![]() ![]() I was sort of politely asked to kind of not be part of the group anymore. Wolf: There was just some division in taste in the band.Īnd so they decided maybe it's best if I just went my way, and they went theirs. You guys were big-time rock artists… and then you left J. Ganley: You eventually reached, I mean, you had a number one record with Freeze Frame. And so he was on the side of the stage, and he watched us perform, and ran into the dressing room and he came up to me and he said, 'Jay, you were amazing!'Īnd I said, "No, I'm not Jay." I said, "No, no, Jay's the guitar player."Īnd I said, "Well, that's just the way it is." By then, the Geils Band formed and I just couldn't do both.īy the time got to New York, Bill Graham invited us down, he heard about us, but never saw us. That's nonstop for about a year and a half or so. We're going to have some fun until the Midnight Sun. If it's in you, it's got to come out because that's rock and roll…it’s all about doing the tuning and getting right through ‘em… and welcome the little late at night kid from Alabama doing it all head getting ready and do it to it. So I became the all-night DJ: The Woofa Goofa….two for half a loaf of show making your knees freeze, your bladder splatter. He said, ‘Well, why don't you get all these records, all these 45s why don’t you maybe help me out?’ Come to my apartment to kind of pass out on my couch. Wolf: Yes, WBCN in Boston, and the fellow that started the station was an eccentric character, and he would drink at these bars until closing time. Wolf: There was a radio show station that started. ![]() At the same time, another brief side career presented itself. They built the fan base with shows around New England. He joined up with a band known as The Hallucinations. Peter Wolf parlayed that performance into a gig. Being a painter, it was so solitary, and all of a sudden I was, you know… there was the collaboration of doing something with other people, and being in a group was really thrilling. I don't know.Īnd it was another revelation. I got up and sang: There might be a man down there. It all happened by buying a big jug of cheap Cucamonga wine, and every weekend there was a loft party. Ganley: Is there something similar about sketching and painting, and lyric writing? Is there some way that those two art forms meld together for you? Wolf: Yeah, I had a scholarship at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and I've always painted. ![]() Ganley: What's interesting to me is you ended up coming to Boston on a painting scholarship. So music always stayed with me when I came to Boston. And every Wednesday, there I got to see James Brown-and the Motown Revue, and Jackie Wilson, and just every soul artist there was.īy the time I finished high school, I not only got to see the great jazz players like Charlie Mingus, but I got to see all the great R&B artists. I don't know how I got in because I was dyslexic and not a very good student, but I was accepted.īut through my friends who are in the music department, I got to learn about people like Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.Īnd so we would walk 10 blocks down to the Apollo. Wolf: Yeah, I went to a high school called the High School of Music and Art. Ganley: It sounds like you're in New York at the cusp of this kind of folk movement, and the beginning of early first-generation rock and roll kind of intermixing. And it shook me, and it has been shaken me ever since. And one day …a sort of decisive moment a born again experience: hearing Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally. Wolf: You know, he was one of my first concerts. I played that record nonstop, and it was Woody Guthrie. It became one of my first records and the gentleman singing.he sang a song Put Your Finger in the Air. I remember being taken to a place called the Little Red Schoolhouse, where I heard this fellow sing children's songs. ![]() He was part of the production of the Merry Widow, and he was a lover of classical music and jazz.Īnd so music was around my life at an early age. He started as a young fella, worked with the Shubert Theater, and he traveled around the United States… and he actually played Boston and parts of New Hampshire in the 1930s. The conversation started with his early days growing up in New York. NHPR's Rick Ganley talked with him ahead of a show here in New Hampshire. Wolf left the band after that record, and today at age 75, he's still making music and touring. That band became a staple of rock radio around the country, with a record contract demanding two albums a year, and constant touring. Get NHPR's reporting about politics, the pandemic, and other top stories in your inbox - sign up for our newsletter today. Musician Peter Wolf made his name and fame in the 1970s and 80s as the stage prowling, rhyming front-man for the Boston-based J. ![]()
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