![]() Geils Band had built up enough of a following in New England to open for Black Sabbath when the group played at the Fillmore East. ![]() We just want to play music.' "Ī year and a half later, the J. and he had a manager who didn't quite like me and thought I was going to steal Jay away or something, so he said, 'If you want to play with J., you can play with J., but it has to be under the name J. "We never expect the Geils band would even get out of Boston," Wolf says. Magic Dick), Stephen Jo Bladd and Danny Klein, they decided to form a band. He went to a coffee house, where he met a guitar player named J. In 1967, several of the group members left and Wolf started looking for new bandmates. Peter Wolf's band, The Hallucinations, began performing with Waters when he'd come to Boston. ![]() Because the chitlin circuit that they were on was sort of dying out, and this was a whole new adventure for these great musicians." But it was a way for them to relax - because, really, other than going to Europe, playing the college circuit was really new to them. "Fortunately, I had a tape recorder, and I'd tape-record a lot of the stories they were telling. And they would just all hang," Wolf says. And Muddy would tell Howlin' Wolf, 'Hey, this young guy has an apartment,' so he'd come by. "And so every day, they would come and use my apartment as a hang-in, and then James Cotton would come and cook up all sorts of chicken, and it became a clubhouse. Because the dressing room at the club was so small, Wolf would invite the performers - Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Bill Monroe - to change in his apartment. You came out, and it was your job to get the audience riled up and not unlike someone in church, where by the end, the audience was up on their feet, the performer just gave it its all and it was always 110 percent."Īfter hitchhiking across the country, Wolf settled in Cambridge, Mass., in an apartment near a jazz venue called Club 47. The dancing and the interaction and the communicating with the audience was the art that I learned there at the Apollo Theater. was like in a church, they were performing for their congregation. And the list went on, but the showman and the pageantry. "During that time, I saw all the great artists," he says. From the Apollo, he says, he learned how to be a performer. The high school, on 135th Street, was blocks away from the Apollo Theater, and Wolf made it a priority to visit the theater on a weekly basis. Shortly thereafter, Wolf started attending the High School of Music and Art in Harlem. ![]() And he would play this bluegrass and these guys called The Stanley Brothers, and they would sing songs, and it was through that that got me into country music." "But on a certain day - on Thursdays and Fridays, in the Bronx - you could get from WWVA, from Wheeling, W.Va., and there was a certain coffee-drinking DJ named Lee Moore. "Radio provided me with a great outlet, and I would learn so much about music through radio," he tells Fresh Air host Terry Gross. Wolf says his eclectic musical influences came from his family, and from sitting in their crowded Bronx apartment together, listening to the radio. His grandmother had performed in Yiddish theater, his father toured the vaudeville circuit and worked at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and his sister danced weekly on Alan Freed's show. It was expected that Wolf would take up an instrument. Geils Band, and he's released seven solo albums, but his musical career started in elementary school, when he played the triangle in his school's band. Peter Wolf was the lead singer of the R&B-influenced J.
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