor doing a blockbuster movie rather than an indie film or play. “The performance is a lot more demanding, because you’re dealing at a larger scope and the aspect about the Geils Band is we always start at 99 miles per hour and like to keep it there.”

Wolf takes the foot off the gas pedal a bit more with his band the Midnight Travelers, which played the Wilbur Theatre earlier this year and cover more shades of country, folk, soul and R&B. He says he still enjoys the sensibility of a group. And he works from album to album with much of the same cast, from coproducer Kenny White to cowriters Will Jennings (who penned “Tears in Heaven” with Eric Clapton) and Angelo Petraglia (now associated with Kings of Leon) to musicians such as Levine, fellow guitarist Larry Campbell and drummer Shawn Pelton.

“Collaboration works for me,” Wolf says. “That’s what made music so exciting to me, ’cause painting’s such a solitary thing. You [have to be] your own disciplinarian. But when you’re working in a group, you’re either sharp or flat, on or off. You get together for rehearsals and there’s camaraderie.

“For me,” he adds, “it’s almost like coming into the studio with a screenplay and seeing the play come to life by the actors.”

Wolf the fan also peppers his albums with guest singers, and Midnight Souvenirs remains true to form with cameos by Shelby Lynne, Neko Case and Merle Haggard. Wolf and Lynne each took a bottle of bourbon in hand to cut lead track “Tragedy” in an L.A. studio on Wolf’s birthday. “It was one of the greatest birthday presents I could ever have,” he says. And Wolf has known Case since he “heard this voice” at the Middle East Upstairs and rustled up some food and baklava for her band’s long drive.

Then there’s Haggard, who Wolf calls “the mountaintop.” When the country legend played Boston on a 2007 tour with Willie Nelson and Ray Price, Wolf says they all partied until dawn at his Boston apartment. In turn, Haggard recorded the melancholy “It’s Too Late for Me,” which closes out Midnight Souvenirs.

“When I first met the Rolling Stones, they were in a hotel room, and Mick and Keith [Richards] were on the floor. It was during the Exile period, or maybe before,” Wolf recalls. “They were playing [Haggard’s] ‘Sing Me Back Home,’ and I believe Gram Parsons was there. We were all taken by Merle.

“The aspect about Merle is like Dylan, Van and [Johnny] Cash,” he continues. “He’s still artistically maturing and still very committed to the integrity that he had in the beginning.”

Just like Wolf himself.