Peter Wolf on His Friendships With Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters & Van Morrison, Signing With EMI: ‘It All Happened by Accident’

Peter Wolf, known best as the frontman for J. Geils Band, which ascended to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982 with the irresistible “Centerfold,” made a career out of being at the right place at the right time. Growing up in New York City, attending college in Boston and becoming ensconced in the worlds of music and art, Wolf was introduced to an incredible cast of luminaries figures — and earned more than enough anecdotes to fill a book. 

“It all happened by accident,” Wolf tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast of the friendships that filled his life and make his memoir, Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses, a lively, fascinating book that only tangentially discusses his career as a recording and touring artist. 

Van Morrison, already a hitmaker with 1967’s “Brown Eyed Girl” when he met Wolf, looms large in Waiting on the Moon. Wolf met Morrison while the J. Geils band was rehearsing in a Boston club. Morrison moved to Boston in 1967 and rehabilitated his career by playing in local clubs ahead of recording his classic 1968 album, Astral Weeks. 

“We’re rehearsing, and Van Morrison happens to come into this club. I didn’t know it was Van Morrison. He didn’t know I was a DJ that he was listening to every night. And by that coincidence, we became friends, and [that’s] sort of how I met so many of the different people in the book.”

Wolf has a knack for making friends, running in fascinating social circles and finding himself in hard-to-believe situations. He was college roommates with film director David Lynch, befriended blues greats Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, met playwright Tennessee Williams, partied with The Rolling Stones, hung out with Bob Dylan and once attended a dinner party thrown by celebrity chef Julia Child.

Waiting on the Moon contains few details about the J. Geils Band, putting the long-running band in the background while focusing on the people who Wolf encountered. “I didn’t want it to be about me,” he explains. “I wanted it to be about them, and [I] tried to capture the nature of the music world at that time. And so Muddy would play the Apollo in one part of the chapter, and then he’s playing a jazz club in another part of the chapter. And then he’s playing, for the first time, a coffeehouse. So that gives the reader a historical sense of the music world at the time of many of these stories.”

Wolf grew up in the Bronx and attended high school in Harlem, 10 blocks north of the Apollo Theater, providing him with a valuable education for a life in music. “Every Wednesday I would go to the Apollo and see an amateur show, and then the entire Apollo review,” he recalls. “And so I saw every important soul artist — almost, not every — but I saw everybody from the Motown Revue, James Brown, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson [and] Dinah Washington. I saw John Coltrane there.”

It was performer and songwriter Don Covay, who penned Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools,” who taught Wolf that an audience is like a church congregation, and the artist’s role is a minister who rouses people from the pews. 

“And that’s why I think I always, always [was] attracted to the Stones and artists that really were able to connect with the audience. And Van Morrison, who doesn’t really move much — neither did Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland or a lot of the soul greats — but he was able to somehow transfix the audience and move them in a different kind of way, not necessarily dancing and jumping from left to right, but somehow creating this very magical moment.”

Even one of the most pivotal moments in Wolf’s career came by accident. When the J. Geils Band fulfilled its contract with Atlantic Records, Wolf met with every president of a major record label in the U.S. — and was turned down by them all. He was left “feeling pretty defeated” and ended up at the Palm in Los Angeles. As luck would have it, a young record executive — and huge fan of the J. Geils Band — named Jim Mazza noticed Wolf and struck up a conversation. Mazza was helping launch EMI Records and jumped at the chance to sign the band.

EMI put Wolf and the J. Geils Band on a new trajectory. After failing to break through at radio at Atlantic, the title track from 1980’s Love Stinks went into the top 40 of the Hot 100. The 1981 album Freeze-Frame topped the Billboard 200, and the single “Centerfold” spent six weeks atop the Hot 100. Like so many events in Wolf’s life, landing a new record contract stemmed from being at the right place at the right time. 

“That was by accident, because we had exhausted almost every major label,” Wolf recalls. “And, by chance, being at the right place at the right time, we ended up at EMI.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Peter Wolf using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart, Podbean or Everand.