Peter Wolf's Roots: Blues, Soul—and Country, Too

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Peter Wolf's Roots: Blues, Soul—and Country, Too
May 13, 2010
By Barry Mazor
The Wall Street Journal

Fans around the world who heard or saw Peter Wolf's hot-charged vocal attack through the 17 years he fronted the much loved and admired J. Geils Band couldn't help but be aware of his passion for both hardcore urban blues and soul music. It lurked in his every phrase and gesture, from the band's early '70s genre hits ("Love-Itis," "Must of Got Lost") to the breakout global pop smashes of the '80s ("Love Stinks," "Centerfold," "Freeze-Frame").

But "Some Things You Don't Want to Know"—a fiddle-driven duet with Steve Earle on Mr. Wolf's acclaimed 2002 solo release, "Sleepless"—now looks like an indicator of another, lesser-known side of the rocker's roots influences and passions: his longstanding love of country music. Mr. Wolf's new release "Midnight Souvenirs," released last month on Verve/Universal, uncloaks that relatively hidden interest by means of three duets with highly individual, genre-hopping singers that have substantial, if varying, degrees of "country" in their résumés: Neko Case, the alternative-country exponent turned indie rock star; Shelby Lynne, the mainstream country singer turned masterly soul and jazz ballad interpreter; and Merle Haggard, the formidably jazzy but unabashedly country legend. The fact is, Mr. Wolf had an under-the-radar stand as a contracted Nashville songwriter in the '80s.

A new album by the former J. Geils Band frontman explores his longstanding love of country music.

"To me," he explained in a recent phone conversation, "country's an obvious kind of leap once you get sanctified into the world of rock 'n' roll, and it overtakes you like it overtook me—when I first heard Little Richard, Elvis and then Johnny Cash. I started to find out where they came from, their influences. And for me, it seems like the honky-tonks that were home for country artists like Buck Owens, Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell were simply made for one kind of blue-collar culture and ethnicity, just as the juke joints were for the African-Americans who also were working in fields and mills and moving up North to get more work. I don't see any difference, finally, between Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, whom I met and even became friends with when I got deep into blues, and their tremendous sense of both tradition and the present, and George Jones or Hank Williams."

For all of his historic abandon on stage and disc, Mr. Wolf proves a thoughtful, appreciative student and commentator on virtually every corner of American popular-music history and performance. He makes some lucid, relevant points about vocal range and its effects:

"Merle Haggard is simply one of my favorite singers. For one thing, I'm kind of a baritone myself. Baritones were pretty common in the era of the crooners—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole. Then came rock 'n' roll, and Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were all tenors, as were even the Beatles and Mick Jagger. Tenors just seemed to take over. But in Merle, there's that quality of richness that a baritone has, and an intimacy and command and distinction that I would put on a par with Sinatra. A lot of my audience might only know Merle as 'that guy who sang "Okie from Muskogee,"' but that's like saying Sinatra is 'the guy who did "New York, New York"' because that's all you know. Merle's an international treasure—period."

The twang connection was already there when young Peter Wolf, Bronx-raised, began appearing with the band the Hallucinations around Boston and Cambridge, Mass., in the mid-'60s, in a scene that included not just folk's famed Club 47 and the R&B-oriented Sugar Shack, but also the Hillbilly Ranch. Among those who caught his shows was Gram Parsons, who would soon be working with their mutual friend, Barry Tashian, in an early version of the protocountry-rock International Submarine Band. It's a connection that lies behind Mr. Parson's well-known turn on "Cry One More Time," a ballad penned by Mr. Wolf and his J. Geils bandmate Seth Justman.

In the 2010 edition of Mr. Wolf's "solo" career—in which he has virtually never sung or written alone—his most frequent collaborator is songwriter Will Jennings, whom he describes as a "genius and mentor." They co-wrote such striking ballads on the new CD as "It's Too Late for Me," that duet with Mr. Haggard, and "The Night Comes Down," dedicated to the late rocker Willy DeVille. Kenny White, who co-produced "Midnight Souvenirs," is another frequent collaborator, but taking charge of the releases that appear under his own name has been one attraction of Mr. Wolf's "solo" status since 1983.

"With all of my projects, I just think of myself as someone who tries to cast the right cast of characters, and also I want to be able to record in the way the records that I love were made. Not that I'm against modern technology; whatever sounds good, is good. But with my aesthetic sensibility, the more traditional ways of recording that I was brought up with are the ones that have a resonance for me."

It's startling to realize that Mr. Wolf's career under his own name has now continued even longer than his uninterrupted stretch with the band, though it shouldn't be a surprise that there have been occasional J. Geils reunions, including several shows just last year.

"The break-up of the J. Geils Band was not something that I wanted," he remarked, "and being a solo artist was not something that I chose; it was something that I had to do to continue as a performer, and to continue to make records. It was a painful, sad aspect, a fratricide, when artistic differences came out. There is something very sacred about a band; I'm talking about a real band here, the way U2, or the Rolling Stones, or the original Lynyrd Skynyrd were a band. We had a tradition in our shows that I feel good about—but life goes through its twists and turns."

"Midnight Souvenir," with its polish and soulful grace, suggests that the music-making still inspires Mr. Wolf, who turned 64 in March.

"Definitely so. For me, the only way to describe it is like this: You meet a significant other, and you get an electric charge, this strong emotional pull to the person, and it becomes an obsession that turns into what you call 'love.' That's what happened with music; I fell in love with the process."

Mr. Mazor, the Nashville-based author of "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers" (Oxford University Press), writes about country, roots and pop music for the Journal.