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Published: 2006
Category: Rock
Back when some of you were in Pampers, a blues-rock band lurched from club to club across the land, giving a live show that drove the natives crazy.
Chalk it up to the music: a stew of Motown, Stax-Volt and rock, all of it dance-friendly, beat-heavy, spine-tingling, loud, rude and crazy fun.
But chalk it up also to the cast of characters. I think first of the harp player --- who can forget a guy who dubs himself Magic Dick? But mostly, I think of the singer, a scrawny, fast-talking hipster, the "Wolfa Goofa Mama Toofa” --- Peter Wolf.
The band, for contractual reasons, was named after guitarist J. Geils, and maybe, if you were not there at the beginning for “Looking for a Love” and “First I Look at the Purse,” you will at least remember their late-career hit. It was called “Centerfold,” and it was about a guy who opens a skin magazine and gets a rude surprise:
My blood runs cold
My memory has just been sold
My angel is the centerfold
By the time that song made everyone aware of the J. Geils Band, the group had been together for more than a decade. They broke up; Wolf began a solo career.
I am here to praise “Sleepless” --- his 2002 release --- as a terrific example of what blues-rock can be in the hands of an old pro.
But first, I want to give you a fast guided tour of Wolf's life, because it's just so damned amusing.
Wolf, a New Yorker, never went to college. Officially, that is --- he liked to go to different colleges and pretend he was a student. His reason: he loved to draw. And colleges had great art studios. ( He also made friends on every campus. At Brandeis, he met Jon Landau, who would later write for Rolling Stone and manage Bruce Springsteen. On another campus, he became the roommate of a filmmaker named David Lynch.)
One drunken night, at a party where a band was playing and everyone was pounding liquor back, the singer forgot the lyrics. Wolf jumped in and finished the song. A light bulb went off. He got deeper into music when he and a friend bought a small Boston FM radio station; Wolf was pressed into service as a DJ.
He joined up with J. Geils, and their band quickly became a Boston favorite. A manager heard them, thought they were a black blues band from Chicago, and signed them. Second-tier fame --- and, for Wolf, marriage to Faye Dunaway --- followed.
As a solo act, Wolf has an advantage --- his friends are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Steve Earle, he knows a million songs in a number of genres, and he can sound ancient as Moses or fast-rapping as a kid on Red Bull.
“Sleepless” has one of everything. A remake of the great blues song, “Homework.” A country duet with Mick Jagger --- who clearly missed his calling as a back-up singer --- and a dynamite refrain: “I'm holding on/to nothing but the wheel.” Keith Richards shows up on a Sonny Boy Williamson number. Steve Earle twangs along on a boozy “Some Things You Don't Want to Know.” And there's an occasional song like “A Lot of Good Ones Gone” that acknowledges how much water is under Wolf's bridge.
This is one of those CDs that's too hip for most rooms. You want just one trick, played a dozen times --- this isn't it. You want to be thrilled and challenged, teased and pleased? Then you're a candidate for the Peter Wolf fan club. It's a discerning, if surely dysfunctional and guaranteed goofy group. But what do you have to lose?
To buy "Sleepless" from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the MP3 download of "Sleepless" from Amazon.com, click here.