How a Jewish kid from the Bronx shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen, married Faye Dunaway and became the Zelig of rock ‘n’ roll

By Jim Sullivan
March 7, 2025

Six years ago, I was talking to Peter Wolf, the former J. Geils Band lead singer-co-songwriter and longtime solo artist, and I asked: “What about writing a memoir?”

Wolf was practically a rock ‘n’ roll Zelig, having had this extensive and varied career, becoming friends with everyone from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. There were stories there.

“People keep mentioning it to me,” he said, noting rock memoirs had “become in vogue.”

“I’ve somewhat started to put together a book,” he told me back then. “It would just be my stories of the people I admire and love and had the privilege to work with and get to know behind closed doors. Hopefully, being able to capture the character of not only why the music was great, but why the artists themselves were so unique and great. I think the key is to do it without being salacious and to make it interesting and still true and pure at the same time.”

Wolf has done just that.

The writing process kicked into high gear during the pandemic. And on March 11, that long-gestating book, Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses, hits the shelves.

“The key theme of this book,” Wolf told me last month, speaking from his home in Newton, Mass., was the Christopher Isherwood sentence: “I am a camera where the shutter is always open.’”

It’s Wolf as participant and observer. It’s a personal story though, too, starting with the singer born Peter Blankfield and his Bronx upbringing, attending art school in Boston, and the beginnings (and end) of the J. Geils Band. But Wolf shines a lot of the light on others that entered his life, some that were ephemeral encounters, others more long-lasting relationships

It is, indeed, a book where many a famous name is dropped, but Wolf, who turned 79 March 7, can hardly help it: He’s a storyteller with a heaping helping of fame himself and the same goes for many of, as he calls them, the “characters.” He’s also got an eye for detail and nuance.

“I didn’t want to do a typical memoir, something that started in my childhood and went up,” Wolf said. “I really started out to do a collection of short stories which the running title was going to be Adventures of a Fan with no chronological order with the idea that I was privileged to get to meet these people and most of them, most of the encounters really happened by accident. It’s not like I sought out certain people.”

Waiting for the Moon does, actually, start from Wolf’s childhood but it quickly veers off to a place where many of the chapters are named (or subtitled) for the “characters” and the time-place continuum has a Slaughterhouse-5 jump-around feeling.

“What I find interesting,” Wolf said, “is a young Jewish boy from the Bronx encountering these talented, amazing musicians who came from a totally different culture, who were brought up in the rural plantations in the agricultural south, the old South that still believed in the Lost Cause and Jim Crow, somehow being able to bring these two vastly different worlds together and being able to have a connecting thread.”

Wolf related his ability to act as a conduit between different worlds to his childhood – and it connects to this very outlet in its 20th century Yiddish hardcopy days.

“The Forward was a newspaper read by my grandmother and her friends and it was important to them because they were immigrants to the new world,” Wolf said. “When my grandparents came to this country from Eastern Europe — Ukraine and Poland — they needed to adapt to a new culture. I remember my grandmother not being able to read English.

“I would read things for her and I would read things for her. She had a lack of schooling because she came over when she was very young. Through the newspaper, they were able to find a connecting rod and hear articles about other people’s experiences. It became not just the news, but a hopeful entry into this new world they were traveling in.

“And I think with these blues artists, when they left the South and went to Chicago to work in the steel mills, or car places in Detroit, or the meat packing places to get out of agriculture, they were really in foreign cities. As they became musicians, and when they started to play for generally mostly white audiences and coffee houses, it was a totally different, vastly unknown experience. When I encountered them, I found that to be very interesting and how a friendship from these two vastly different experiences were able to be brought because I admired them and they understood that. I tried to be helpful in acting as sort of a roadie or tour guide, in any way that I could assist.”

Those famous folks in the book are many and varied. There are the aforementioned blues guys he befriended early on in Cambridge, Mass., like Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. He bought them booze, put them up, did whatever was needed. And, of course, there’s Morrison, Dylan, John Lennon, Sly Stone, Merle Haggard and the Rolling Stones.

But not everyone who came into Wolf’s world and shared part of his life came from the music world. Among others: Eleanor Roosevelt, Julia Child, Andy Warhol, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, Roger Corman, Steve McQueen. Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Norman Rockwell, Timothy Leary, Robin Williams, Paul Newman and Carrie Fisher and David Lynch

Lynch was Wolf’s roommate in the early ‘60s when both were attending Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Wolf was behind on rent; Lynch had had enough of him and changed the locks. Undaunted, Wolf was trying to break in the back way to retrieve some belongings. The police spotted him, nabbed him and, well, it was the time of the Boston Strangler and the police thought just maybe …

“I was not the Boston Strangler,” Wolf said. “I don’t think the chapter leaves any doubt.” (It does not.)

One of the most amusing rock stories, in retrospect at least, is when in the summer of 1982, the J. Geils Band was on a summer tour with the Rolling Stones in Europe. One night, post-show, there was partying on a coastal beach and in the hotel room. But in the wee hours, no one could locate Wolf, who did not know how to swim.

Not that he knew it at the time but, Wolf said, “there was all this pandemonium going on in search for me and people assumed I got carried away in a riptide. And there I was in some sort of Moroccan cloak that Keith [Richards] gave me.”

Wolf was four sheets to the wind, but not findable. He was on a closet floor. “It was basically his [Richards’] son Marlon who closed the door, not realizing I was passed out in the closet.”

“When I look back at it, it was kind of funny.”

He also discusses his ex-wife Faye Dunaway. “It was a time when these were two separate [things], the world of rock musicians and the world of film stars,” Wolf said. “All the film stars wanted to be rockers and all the rockers envied the film stars. So, when Faye and I were together it was very rare for a rock and roller and a movie star. I mean eventually Cher and Gregg Allman — it’s not anything unusual these days  — but back then it was.”

Up to now, Wolf has shared little of his tumultuous relationship with Dunaway with the public. They were married in 1974 and divorced five years later.

“As the book was forming,” Wolf said, “it was suggested that this was something you might want to explore, because — this is a bad analogy — but like a lot of people are coming to the show and want to hear you do certain songs and if you leave out those songs, they might feel a little disappointed.

“With Faye, I didn’t want to do a kiss-and-tell,” said Wolf. “She actually fell in love with me and because she was an incredible character to pursue, I developed it more.”

They were both in love; they both had their issues, and while Wolf delves into the volatility, he is less accusatory than accepting of her eccentricities and foibles, along with his own.  He said that he tried to treat the story of him and Dunaway the way some of his favorite writers would have — “writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Willams and even Michael Korda who wrote this book about publishing. I really tried to focus in on all the characters.”

Though musicians in the J. Geils Band pop up here and there, they are not really named until the J. Geils Band chapter. For instance, Magic Dick (Richard Salwitz) is “the harmonica player.”

Although Wolf did some 21st century reunion concerts with the Geils Band — “ill-advised,” he writes — it was over in 1985 when keyboardist Seth Justman decided he no longer wanted to write with Wolf, but with his brother Paul. And Wolf was ousted, just after the band hit its commercial peak. Wolf was shocked and, though he made a Top 10 record with his solo debut album, Lights Out, he didn’t perform on stage for ten years, until Bruce Springsteen called him up to join him on a song at Boston Garden.

“I tried to give a shortened history of the rise and fall,” Wolf said of his decision on how to treat the band. “I didn’t really want to venture too deeply into the details, because when I read other musician’s memoirs, unless you’re a real fan, those details become boring to many people. So, I wanted to avoid all that and just tell it from my point of view what the band meant to me and, unfortunately, when it kind of fell apart.”

When we spoke, Wolf had just finished doing the Audible version of Waiting on the Moon. “That was quite an experience. To read it is one thing,” he said. “To read it well becomes the challenging part. It’s like doing a song, you have to find the right key and the right placement. There are other voices or characters and the pacing of it is important. As we’re talking right now it would be too fast for an audiobook because an audiobook has to be at this tempo” — Wolf slows down — “as opposed to this tempo.”

At one point, Wolf thought about trying to imitate the voices of the characters in the book. For instance, he astutely described Jagger’s ability to shift between posh and Cockney accents, depending upon who he’s talking to.

“There was a moment there I thought I would do that,” Wolf said with a laugh. Reasoning prevailed: “It seemed to not make sense.”

Though I bet Wolf could do a pretty darn good Jagger.

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