Peter Wolf Publishes Memoir

Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses

By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 23, 2025

Peter Wolf (2025). Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses. Little Brown and Company.

Wolf was born Peter Walter Blankfield on March 7, 1946, in the Bronx. He attended the High School of Music & Art, located in west Harlem near the Apollo Theater which he often attended.

A typical New Yorker, he never learned to swim or drive. These limitations figure into the enthralling narrative which has been published with rave reviews. The book is entertaining, well written, and insightful about the many legendary musicians and celebrities he encountered during a long and productive career as singer/ songwriter, galvanic live performer, and recording artist.

Early on, virtually penniless, he hung out in clubs, scrounged and crashed. Standing at the bar with Bob Dylan, he downed drinks when Dylan was distracted. The drinks were refilled and again Wolf shamelessly scoffed them. Crashing at Brandeis University as an ersatz student he encountered a student, Jon Landau, who shared many interests and would later discover and manage Bruce Springsteen.

Peter had arranged to appear as a duet with Landau at Cholmondeley's Coffee House in the Castle at Brandeis. It’s where I heard many folk artists and Lightning Hopkins. At the last minute Landau, then an aspiring musician, opted to perform solo. I heard a lot of music at Brandeis including a young Joan Baez in the lounge of a dorm. With Rachel Goldstein we would drive to Cambridge to hear her at Club ’47. On one of those occasions she performed with Dylan.Aspiring to be an artist Wolf won a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He moved in with future filmmaker David Lynch but struggled to pay his share of the rent. When the pissed off Lynch was fed up with the freeloader the locks were changed and Wolf was on the street. It’s disappointing that, other than Lynch, he is mum about the Museum School.

What he shared with Landau was an encyclopedic knowledge of black music, blues, soul, and doo-wop. In 1964, with students from the Museum School, he formed his first band, The Hallucinations. It comprised Paul Shapiro (guitar), Doug Slade (guitar), Joe Clark (bass), and Stephen Jo Bladd (drums). They played clubs in the Combat Zone.

Steve Nelson, the manager of the Boston Tea Party, booked them as an opening act which is where I first saw them. Their girl friends appeared on stage propped up against the amps. The band immediately attracted a local following.

My sister Pip was an early fan. Later I introduced them, “Peter this is Pip. Pip this is Peter.” In my photo of that encounter Wolf seems less than amused. “He never even turned to acknowledge me” she commented recently. “What I found most interesting about him was that he was an artist.”

From an attic at the Tea Party Wolf, literally, moonlighted as a late night DJ for the emerging WBCN-FM. Under the eccentric T. Mitchell Hastings the station was gradually transitioning from eclectic obscurity to become one of the most innovative and successful ventures in America.

The Tea Party took off and by the 1970s Boston, with its base of 250,000 college students, became one of the leading music markets in the nation. All of the best bands, including the British Invasion, played the Tea Party and other clubs. For under $10 you could get close to them. Compare that to tickets in the hundreds or even thousands to see the top bands today.

As a young rock critic I got to hang out in the Green Room sharing beer and joints with the Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker, The Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, The Who and whoever was in town. There were raucous parties in Cambridge like the one where Led Zeppelin  nearly came to blows with The Kinks. Ruthie Buxton made the mistake of inviting both rival bands to her pad.

Wolf parted ways with the Hallucinations. Shapiro wanted to focus on painting and became a successful artist when he  relocated to Santa Fe. Wolf, Shapiro, and Bladd performed with Willie Loco for a benefit at the Tea Party. I photographed that rare reunion.

Wolf and Bladd began to jam with J. Geils which included bass player Danny Klein and Magic Dick on Mississippi saxophone. Seth Justman was recruited on keyboard and became a writing partner with Wolf. A manager at the time insisted that they perform as the J. Geils Band. Even Bill Graham, when they appeared at Fillmore East, greeted Peter assuming that he was meeting J. Geils. I recall that all star evening and the closing of the venue. J. Geils told me that he wanted to jam with the other famous guitarists.

It never happened and we miss having Wolf’s assessment of Geils as a musician. They were a great live act. It is telling, however, that while they notched a platinum album (Freeze-Frame) and three gold studio albums (Bloodshot, Sanctuary, and Love Stinks), and two gold live albums a decade apart, they were nominated several times but never voted into The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

They started in 1968 and signed with Atlantic Records in 1970. Mario “The Big M” Medious recruited them for the label. They made ten studio albums through the final Freeze Frame in 1981. Eager to sign with Atlantic, which was famous for its soul artists, they did so through faith and a handshake without benefit of a lawyer or manager. They signed to draconian terms and never saw any revenue to speak of. They toured relentlessly but lingered in debt. When the Atlantic contract expired, as Wolf tells it, nobody was eager to sign them. On a fluke they landed with EMI a major label with the muscle to promote singles like “Centerfold” that reached number on the Billboard charts. They became a headline stadium band.

After all those years of scraping by they were on the top of the world. Blindsided, Wolf was called to a meeting and fired. The band wanted to move on and Justman took over lead vocals as well as songwriting with his brother. Deeply traumatized Wolf did not perform for several years. That jinx was broken when he was called on stage for an encore with Springsteen.

The band led by Justman was a flop. The 1984 release You’re Getting Even While I’m Getting Old tanked and that was it for the band. There were one-nighters and reunion tours but Wolf does not speak well of those experiences.

The songs that were rejected by the band became material for his first solo album in 1984 Lights Out. Through 2016 he released eight albums for seven labels.

If you are a J. Geils Band fan this book is a disappointment. Wolf discusses just about everything other than his bandmates. We finally learn why in chapter 30, Fratricide- The Rise and Fall of a Full House: The J. Geils Band. In a terse six pages he covers the basics of the breakup seemingly restraining from pouring gasoline on the fire. Between the lines we intuit that Justman was the culprit who killed the goose.

There are a number of vintage images but the book has been poorly designed. The publisher saved money by printing them small on pages with text. Most of the images are muddy and lack sharp contrast. The better option would have been an album insert of several glossy pages.

The best way to approach this book is for what it is rather than for what it is not. All those years of recording and touring are a black hole. For the casual reader, however, this book is a page turner. I plowed through it laughing all the way. The more so as I was intimate with so much of its content particularly the esoteric mystique of Harvard Square.

For a time Peter and Magic Dick were my neighbors in the notorious Murder Building opposite the Cambridge Post Office. Discretely, he refers to his pad as in Craigie Arms. There were two murders in the building. One was by The Boston Strangler and the other an anthropology student at Harvard. She was laid out in the ritual manner of the Amazon. The case was never solved.

The ramshackle complex had an eclectic mix of bohemian tenants. One was the brilliant and decadent Ed Hood. A scion of a wealthy and prominent Birmingham, Alabama family he pursued a PhD in English at Harvard but was terminated. He liked to educate people including Wolf who was tutored in literature. I knew Wolf as a hipster speaking a pitter patter of alliterated jive. It was a surprise to learn that he is so well read. That shows in the writing which is fluid and brilliant.

Hood appeared in two Warhol films, “My Hustler” and “Chelsea Girls.” Warhol’s entourage including Edie Sedgwick and the outré poet, Renee Ricard among others, passed through the Murder Building.

Through scores of anecdotes it is astonishing to read his meticulously detailed recreation of distant encounters. He describes the setting, including what they wore, as well as reconstructed conversations.

There were other renowned Boston/ Cambridge musicians and bands but Wolf was the essence of the scene. From the Murder Building one strolled to the Pâtisserie Française for croissants and the morning paper. It was cool to hang out when we had more time than money.  Popping through the alley opposite the Brattle Theatre there was Cardell’s a cafeteria with cheap eats. Proprietor George Demers had the latest updates on Wolf. With Cambridge as a home base Wolf, who was constantly on the road, had a cosmopolitan worldly view. The book nicely bifurcates between local and global.

Van Morrison was a friend of Wolf while he lived in Cambridge and worked on Astral Weeks. They performed together at Symphony Hall. Grabbing a sub sandwich I attended that iconic concert. Arguably, other than during Pops, I am the only person ever to have enjoyed dinner theatre at that venerable hall. There was a great after party at the Hotel Continental in Cambridge.

He writes with poignant detail about his high school sweetheart Edie. I remember her as stunningly beautiful. It was a terrible shock for all of us when she died young in an accident. There would be other women, including famously, Faye Dunaway, but you sensed that Edie was the love of his life.

His other great love is the blues. It is charming to read of Wolf as fanboy and groupie to the musicians he idolized. He hung out next to Club Passim waiting for Muddy Waters and his band to show up. When Muddy rolled up in his Cadillac the eager Wolf helped to bring equipment into the club. Learning that it was a coffee club harmonica player, James Cotton, complained that there was no booze. Asking for their preferences, on his own dime, Wolf ran off to a liquor store which cemented his relationship with the band.

In the long interval between matinee and evening performances Wolf invited them to take a short walk to his apartment where they hunkered down. This became the norm when they were in town with Cotton fixing a mess of soul food. There is also a lot about John Lee Hooker. Later, Howlin Wolf came to Joe’s Place, another Cambridge club, but Cotton advised Peter to stay away as the man was crazy. I vividly recall those gigs but Howlin Wolf, then on regular dialysis treatment, was not as evil or menacing as he once was.

What Wolf wrote about Dunaway is infectiously mischievous and charming. Their careers kept them apart for long stretches but he describes being on set a couple of times when she was filming on location: Three Musketeers (1973), Chinatown (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974).

There was a meeting at Jack Nicholson’s home to discuss changes in the Chinatown script. Serious partying included booze and a mountain of blow on a coffee table. Jack and Faye went upstairs to discuss their work but never came down. Near dawn Wolf deduced monkey business. In a rage he tossed the table and all that coke into Nicholson’s pool. Then he had to find a ride back to the hotel.

Things were never right with Faye after that but when he ran into Jack it was never discussed. Oh well, show biz.

They were an odd couple; the movie star, grand Southern lady, and scuffling rocker from the Bronx. Their first date entailed popcorn on the couch and a TV marathon of Gunsmoke. She, literally, taught him table manners. Prior to learning versions of continental style he would just wolf it down so to speak.

While Wolf likes the sauce it tends to be straight no chaser. As a wedding present, Ahmet Ertugun, the president of Atlantic Records, gifted them two cases of exquisite wine; one red and one white. The high end liquor store was shocked when Wolf demanded to exchange it for what proved to be some fifty plus cases of Bolla, vapolicella. At about $10 a bottle it’s a decent wine for the price. I used to drink it when it was all I could afford and before my palate developed.

With Faye in Hollywood he tried to make the most of the access that entailed. He wanted to make a deal to record a sound track for a movie. That led to a meeting with Alfred Hitchcock in his home. He was offered a drink but stuck to tea even after many nudges to consider champagne or a glass of sherry. The director was annoyed when Wolf wouldn’t budge. He later learned that Hitchcock’s wife refused to let him drink alone. If Wolf drank tea then Hitchcock was denied his afternoon tipple. In frustration the guest was shown the door.

The tutoring of Ed Hood served him well during a lunch with a friend and unknown gentleman. Wolf asked “What do you do?” That proved to be an insult to poet Robert Lowell. They would meet on other occasions when Wolf handled himself better while discussion turned to the great poets.

There are reports of encounters with all manner of people from Peter Sellers and Roman Polanski to Julia Childs. I often ran into her shopping at Savenor’s which was renowned for its meat. She was a Cambridge neighbor.

While Wolf was recording Sly Stone was in a studio just down the hall. He was camped out front in his tour bus. With Sly you never know what you get and Wolf conveys the musical genius as well as the sad dark side of a brilliant artist whose career imploded.

After the breakup with J. Geils there was an ongoing search for a writing partner. He found a brilliant one in Don Covay. He wrote the Aretha Franklin hit “Chain of Fools.” We get treasured insights to the creative process. It’s revealing that we learn about working with Covay but not a word about Seth Justman with whom he created seven albums. He and Covay were about to record Peter’s first solo album. The featured song and album cover was to be “Dancing in the Dark.” At the last minute they learned that Springsteen was about to release a song with that title. That assured that Wolf’s album would be buried. The title was changed to “Lights Out” and charted at 12 on the Hot 100.

The final chapter Every Fool Has a Rainbow: Merle Haggard is particularly poignant and insightful. Wolf is never better than when writing about the musicians he most admires. He pursued Haggard to record a duet. This entailed chasing him from gig-to-gig just hoping for face time to pitch the tune.

The most successful Country stars hung out in their tour busses. The luxury vehicles cost $1 million plus. Social life rarely occurred in the green room of clubs. The fabulous Willie Nelson bus was notable for having the best pot. Wolf writes salaciously about that.

Knowing that Haggard was due at a gig nearby Wolf lay in wait. He convinced producer Don Law to allow him to create an on-site popup recording studio. Musicians were hired for the occasion. When Wolf was granted an audience he was surprised that Haggard was willing to make a cut. This was later edited and released.

Of the legendary Country stars Haggard with an abrasive, outlaw sound was regarded as one of the greatest artists. On their duet Wolf reports that Haggard dug deeply into the lyrics. “It’s Too Late for Me” is track 14 on the album Midnight Souvenirs.

The lyrics were all too significant as time was running out for Haggard. Life on the road wears down even a diamond in the rough like the singular Haggard. Early on his life turned around as an inmate in attendance for Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison (1968). That glimpse of a declining giant was a sweet last word of a book I was reluctant to stop reading.