Episode 1645 - Peter Wolf

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Lock the gates!

All right, let's do this.

How are you, what the fuckers?

What the fuck, buddies?

What the fuck, Nicks?

How's it going?

What's happening?

I'm Mark Marin.

This is my podcast.

Welcome to it.

What is going on?

What is going on with you?

seriously i mean what is going on with you

just tell me or just at least tell yourself do us all a favor i'm sorry you just what are you just exercising how how are you is everything all right i i'm okay i'm oh i'm okay

i'm okay

i'm okay

a lot of different angles on that one today on the show the uh the magnificent peter wolf is here i didn't know what to expect.

Peter Wolf, the singer and songwriter and former front man of the Jay Giles band.

Yeah, there's a couple Giles at records that I listened to the fuck out of.

I mean, when Freeze Frame came out, oh man,

in the early stuff, nothing like the Jay Giles band.

They're the fucking Jay Giles band, but this is Peter Wolf.

He's a, you know, he's of that band, but he's so much more.

He wrote this book called Waiting on the Moon.

Now, this thing is kind of great because it is a memoir to a degree, but it's really a bunch of essays about the people he's met in his life.

Some people who you know, there's, you know, connections there, like when he was in Cambridge.

It's just, he's one of these guys that's kind of like, almost like a Zealig in terms of where he was at certain times before he was in Giles and the relationships he had with like Muddy Waters and

some relationship he had with Van Morrison before Van Morrison was big, John Lee Hooker,

you know, intellectuals in the Harvard Square area, and then on throughout his life, just all these different encounters with people.

And it was kind of a fascinating,

fascinating little moments and portraits of himself and his relationships, even if they're in passing with these people that some of us all know.

I know I'm getting old to say, you know, we all know them, but I don't know.

Like most of the references I have were of a generation before me.

But it doesn't matter.

It was kind of interesting and fun to talk to Peter.

So that's happening.

I do want to tell you the documentary about me, if you don't get enough of me here.

The documentary, Are We Good, is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City next month.

There are two screenings, Saturday, June 14th at 5 p.m.

That's at the OKX Theater on Chambers Street.

Then Sunday, June 15th at 5.30 p.m., it's screening at the Village East on 2nd Avenue and 12th Street.

You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour.

There is a ticket link there.

So

you can knock that out.

Come, come.

I know some of you just saw me perform.

Come know more about me than you ever need to know.

And see a lot of my, you know, there's a lot of

There's a lot of shots of the cats, a lot of shots of me pulling my pants up.

That seems to be what my life is about, pulling my pants up and talking to my cats and doing stand-up comedy and talking to you people.

So, the cats, you know, I don't want to leave anybody hanging.

I know there's a narrative here about

Charlie's issues and Buster.

Well, here's what's going on.

Since I've been home very consistently for a few weeks now, the hierarchy seems to have leveled off.

You know, the king is back and people are behaving appropriately.

There's a little, you know, Charlie's excitable, but he's not being hostile.

You know, he's punching at Sammy a bit and he's playing with him and he's punching at Buster just a little bit.

Everything seems to have leveled off.

They're sweeping.

They're sweeping on my bed.

Everything is okay.

It's okay.

I was the missing piece.

It was my absence that was causing the power vacuum.

And now the power is back, baby, and everybody falls in line.

Though Charlie's still very erratic,

I have, I don't know if you know this, but I have those things that you can,

I don't know if they're drying racks, but you can unroll them on top of the sink.

It's like

a rubber grating.

And I have them over all the sinks in the kitchen because Charlie, given the opportunity, will pee in the sink.

And it happens pretty quickly.

I turned my back.

I was washing some stuff and I had unrolled or I'd rolled up one of the little rubber grates.

And within seconds, Charlie was just peeing in the sink, just sitting there looking at me, peeing in the sink, directly into the drain.

So what was I going to do?

I let him finish and then I washed it down.

But

yeah, so Charlie, you know, he's a surprising cat.

But that wasn't so surprising.

It's just I

turned away for a second and he's peeing in the sink.

Worse things could be happening.

Another little bit of information that I got, you know, I don't know how many of you, Sammy, I don't know what to do with.

Sammy, I'm going to bring to the vet because he needs a yearly checkup.

But I just, occasionally, he shows affection and he's very awkward with it.

And

he'll lay on my lap in a very seemingly awkward way.

Doesn't like to be pet much.

But you just, with that kind of cat, you just kind of wait around for it to happen and you go like, oh, look at you.

Buster is

my guy

and i don't know how many of you have been with me for a long long time but uh when buster was i think less than a year old he ate some uh

plants that had pollen on it from lilies and he went into renal failure and i

i i i saved him um

but it was always a question as to whether or not

you know he'd get that function back you know after ultrasounds after the

after the he recovered you know one kidney was small and one kidney was big.

And I always assumed that one kidney wasn't working.

But then, like, as time went by, it's been eight or nine years here, he, um,

you know, his numbers have been okay.

But I just, the vet said, why don't we just take a look at those kidneys again

or like get some updated information.

So I brought him in for an ultrasound.

And still, one kidney is abnormally small and the other kidney is large.

And the assumption is that the small one is dead and the big one's doing the work of two.

So I think I know that now.

We're fairly conclusive that my cat buster is kind of churning away on one kidney.

But you know, he's having a good life, and we'll just keep going

until it starts to buckle.

And then we'll take steps to help him out.

But,

but, yeah, man, cats.

Am I right?

It's nice to be home.

I bit my fucking whip in the same place three times.

There's like nothing more immediately fucking aggravating than biting your whip again in the same place.

God damn it.

Anyway, look, you guys.

So I got an interesting email.

I want to know if this is a Canadian thing or this guy.

Like, this is one of the great emails.

The subject line.

As some of you recall, if you've been following along, I left my laptop at

border control in Toronto at TSA

and I talked about how quickly I got it back

and it was great I'm glad I have it because I was ready to ditch it just get a new one dump everything I could down from the cloud but I have it I have it back and now the the pressing nature of getting a new computer has been lifted.

I could probably use a new one, but I don't use it for that much.

It doesn't matter.

So I get an email, Subject line, story about lost laptop at airport security in Toronto.

Just heard Mark's story on today's podcast about leaving his laptop at airport security in Toronto.

Please apologize to him from me.

I recognized Mark in line at security on Sunday and briefly told him a story about how I got scammed on SeatGeek and was not able to use tickets I bought to his show in Toronto on Saturday night the night before.

He was very kind during our brief interaction, but obviously I inadvertently distracted him and he left his laptop on the security conveyor belt.

I'm so sorry for any inconvenience I might have caused him.

Please do pass my apologies along to him and tell him to come back to Toronto soon.

Chad.

Chad, buddy, buddy, I didn't even think of that.

And

I don't want you to carry it, man.

You really got to let this go.

I don't know if this is politeness or, you know, if it's a, I don't know, is it a Canadian thing?

Tell me, does that sound like a Canadian email?

To carry that way, Chad, I'll be honest with you.

I really think what happened was generally because I have TSA

pre,

pre-check, and they never make me take my computer out, but they make everyone take their computer out.

at security in Toronto.

I guess it's an international thing.

So I really think it was just I'd become quite accustomed to just taking, to not, to not taking my computer out and I spaced it.

But now that you mention it, yeah, maybe, okay, you know what?

Maybe, maybe it was your fault.

I don't want to blame myself at all.

So Chad, thank you for apologizing.

I appreciate that.

I can let it go now because really, I wasn't mad at you up until I read the email and then I realized, well, if this guy wants to carry the load and I don't have to blame myself, I'll blame Chad.

And he just apologized.

So thank you, Chad.

And now the burden is lifted from everybody.

Bottom line is, though, I got it back.

We can let all of it go, Chad, you and me together.

Okay?

We're good.

All right, look,

Peter Wolf is

really a legend.

And

it was kind of interesting to talk to him because I don't think Jay Giles gets the respect they deserve, quite honestly, number one.

And number two, as I said earlier, I was kind of blown away by his book and the fact that it's really not about Jay Giles.

It's really about a lot of interesting people that Peter had come in contact with over the years.

It's called Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses.

It's available now

wherever you get books, and there's all kinds of stories about all kinds of people in there.

And it's very entertaining.

And this is me

talking to Peter about that and stuff and things.

The interesting thing about the book is that it's not chronological.

Like you go, you know what I mean, dropping in, dropping in, dropping in.

And

what is even more interesting is that it's not necessarily about the band at all.

This was a book that I started.

many, many, many years ago

as a thought, because as I say in the prologue, people said to me, you know, Pete, you tell such great stories, you know, in the dressing rooms, parties.

Yeah.

And they always get the thing,

you know, hey, Pete, you know, you should write a book.

Right, right.

And Christopher Hitchens

once said, everybody has a book in them.

Yeah.

But it doesn't mean everybody wants to read it.

And I always kind of took that to heart.

And so many years ago, I wrote an outline of just different adventures.

And then the pandemic came along and everybody were friends of mine where they were doing all these Patreon things and writing rock operas and this and plays and albums.

I was just reading, reading and listening to all the records I'd collected all my life.

And I started to make a new recording.

And I got about 80%

done with it.

And I realized, wait a second, if I release this,

this is going to

be into the ether and disappear in like 48 hours like the rest of my solo records, you know, especially the later ones that I love so much.

And I figured now might be the time to do something different, a different approach.

So I thought this would be the time, possibly, to really sit down and write a book.

And so I went through all the different little notes I had and I decided to write a book of basically short stories

of the people that I admired, the the people I was privileged to get to meet,

and the encounters.

And I didn't want to do a kiss and tell book.

And I also decided it's just suggested.

Yeah.

There's no kissing and telling, but there's a...

And then we had some cocktails.

Yeah.

And Mark, the two things I didn't want to write about

was

my marriage to Faye Donaway.

and the Jay Giles band.

Yeah.

And I just wanted it to be a collection of short stories.

And I'm a big reader.

And there was a book, Dogs Bark by Truman Capote.

And in it was short stories of vignettes of him meeting Brando.

That was pretty interesting.

His vignette on Mal Monroe,

Humphrey Bogart, you know, when he did a screenplay with Humphrey Bogart for one of his films.

And so I thought that, you know, that was an interesting template.

And then there was a book, one of my favorite books, Berlin Stories, by Christopher Ishewit.

And he had a line in there: I am a camera and my shutter is always open.

And he describes what Germany was like just before, you know, the Weimar Republic, all that.

And that book became what Cabaret was based on, the movie and the play.

And so I figured that's the way I was going to go.

And I was, you know, I read all different musicians'

memoirs, biographies, written by

the, well, yeah,

a bunch.

Not a bunch.

You ever read that

Straight Life, the Art Pepper one?

Oh, man,

that's one of the ones that was going to come to mind.

Yeah.

And it's funny when Keith Richards...

That's another great one, dude.

Yes, when Keith Richards, gentleman James Fox, that was helping Keith write his book, came up and spent a good deal of time with me.

in Boston.

And I said, listen, if you're going to be working with Keith, you've got to keep it in his voice.

I said, there are certain books.

He did, too.

Oh, he did.

And this great thing about Straight Time, though, it was his voice told to his wife on Arpeppa, the great jazz saxophone.

I love that book.

From out here in Los Angeles.

I always say it's 100 pages

about saxophone and jazz, and 300 pages about heroin in jail.

Oh, boy.

Another great one, of course, is Miles Davis's book.

Oh, is that good?

Yeah, I haven't read that one.

Oh, man.

If you want to be in a room with Miles, you just get that book.

Quentin Trupp did the,

he's a poet.

Yeah.

And he sat down with Miles for a long time.

Oh, I got to get that.

It's amazing.

And, you know, Miles, a lot of people don't realize, came from a very wealthy family.

His father was in.

St.

Louis, right?

St.

Louis, yes.

And

he was going to go to Juilliard, which he did.

Yeah.

And he got this bug because he saw some big bands passing through Juilliard.

And so he would leave Juilliard at night.

He would head down to 52nd Street, and he connected with Dizzy and Charlie Parker, all these great artists.

So that's all really documented in this book, which is really an amazing read.

So these are the, you had these in your mind.

Yeah, and then, you know,

a woman I know and work with a little bit and stuff, I thought at the time it came out, Patty Smith's book, Just Kids,

you know, captured, you know, a moment in time, and it wasn't about, you know, her band or this or that.

And so also Dylan's book.

Bob's book, you know, was

yours reminded me a lot of that.

You know, because Bob is of a type where, you know, time moves and the times move through him.

Right.

And so what you get in that, what was it called?

What was his autobiography?

Chronicles.

Chronicles.

Part one.

Yeah, part one.

What you get is this sort of poetic, you know, historical piece about, you know, like you talk about the folk scene at Bleaker and McDougal around the same time that store plays heavy in Chronicles.

But what you get is you see, it's almost like a history book in terms of what these periods were like.

Right.

More than it's about his music necessarily, except for the, you know, the long chapter on the mystical three-chord or four-chord progression you figured out.

Right, right, right.

And it's funny, you know, you said it, because the two people

who I asked for advice about the book

one was Bob yeah and I said to him you know Bob I hear you're writing a book

how's that how are you approaching that yeah he said you know

I'm kind of famous and so you know if I'm writing about 1974 yeah I might call up a couple of people and say what do you remember about 1974 and I thought he was putting me on.

Until I, I'll give you, for instance, when I was writing this book, book, I had a scene where I remember walking down the hallway in this hotel.

The Rolling Stones were playing in Boston.

They were playing several nights at the Boston Garden.

And they took over the entire floor of the Sheridan Hotel in Boston, big hotel, but the whole floor, they had bodyguards and

security

by the elevators.

You couldn't get up to the top floor.

And they had the whole band, everybody, the whole top floor was rented out by the Rolling Stones and their crew.

And I remember being up there and walking

into a room, and as I was writing, sitting on the floor playing acoustic guitars was Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Graham Parsons.

And they were singing Sing Me Back Home, Merle Haggard's great song.

And as I'm researching, because I want to get things because Bob said, you know,

call people who remember 72, but I didn't know who to call, so I was doing my own research.

I realized that Graham Parsons had died a year before this tour, so he couldn't have been in the room.

And so then I got scared because, you know, couldn't trust your memory.

So I checked out, and really what I realized was that Mick and Keith were sitting on the floor.

They were playing acoustic guitars.

They were singing, singing back home.

But it was Keith telling me that he learned the song from Graham.

Oh, interesting.

And so that's why I just assumed Graham was in the room.

But that whole thing of historically placing something.

And so for me, in starting this book, it was just going to be chapters.

Yeah, I think it's great.

But each chapter was going to be like a short story.

So there's 30-something chapters in it.

Of your memories and of things that had an impact on your life.

Yeah, and people.

And people who are.

So if you're interested in Alfred Hitchcock, I'm going to see Alfred Hitchcock.

Or if you're interested in Muddy Waters or Julia Childs, you can go to any chapter.

But the most interesting thing about it, I mean, I think it should be read, you know, as a book all the way through.

Well, I would hope so, yes.

But

what's interesting to me is that fortuitous

these coincidences, but they're not coincidences only in the sense that when you look back at them, you met so many interesting people of so many different walks of creative life.

But the constant is you.

And

it's just an interesting life outside of whatever the Jay Giles band was or is or what it means to somebody is that, you know, this morning I was thinking, well, his full life, you know, it's only 20% Jay Giles.

I mean, my solo career is longer than the Jay Giles band.

But I'm talking about like the

you becoming the creative person that you were was informed by these experiences that

are rich and varied, and no one would ever know that.

You know, if you hadn't written this book.

And once you read it, you you can see how all this stuff was kind of feeding into you and your vision and what the music was at some point.

The music you liked, the music you played originally, the music you ended up playing all through your life.

But if I might say, before we go any further, I loved the Jay Giles band.

Of course.

I put my heart and soul into the Jay Giles.

It became my life.

Even in my marriage,

Jay Giles band was always front and center.

And that never caused a problem because

when Faye and I were married, I was very dedicated to helping her with her career, and she was extremely dedicated in helping me with my career.

So we were, you know, we always had that understanding.

We never even had to mention it.

But the Giles Band was my entire life, as you can read in the book.

And the reason that I devoted finally,

once I was writing, and I wasn't mentioning Faye, and I wasn't mentioning what I was doing.

Well, you mentioned you meeting Faye and sort of the poetry poetry of romance.

I mean, it's not a kiss and tell book, but you do talk about how and why you fell in love with her.

Well,

once I got to Little Brown, the publishing company, and the gentleman who was Bruce Nichols, who was my editor,

he said, you know, you're not writing anything about the Giles band.

They're mentioned throughout these adventures.

But, you know, Pete, people want to know, you guys were together for 17 years.

What happened?

I said, well, I don't want to get into that typical thing with

bands and the bass player and this and getting fight.

And so

after he, and I have an agent by the name of Andrew Wiley.

I don't know if that name rings a bell.

Yeah, it does.

But Andrew Wiley is probably one of the most

respected book agents in

the industry.

And he handled Selman Rushdie, Martin Amos, the Saul Bellows estate, Philip Roth Estate.

He's a very notable literary agent.

And he handled Bob, Lou Reed, and

he thought that I should write something about the Giles Band, so I wrote a chapter about the Giles Band.

And as the woman that I dedicated this book to, her name is Grace O'Connor, and her sister, Nora O'Connor, who you recently met, she had finished this book called, I think it was The Long Goodbye,

about Chinatown being the last great film, the last movie of the 70s, sort of the last Hollywood's last great movie.

And I was telling her, you know, when I was on the set of Chinatown, and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, she said, what?

She said, Peter, you got to write that.

You know, I said, no, I don't want to get into it.

No, you got to write that because you told me more about Chinatown and the making of Chinatown than this whole entire book, you know, described.

So I sat down and wrote a chapter about that.

And then I started writing about Faye and about, you know, how we first met.

And I realized we had a deliriously intoxicating, all puns intended, a really amazing romance, a great love

story.

It's a sweet chapter.

And so I go through, there's several chapters with her, and so I finalized there's a, you know, chapter chapters on Faye and all our adventures and

our beginning, our middle, and our sad end of the marriage.

And with the Giles Band, I tried to keep it in one chapter

under the name Fatricide, which is an old biblical word, the Latin word that comes from meaning brother killer.

We were all, it's a brotherhood and a band, and I try to describe in the book that certain classic bands of the era that the Giles Band formed, you know, that 60s era, you have this, you know, McCartney, Lennon, and then usually there's a key player, key players in a band

or a key player.

But I was talking about where there's a key player where there's generally two people.

Yeah.

And they kind of have a kind of an immediate interaction.

Yeah.

And they connect.

And they feel like, wow, man, you know, we got something going.

And then so they look for the drummer or the bass player and other people.

And you form like this little collective or a gang or a group.

And you become sort of it all becomes one.

But the key players are making the creative decisions, and that's usually understood from day one.

Yeah, and so, for instance, Jagger Richards, you know,

maybe it didn't start from day one, but developed very quickly into that.

McCartney, Lennon McCartney.

We talked to Keith, and it's Keith Spam, but yeah.

Yeah,

and

he's something else.

Yeah,

talk

Talk about wit.

His wit is as sharp as the knife he carries.

Smart fucker, too.

That book blew my mind because I loved the Stones my whole life.

And you read that book and like, oh my God, there's so much more to this guy than any of us ever imagined, which I think happens with your book, too.

Well, thank you.

And that's what the intention was.

And then you have like Glenn Fry and Don Henry.

Yeah.

And the list can go on and on.

I get Joe Perry, you know, Steve Tyler.

And so what happened with the Gals Band, that all, the collective is together, the band's together, you're all unified and you're looking to

maintain and keep going, paying your rent,

and turning five into ten, tenant, you know.

And when there's a crack in those key members, it's like a crack in a marriage.

And if it gets close to divorce, the

other members are like the family or the kids in the family.

I don't mean in a negative way, but they're caught between

these two sides.

And that ultimately was what happened with the Jay Giles band.

I was very determined to go on the band and keep it in a roots direction.

And there was, me and the key player got into

differences of opinion about what.

Because popular music was changing.

Popular music was changing.

There was a certain sense that, you know, bands that had been around were dinosaurs.

There was the new wave,

all of that, new faces,

this.

And

it kind of

and there was that pop and the synthesizer sound.

And I think

my other team member wanted to go into the more pop.

tech oriented

because he was a keyboard player.

And he loved all the synths and the Oberheims and all of that stuff.

Yeah, that's the double-edged sword with the keyboard players.

Eventually you can make sounds that a whole band can make.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I, you know, once that we had a writing partnership like Lennon McCartney, where whatever songs and we.

You and Seth?

Yes, me and Seth.

And whoever did what, we didn't count, you know, we just came up with a song, you know, like Must Have Got Lost.

You know, I remember writing it on a, you know,

flying back from Colorado or I on a holiday in envelope.

Yeah.

You know, and we sitting down together and, you know, you might have added a minor minor here or this.

You're working together.

And when

that started to fracture and

he wanted to break up that sort of understanding as a team.

And

it was a hurtful kind of thing, but he felt that,

look, I could move on if I wanted to work with other people.

That was fine, but he just did not want to be committed to this 50-50 working relationship.

That fracture

got bigger and bigger until finally

the Giles band as a team, they stuck with the other key writer and they felt that it would be best they go their way and I go mine.

And I brought in a bunch of songs that

all became...

songs that were on my first solo record, Lights Out.

Yeah.

Lights Out.

Uh-huh.

Blast, blast, blast.

Uh-huh.

And so I wrote that with a great songwriter.

I wrote that with Don Covey, who wrote Chain of Fools for Retha Franklin.

What fascinated me, too, was that early on,

I mean, you start this book with almost a fantastical

child memory that, you know, kind of sets the tone for the whole thing.

That, you know, you realize...

you know, in retrospect that, you know, you, by coincidence, went to the movies with your mom, I think,

and there was some family

strain going on.

Your sister was ill.

Right.

And then, you know, just

who knows why, but after the movie starts, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, you know, sneak in, and you end up sitting next to Marilyn Monroe.

And that kind of becomes the portal

and the template of the whole book, is that it's not coincidental, that was, but in your life, because of your interest in music and art and what have you,

you came in contact and had experiences with these

phenomenal people of all different kinds.

And I just think it's very interesting that it starts with Marilyn and you were what, like 10?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was 10 years old and the chapter is called I Slept with Malamin Monroe.

And what happened, Margaret, is that we were sitting in this theater.

My sister had rheumatic fever

and it was a disease that was not

very well known.

They were doing research and she was at this hospital and I was too young to be able to go in to see her.

So they quarantined her.

And my parents would visit and they got news that wasn't very good.

And so my mother decided to take us all to a film.

And my mother, being

politically very progressive at the time,

and

she

was considered during the McCarthy era a red because she believed in women's rights, equal rights, and equality for blacks, whites.

She was on the first freedom ride.

She believed in

unions and

just all the progressive things.

Were you guys Jewish family?

Yes.

There was half, and I have part Jewish.

And then my father grew up in Little Italy, but the Little Italy of Harlem.

But I ended up living with my

Russian Jewish grandmother, who was from Odessa.

And she was a great singer-songwriter, and she was in,

it's now forgotten, but was a very potent, vibrant place, the Yiddish Theater in New York, Lower East Side, where John Garfield and Paul Muni was out of the.

And so we're in this movie theater, and the movie that my parents picked was a Jules Dassin movie who was French.

And it was a French film called He Who Translated was He Who Must Die.

And the premise of the movie was by

Nikos Kazinsakis, who's a Greek writer.

I read all his books.

Not at 10 years old, but early on.

And the film is about if Christ came back

to

Earth, the first people that would want to kill him would be the church because he would be against the whole opulence and all the money collected at the Vatican.

And he would be so controversial.

But the movie was in French, and I'm 10 years old dyslexic you know looking at subtitles and it was not very interesting to me

and it was one of these art theaters small art theaters in the middle of Manhattan

and this woman

moves next to me because I guess some people sat in front of this couple that was you know, sort of obstructing their view.

So she moves right next to me where I'm sitting.

And I'm eating my, you know, good and plenty or M ⁇ M, food it might be and

this intoxicating smell of you know

amazing smell that she had and I dropped my box of candy and I went to pick it up and I noticed that she was wearing house slippers fuzzy house slippers and a nightgown and you know underneath the fur coat yeah and this is very odd you know going to the movies and you know house slippers and a nightgown and

And so she kicked the box and picked it up and gave it to me.

And she was wearing sunglasses and a kerchief tied,

but had this amazing smile.

And I took the candy back.

And as the movie continued, I could slowly feel her head

resting upon my shoulder.

until she

actually just fell asleep.

And as the movie wore on and on, I too got very tired and fell asleep.

And so our heads were together.

We were sleeping together.

And as I tell in the end of the story, how it ends, that's how I ended up sleeping with Malam and Monroe.

But you didn't know.

No, I didn't know.

Until the lights came up, right?

Until the lights came up, and then everybody in the movie theater said, oh my God, there they are, there they are.

And it was very, she just got married to Arthur Miller.

And, you know, they were trying to rush out, and he woke her, and then he woke me up, too, because we were both locked, our heads were locked together.

You know, honey, honey, we got to go, the lights are going to come off.

And she, you know, I think was probably kind of not out of it, but she took her a while to get her up.

Yeah.

And then she turned around.

I remember watching her because she had this fur coat in the hair, and everybody was all excited.

And she turned and gave me this amazing smile.

And the only thing left was a lingering perfume, which I researched and found out out was Chanel number five.

There you go.

And

yeah, so that was one of my first encounters.

But in every one of these chapters, almost, it's by serpentipity, if that's what I'm saying.

That's what I mean.

That's what I was trying to say.

It was just by coincidental circumstance.

Yeah, and it's not like I'm trying to write about, I know all these famous people.

No, I know, but it's crazy because they weren't famous.

You know, like, you know, I mean, I had no idea that you were kind of wandering your own creative landscape and wanted to be a painter.

Right.

And that was going to be the thing.

Right.

And I was going to be a painter.

Yeah.

I mean, that was about, when I was about maybe four or five, that art was my obsession.

But your dad was

in kind of a singer, too.

My dad was a baritone,

and he also had a great love for painting.

But he

was in the Robert Shaw chorale later on.

But early, in the early days, in the 30s and stuff, he was a song plugger.

People don't really remember what song pluggers were, because music came out in those days on sheep music.

And you would have in different record stores people with pianos playing the new song.

And people, most people had pianos in their homes.

And if they liked the song, they'd buy the sheep music.

Or if they heard a song on the radio being sung by a big band because before records were being played, they would get the sheep music.

Or if they saw a song in a film,

Irving Berlin song or something, they would buy the sheep music and take it home and play it on the piano.

So my dad had a radio show called Boy Baritone, and it was a 15-minute show on W.

Keixar, and he sang

the latest songs.

And then he ended up joining the Schubert Theater at 14.

and traveled doing light operas like The Merry Widow and Student Prince.

And he traveled on a train and he would tell me that the train had all the sets and everybody slept on the train.

The train was a hotel.

Every night after the show,

you'd go back to the train and sleep on the train and guys would carouse in the bars and stuff.

And so show business was

in my life early on.

It's a specific type of show business that you actually ended up living.

Right.

But little did I know my father's brother

was

a dancer at Roseland.

And this was in the era when dancing, ballroom dancing, and tangos and mambos and people would go out to places and go out to nightclubs and have bands and people would dance.

And he was a ladies' man.

And

he was my father's older brother.

And he managed a guerrilla, a champion, baton twirler, the wrong world's strongest man, puppeteer that was a ventriloquist, and my father.

And his office was in the automat on 42nd Street, next to Jack Dempsey's, where Bob Dylan's book opens up.

So I know the era quite well.

And he always had a variety under his arm of a cigar, and he was always trying to get my dad, you know, different jobs and different gigs.

And I adored him.

And he had a little black book, you know, with women's names on it.

And I watched him, you know, would call up ladies.

But he was kind of homely.

He kind of had a Jimmy Duranty look to him.

But he was an amazing, you know, a more ladies man.

And he had tons of women.

Yeah.

And he was a great dancer.

And so he got my father

these dates and my father got a scholarship to study opera in Italy.

But during the Depression he felt that, you know, as a male, he had to stay and work.

And so he stayed in the United States and gave up his his dream as becoming an actual opera singer, but stayed with music.

But also the, you know, once you got to Boston,

because the Giles band was a booze band, R ⁇ B band.

They were a rock and roll band, but it was very, it was specific what the roots of the sound were.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know,

again, the coincidence of you being in Boston,

you know, around Harvard, you know, you were living your somewhat transient life

that, you know, coming into contact, because I know, like, there was a group of guys, the three of them, you know, Fayhee, and there was a couple other ones at Harvard, who were digging up a lot of these blues guys who had lost, had been lost to time.

Dick Waterman and Joe Boyd mentioned a lot of them

on your show.

Yeah.

And yeah, they were researching and finding a lot of the old bluesmen.

Because they were 78 collectors.

They're like, what happened to these guys?

Right.

And they went and found Son House.

Right.

They found Kip James.

But you were there.

And by the time, I don't think people fully realized that these records were almost rarities, that you had to really seek them out

at a certain time.

And that Blues Revival, I mean, you know about the Blues Revival in England and stuff, but the fact that you were there and it was sort of the period, you know, just in the middle and towards the end of the folk scene, that they were running guys like Muddy through and guys like John Lee Hooker, and you were able to see all these guys, but you sort of have these interactions with them and build relationships with them before you were really even a band.

It's kind of crazy, isn't it?

Well, what's really crazy is I did have a band.

We were art students.

It was all art.

The hallucinations?

Yes.

And

because of the 60s, we thought hallucinations

was pretty cool.

And not unlike when David Byrne was going to RISD in Rhode Island.

And you were at at the museum school?

I was at the museum school in Boston.

And so it was all art students.

And

a lot of these blues artists, because of Newport, was so close to Boston,

also came to a club, very famous club, folk club in Boston called the Club 47.

And that was where Joan Baez got a start.

And that's where Bob

Dylan and Dave Van Ronk and Eric von Schmidt, these names, Tom Rush, they all played the Club 47.

And you would go.

And I would go.

But previous to that, I have to say, I went to high school of music and art in Manhattan.

And I was a Bronx boy.

And so I'd travel every day by bus and train to get to school.

And the school was located in Harlem on 135th Street.

And once a week, I'd make a mecca.

I was there for many years.

Once a week, religiously, I went to 125th Street, home of the famed Apollo Theater.

So when I was going to high school at the age of like 14, 15, whatever it is, I went to the Apollo once a week and I saw every great RB jazz artist that was still working.

And so I saw everyone from James Brown to Dyke and the Blazes, Retha Franklin, all the great comedians, Moms Mabley, Pigmeat Martin,

Here Come the Judge, Pigmeat Markham,

Flip Wilson,

it's just amazing.

And then people, and then they would have jazz cavalcades.

So I got to see John Coltrane, Herbie Mann, Ray Charles, Betty Carter, and Jackie Wilson.

And so Otis Redding's first appearance,

one of the first appearance, I should say, and Joe Tex and Wilson Pickett.

You saw them all?

Yeah, and I'd go to Birdland because Birdland allowed, drinking age in New York was 18.

And if you were accompanied by an adult, which meant someone that was 18 years old,

I would sit in what what they would call the milk bar, which is a section that they just served soft drinks.

And I got to see Art Blaking, the jazz messenger, Hara Silver,

Bethlehemius at the five spot.

So all these great jazz artists that just had this amazing impact on me before I even got to Boston to study at the museum school.

So

New York just had this amazing cultural, just renaissance.

And then you were downtown, because your dad knew, what's his name, Earl?

Izzy Young.

He run the folklore center.

Right.

And I'm,

and I would go to the folklore center because they had these great, you know, folkway records and sing out magazine, which was a folk magazine.

Well, and that covered some blues as well.

Oh, yeah.

But mostly it was a folk, you know, traditional, like the child's ballads.

And if somebody wrote a song like Peter Lafarge, they would have that in there.

And I was there in the folklore center one day, and there was this curtain in the back, and I'm hearing, you know, this voice singing,

something like Pretty Peggy O or something and

oh man, I was sounding great.

And it was singing another song and

sounded kind of like

just great blues kind of song.

And I could hear the packing up of guitars behind the curtain and these three guys walk out

and I go up to the front of the store.

And I asked the fellow, you know, who is that singing?

He goes, oh, that's this guy, Bobby Dylan Stadila, or something.

He's a new friend of Izzy's.

Just came to New York last week.

Yeah, and you were just there.

Right.

And I just happened to hear it.

And so

I was so intrigued by what I heard, I ran down the steps to see if I could find where these guys were going.

And so I went back to the folklore center and said, well, where is he playing around?

He said, oh, he's just kicking around.

He plays sometimes at the Cafe Wai.

Or you can catch him at the gaslight.

They do hootin' and he's there and stuff.

So

I would go down and seek out, try to find this guy, Bob Dylan, a Dylan, you know, and

then I realized that

one day I saw

at the gaslight there was some names of Hoot Nanny Tonight and blah blah blah blah blah and then I asked if this Bob Dylan or Dylan or whatever is going to be playing and oh yeah, he was and then

I caught, you know, an early set of Bob Dylan doing a bunch of talk of New York and these gospel plow and Boody Guthrie songs and stuff.

And the fellow that was running the Hoot Nanny was a folk singer, a great folk singer, Dave Van Ronk.

And so

then I became totally obsessed with this guy because just watching him.

And he was amazingly

funny.

He had an incredible stage presence.

And

charismatic.

You couldn't take your eyes off him when he got up.

And he would do things like, you know, play around with his hat.

And, you know, he would dunk his harmonica in a glass of water.

And he said, man, you know, he would tell you, you know, this is how you bring back harmonica alive.

He said, I wonder if I'd dunk it in a glass of wine.

Would the harmonica get drunk?

And, you know, people would be, I mean, it was just like a, sort of like a comedian.

A raconteur.

Yeah, it was just great entertainment.

I think he got that from Jack Elliott.

Well, yes, you know, Rambling Jack, but he edited Jack's Rambling.

Sure, sure.

But I think he got that charm trick

from Jack.

I would have to agree.

But he had a great wit, a great charm, which he still has.

And

so I followed him.

And I finally see, you know, this Monday night hooting at him.

You pay a dollar, you get a free drink.

And at that time, I had no money.

I was drinking what they call 151 rum,

party 151 rum, a little bit of Coke.

And when on an empty stomach, you have two of those, and

you're there.

And so I was out of money, and I would always push my way to the bar where Bob would always hold court on Monday.

And he'd be talking to some guy

about, he'd just heard this amazing record, man, that John Hammond gave him in this white album cover, man.

And it's this blues artist, you know,

Robert Johnson, man.

And this guy sings something.

He's explaining.

He's turning to the guy.

That was before they put the record out.

Yeah.

Of those 20 songs or whatever.

Yeah.

And

so he had a glass of wine.

And he's turned, his back is, you know, towards me.

I'm standing right next to him.

He's talking to this guy.

So I take his glass of wine and I drink it.

Yeah.

You know, put it down.

Bob turns around and realizes the glass is empty.

calls over to the bartender, you know, hey, you know, Joe,

so Joe fills up the glass, he takes some wine, turns back to the fellow talking, I see the glass of wine, drinking wine.

This would go on all night.

And he had no idea that this little punk next to him was drinking his wine because he was so into telling the story.

And all he had to do was raise his hand and his glass would get refilled.

So

I would just follow him.

Yeah, it was funny, though, because the first sort of you know, when you kind of reached out to him and were able to get his attention long enough to say you were a painter, and then he said, I like paintings, you should come show me.

I had a little studio at an apartment.

I had lived in an apartment building, the Bronx, and there was this little house next door, and the woman that lived there allowed me to have a studio

in my apartment.

I mean, down in her basement.

And

I'm listening to WBI, which was a Pacifica radio station, and there was a show on Folk Singer's Choice by Cynthia Gooding.

And her guest that afternoon was a young folk singer just blew into town, Bob Dylan.

And

I was, you know, a big fan.

I turn it up loud and Bob's on there and he's singing, talking about, oh man, he just came back from a circus and his mother and father's traveling here and he's

training bulls and I don't know.

He's doing this Bob thing.

And

the show's over and I call up and I

ask for Ms.

Gooding and says, excuse me, I've been listening to the show.

Can you tell me where

Bob's playing again?

Because I want to go see him.

And she goes, well, hold on.

And there's a minute or so passes by, and Bob gets on the phone.

I go, hey, man, I just really love your music.

Follow me down

any place you're performing next so I can come down and see you and he said yeah man I said you know I'm a painter and he said oh you're a painter I love painting I've painted it oh yeah

I get this address and so two seconds later I'm grabbing all my paintings getting on the subway rushing down to

meet

this guy that I'm enchanted with.

And I get to the address, and there's

members, Mark Spalostra and Patrick Skye, two folk singers, sitting on the steps.

And I go up and I'm looking around the doorbell for the name.

And he goes, you're looking for Bob.

I go, yeah, I said, so are we.

And just at that moment, this gentleman,

John Harold, he said, well, Bob's at the gaslight.

Yeah.

I'm not at the gaslight, he's at the kettle of fish, was a bar where they all hung out.

And they're all at the kettle of fish.

And I come in with painting in hands.

And I said,

I didn't know what Bob, you know, at this point, looked like, because I had not seen him yet, because I'm backtracking a little bit.

But I heard the voice.

And

people are talking, hey, Bob, I want some more beer.

And they have these pictures of beer and they drink.

And I go up to him and say, hey, man, I got these paintings

for you that you want to see.

He looks at me and goes, paintings?

I don't want to see no paintings.

And boom, you know, it was like that was a hard moment.

Yeah.

It's just so funny because there's this like arc of you pestering Bob or drinking his wine.

And now, like, in the arc of your

evolving friendship with him over the years, does he remember that stuff?

I don't know.

I was not, I was wise enough.

I was wise enough

never to mention it.

But what's interesting is

this.

Can we give you a nice blurb?

If you could.

Sometime back, Pete gave me a biography of the painter Charles Soutine.

Soutine.

Chaim Soutine.

Chaim Soutine.

He said he was the Jimmy Reed of the art world, but I already knew that.

Soutine is nowhere in this memoir, nor is Jimmy Reed, but there's plenty of other folks who are.

This book reads like a fast train.

You'll get a glimpse of everyone passing by through the window, characters that have crossed Pete's path, who he's known up close and personal, a diverse crowd, one you wouldn't think belong in the same book.

Marilyn Monroe with a scarf on her head, sitting next to him in a movie theater, Muddy Waters, Faye Dunaway, David Lynch, the filmmaker, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jagger, Tennessee Williams, Merle Haggard, they all play an important part in Pete's life.

It's come alive in more ways than one.

As you'll see, Pete's been on quite a journey, but before it all began, he had hopes to become a great painter.

But then, out of nowhere early on, he went in another direction and never came back.

This memoir has been a long time coming, and it's Pete's great painting.

That's nice.

Oh, yeah.

So he read it.

Yeah, he read it.

And I was so, so honored

when he,

you know, did that and sent that in because it just meant the world to me.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

You know, and here's the funny thing with Bob, when I first heard his voice, I had a moment like that

not too many years before that.

Yeah.

I was sitting on a stoop in the Bronx where I grew up.

and

through the window I heard this voice coming on the radio and it was the singer, you know, don't leave me baby here, you know,

since my baby let me go home.

And I was transfixed, you know, I couldn't believe it.

And I, you know,

it was just drifting through a window.

And I ran to the local record store that very moment.

And I, you know, about 10 blocks away, I ran into the record store and I said, do you got this record about some hotel

something about a guy?

And then he goes,

the owner of the store said, you're about the 30th kid that came in and asked me about that record.

I should have it by Thursday.

And this was, I don't know what day.

And every day I'd go in to see if they had this

record.

And it was just, I just had to have this record.

But the point I'm trying to make is, I didn't know what this person looked like.

I didn't know anything about him.

But there was something in the voice that made this

spiritual, mystical impact on me

that I cannot explain.

And that person ultimately was Elvis Presley.

And so from...

10 years old, I became an Elvis Presley fan,

still to this day.

And I was the the one guy that bought every soundtrack album that he, I mean, I became and stayed an Elvis Presley fan, you know, right up until the day he died and continued and still an Elvis Presley fan.

That's why I loved Peter Gerlnick's books

on Elvis, those two volumes, just the definitive.

And if anyone has any interest in Elvis Presley, I recommend Last Train to Memphis and then his second volume, Careless Love, which is the downfall of Elvis, which was really a tour de force.

But what is it that, you know, I can't explain it, but what is it that in the voice that Elvis possessed and Bob possessed?

That it was no voice.

And that is the thing that I find so magical.

And not only for me, but throughout the world, Presley, you know, people couldn't even understand what he was saying.

Just something in the voice, and same with Bob.

And I always considered Bob probably, and I still do,

one of the most expressive singers,

like expressive painting, of a song

akin to Sinatra that really knew how to sell the lyric of a song.

And when you hear Bob do other people's songs like he did early on,

they're so powerful.

And if he does Mana Constant Sorrow, like from the Stanley Brothers or Pretty Peggio and these great old traditional songs.

Well, he did that later, too.

You know, Rosen had him doing those

kind of interesting covers for A World Gone Wrong.

Oh, right.

Yeah, those cover records are, you know, when he was older, pretty much it.

Doing those acoustic

woman, Debbie Gold, helped put that together with him.

But

no, so he's, you know, just a master at, you know, expressing through song the lyrical meaning of a song, just like you can listen to Fred Astaire

singing One for My baby, one more for the road.

And then you hear Sinatra.

And Sinatra stole that song.

So that Johnny Mercer song, when you hear it,

it's Sinatra's.

He owns it.

Well, I mean, you had that same sort of sensitivity to

John Lee Hooker.

Oh, boy.

And to

Muddy.

And when we started this arc here, that was fascinating to me that you were kind of waiting around the club for, in both cases, it seems, with Muddy and John Lee Hooker to see them.

And you offered some help and you ended up building sort of lifelong friendships with these guys.

I did.

And I would wait, if I found out they were playing at a club, I would get there early afternoon so I could see them arrive, be there to greet them and just

see what they know, just to get close to them before.

James Cotton.

Yeah.

And so Muddy was playing at this Club 47 where Bob and Joe and Baez and everybody played this iconic, and for a blues band of that nature, Chicago blues band, to be playing at this Folth Club in those years, we're talking about, I think, 64th, was pretty unique

and

out of the ordinary.

And I remember standing

all afternoon and finally, you know, two Cadillacs come rolling up.

And then as a kid, I had bought the Best of Muddy Waters album just because of the cover.

I did not know what the music was like because I came enchanted with this face on the cover, this profile.

And then there, sitting in the car was this profile,

right in front of me.

And I run up and I go, Mr.

Waters, you know, welcome to the Club 47.

Welcome to Cambridge.

Is there anything I can do?

And he gets out of the car and he's just regal, beautiful.

He's had this diamond stick pin in his tie and his coiffed hair and a beautiful orange-bronze skin.

He looks at me and goes, yeah, you can start carrying that equipment.

And he thought I worked at the club.

But I was more than happy to carry the equipment.

And

they stayed at this club.

The dressing room of the club was like half the size of the studio that you and I are talking in.

And I explain it in the book, but long story short, I had an apartment, a little funky apartment about two, three blocks away.

And

what develops is Muddy and his entire band are using my apartment as their clubhouse.

And so there in my little futon on the floor is lying my hero in muddy waters,

in his

t-shirt, do-rag on his head.

And I'm playing him records.

There's one

very poignant scene where it was Muddy's birthday and I was planning a party for Muddy, a surprise party.

Muddy was on stage and knowing it was his birthday, I had all the cake and all Muddy was drinking champagne at that point, and I had scotch for the rest of the band and gin for Otispan.

And

during the show, the manager comes running up to me and says, Peter,

we were in a, you know, Boston, when I moved to Boston in those years, was probably one of the most segregated cities

north of the Mason-Dixon line, because you had Little Italy,

North End where the Italians lived.

You had Brookline and Newton, where most of the Jewish community lived.

You had Southey where the Irish live.

And it was just totally segregated.

And so we were in this, at that time, this black neighborhood where this club was.

What club?

It was the Boston Tea Party.

And

the manager comes running to me and tells me Martin Luther King had just been assassinated.

And they didn't know if he was, you know, it was just, and so Muddy's in the middle of the band.

And

I tell Otis Span's wife, and she starts screaming, you got to tell Muddy, you got to tell Muddy.

And he just finishes a song, and I, you know, as I say in the book,

I had to go up and tell Muddy that Martin Luther King, and the audience was filled with young, you know, white kids and, you know, fans, and basically the audiences that Muddy was playing to in those years were primarily, especially up north, were, you know, just young white, you know, folk, you know, people who were

jad, whatever.

And that became a very poignant evening, and also it was his birthday.

And what happened?

Well,

we, everyone, Muddy called for a slow blues number, really slow blues number, and the band was playing.

And Muddy, you know, with control of the band, just waved his hand lower and lower.

And then he put his hand up, turned to the band, and they had the band stop.

And he said, young people,

listen to me.

Something terrible has happened.

Martin Luther King has been assassinated.

He's killed.

I want you all to be very quiet.

Please leave very quietly, stick together and go home and be safe.

Get home quick, please.

Because Muddy knew.

there was going to be big trouble.

Yeah.

And, you know, people filed out.

There was a, you know, you could hear a pin drop.

Everybody was just, you can hear the

fear and the, you know, just the

sense of king

being killed.

And we went back to this little funky, you know, just run-down hotel where Muddy and the band were living.

It was basically a red light.

You know, it was a flop house.

Not a flop house, but it was just, you know, to these great artists, you know, the tram, we can get into it more, you know, just that the

these These black jazz poets, geniuses had to

endure

in those years and still endure.

And so we went back and we had the birthday cake and

Muddy went to his room and I was with the rest of the band.

They said, you know, we should at least celebrate.

We got the cake.

Muddy's driver named Big Bo, who was his assistant, went in and got Muddy.

Muddy came in, and we lit the candles, and you can hear the sirens, the police cars outside the windows, you know, getting louder and louder, and more sirens, more sirens.

You could tell the city was, it was,

and you could tell Muddy was very subdued.

Yeah.

Stood over the cake,

blew out the candles, and it was very easy to understand what wish he had.

And with Muddy, I encountered Hall and Wolfe and all these great people.

And

the chapter ends where I go, over the years, I got to play and tour with Muddy many times.

Whenever he came to town, I was only too happy to continue to act as his personal valet.

I would take him for a bite to eat, and after the show, we would head out to the airport.

And in the early morning hours, we'd wait for the first flight out to Chicago.

By then, he mostly flew to all his gigs because he had a bad car accident, and he was unable to endure the long drives with the band.

The last time I saw him, we sat together all night under the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights at Logan Airport.

When it was time for him to board the plane, I walked him to his gate,

as if he knew we might never see each other again.

He said, Lil Wolf, Peter the Wolf, thank you, thank you, thank you, my friend.

He repeated it once more, and then with the regal bearing that never let you forget you're in the presence of a king.

He walked down the jetway,

turning just once to wave before he disappeared from sight.

That's how I ended it.

Yeah, it's the last time you saw him.

Last time I saw him.

He died not too long after.

Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you, man, I mean, throughout the book, you know,

the whole your part in, you know, kind of Van Morrison's career, it's kind of fascinating.

And then, you know, you're figuring out your own thing.

You know, there's bits in there, you know, Robert Lowell, Martin Scorsese.

I mean, the range of people you encountered, Andy Warhol, that guy, Ed Hood, it's like an amazing story.

And, you know, all through it, like, it's, it's very, you know, you don't want to put it down.

And, you know, if you, if you're into the history of arts and culture, the story about Coltrain playing,

that was crazy, man.

You know,

that loft department.

And even David Lynch, which I knew nothing about, that arc of that story is kind of

yeah, yeah.

But how did you meet him?

It was just a coincidence.

Well, I was

after, I never really graduated high school.

You know, you had to go to summer school.

I wasn't going to do that.

And I was, you know, at this specialized high school, you took an exam, high school in music and art.

And And so

all my friends, it was a very bright, a lot of the students very bright other than myself.

And they all went to very established colleges throughout the United States, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin, Harvard.

And so I spent a year hitchhiking around

going to these universities to visit my friends, but pretending I was an art student at these universities.

Because in those years, you know, this is not internet, you didn't need ID.

If you look like a student, you'd be able to go into the student lounge or go into the dining room and eat.

And so I would visit my friends and hang out and live in the student

lounge on the couches and sleep there and maybe use a shower, you know,

shower once a week or once a month, whenever I was.

You know, I was a kind of mess back then.

And

this one gentleman at the University of Chicago who I went to high school with

constantly wanted to get rid of me.

His name was Leon Botstein, and he ended up becoming the president of Bard College.

And so Leon, trying to get rid of me, says, you know, we're all driving to Boston, and

you're going around pretending you're an art student to these different colleges.

You have an amazing bunch of colleges in the Boston area.

And I thought, oh, yeah, there's Harvard, there's BU, there's Northeastern, there's Brandeis,

Simmons.

I mean,

it was a girls' school, but it didn't bother me.

So I figured, wow, man, I could, you know, and what I would do is I would, you know, pretend I was an art student, use all the art supplies, paint, and, you know, move on.

Once, you know, my welcome was or if somebody figured out I wasn't really there, I'd just move on to another university.

So here I am in Boston, and

during the ride, Leon says, you know, there's a school here, the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.

And so they stopped, and I took some of my paintings that were in the trunk, and I brought them in, and I applied.

I didn't have the money.

Leon lent me the money for the application.

And so I'm hitchhiking now.

I'm back in Wisconsin,

again pretending I'm an art student at the school.

And I call every now and then home to let my mom know I'm okay.

And she goes, Peter, you got a letter from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.

And lo and behold, I was accepted and I was given a grant.

And so I was on my way to Boston and didn't have a place to stay, so I was in the museum school on the wall, you know, looking for, you know, people post things, you know, looking for, you know, selling a toaster, you know, having a place, looking for a place, looking for a roommate.

And this voice behind me says,

you looking for a place?

Are you looking for a place?

Yeah.

And I go, yeah.

And he goes, well, I'm looking for a roommate.

He goes, my name is David.

And I go, hey, my name is Pete.

And it turns out, it was David Lynch.

It's so funny.

And

I didn't care what the place looked like.

I didn't care how much it was.

I needed a place.

And so it turned out it was like about three blocks away from the school, a small little apartment, and there was a bunk bed.

And I was on top.

David was on the bottom.

And he had

some of the records.

I had a records.

But we were like the odd couple.

David was very neat, always wore a shirt, a very iron shirt with button, always buttoned up to the collar.

And I was a slob had green teeth.

I had smoked so much my hands were yellow from the stain of cigarettes.

Well, he smoked, didn't he?

Yeah, when we were both, but I was smoking, you know, because I was the artiste.

I was going to die by, you know, 30.

I was smoking Goa's.

Oh, wow.

And David was smoking Marlborough's, but we always had to keep the window open because there was so much smoke.

But I couldn't pay the rent.

And so one day, as I was coming back to the apartment,

David unchanged the lock on the door.

And that turns into a whole other adventure with David.

But, you know,

many years later, David and I got together several times out here in L.A., and we would open up many a bottle of wine and go over old times.

But he ended up leaving the museum school, the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts to go to Philadelphia.

And that's where he started his first film, Race Ahead.

And I left the school to start my first band.

Yeah, which was The Hallucinations.

Yes.

Yeah, it's a great story.

There are so many great stories.

And I love all the John Lee Hooker stuff because that guy was great.

And he was another guy that you built kind of a lifelong relationship with.

Oh, John Lee, right up to the date I liked Muddy.

I stayed in touch.

And I'll tell a story.

Somebody says, you know, I tell this story a lot, but, you know,

I just love it so much.

And I kind of end the hooker chapter.

I talked my way into letting John have my band, The Lucination, open up for him.

And

no pay, no nothing.

It was just a great honor to open up because no one was coming to this club where it was.

You waited one night and no one came to it.

Well, yeah, he was booked there for several nights, and I knew it was going to be pretty empty.

And we filled the place for him.

And I wanted to spend time with John Lee.

And I asked,

John, could I come by and visit you at the hotel?

And he talked with a very bad stutter,

but never when he was on stage.

And in the book, I didn't want to imitate it because I thought it would be insulting.

It just wouldn't be

proper.

But

I said, John, I'd love to just hang out one afternoon.

He said, yeah,

come by, Lenox Hotel,

room 402.

Come on by 3 o'clock.

Man, 2.30, I was waiting outside that door.

You know, I couldn't believe it.

You know, I was going to spend an afternoon with one of my heroes.

And I knock on the door, you know, come on in.

Door open.

I open up the door.

It's pitch black, except for the light of a T V.

And it's one of those rooms with two beds or in it, like a holiday inn room.

And on one bed, there's my hero with Argyle socks pulled up to his knees.

He's got boxer shorts on.

And he had, you know, a do-rag on his head and wrap-around dark sunglasses.

And on the night table, right by his bed, was a big bottle of Ballantyne Scotch,

pack of cool cigarettes, ashtray with a mountain of butts in the ashtray.

And on the other bed was this beautiful,

she was lying out across the bed, beautiful curves, I mean, I mean, amazing shape, this beautiful, beautiful 335 Gibson guitar.

And there it was, the quintessential bluesman.

He traveled alone.

He lived alone.

And there was him on the bed, his guitar on the other bed, and the room was dark except for the TV.

Come on in.

You know, I'd come in and pull up a chair, pull up a chair.

I'm sitting down.

And now you have to remember, this is John Lee Hooker.

Yeah.

You know, the man who sang, I'm mad, I'm bad.

I can can kill you, I can cut you, I can hurt you, I'm mad, I'm bad.

I'm like Jesse James, don't you mess with me because I could do things to you, you claim mad.

And he would sing these, you know, songs.

I'm the crawling king snake, baby.

You know, and

there he was.

And I was looking at him watching TV.

And this man that's saying, I'm mad, I'm bad, I can kid TV, he's watching Lassie.

yeah.

And when he realizes that I realize that he's watching Lassie,

he says, you know, Peter, that Lassie, he's one,

a motherfucking smart dog.

And, you know, that broke the ice.

And that's when I realized that he was one of the sweet, sweetest, most gentle, and most sensitive people.

you know, that one would want to meet.

And, you know, these,

because he traveled alone most of the time and he was the, you know, had this life of this real bluesman.

He could go from the city, he attracted these young women that were just kind of all in trouble in those days.

You know, the hate Ashbury days, the runaways and

the psychedelic drugs.

And John would always befriend these ladies,

try to talk them,

give them money to get back home and talk if they're a runaway.

And

he was just an amazing guy.

And everybody who got into his inner circle remained friends with him throughout his life.

And he was one, thanks to this one gentleman who owned this agency, Rosebud, that took over John's life, was able to get him the royalties.

And John ended his life, you know, really very comfortable.

Yeah.

And he died very peacefully.

Well, he also got like celebrated, you know, Santana and I think Van Morrison.

Right, and now it's put together.

You know, he did these great duet records.

But John, as people don't know, the beginning, he had the first and I think still the biggest blues hit ever recorded as you know, a single, which was Boogie Children, recorded in 1948.

And everybody, B.B.

King, Muddy Waters, Helen Wolf, they all wanted to have a hit as big as Boogie Children.

And didn't Boom, Boom, Boom go pretty good?

Oh, yeah, that came later on because the animals covered that.

But John Lee and Boogie Children said, Mama told Papa, let the boy boogie.

Because it's venom, it's got to come out.

And it's just him, electric guitar, and his foot.

It seems like a shame in the big picture, and I guess we should wrap it up, that like I felt that

after the hits Jay Giles had, that with,

because,

uh, you know, Freeze Frame,

that record popped so fucking hard, man.

Well, here's what happened.

We left Atlantic, and I describe, you know, in

the book

that how, you know,

I'm acting as the band's manager, the Giles band's manager and I'm trying to go to different record companies get us re-signed after Atlantic our contract ran out we did 10 records and

I'm asking Ahmed if Erdogan's the president if he's going to sign us again and so I'm meeting all these different record presidents finally just happened to be with this lawyer who was trying to help me out and I was really depressed.

I said, you know, I don't think anybody's going to sign us.

I think it's the end of the Jay Giles.

And we're sitting in this booth in the Palm Steakhouse.

And

I'm having a drink.

And this young fella comes up to the booth in one of these satin jackets.

And he says, you Peter Wolf, Peter Wolf.

And I go, yeah, how you doing?

And he goes, oh, man, I can't believe it.

You know, I'm from Detroit.

And, you know, man, I saw you like 10 times, Cobalt Hall, man.

You've been my favorite band.

Oh, goddamn, man.

And, you know, oh, thank you very much.

And he goes, yeah, you you know, I'm starting this new record company.

And, you know, I was working with Basker Menon.

We just got out of the meeting.

Man, if I could ever sign a band like Jay Giles, and just the lawyer, like, eyes light up, you know, and you can see, you know, his eyes going like, you know, like a slot machine, you know, the numbers.

And he says, wait a second.

He said, what record company?

Basker-Menon?

And I never heard the name before.

And it turns out Basker-Menon was the head, the CEO of EMI Worldwide.

The Beatles were on.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

And he was putting together this company.

And

there's this hilarious story where

we call Basker-Menon late at night.

He comes, joins us at the steakhouse, and Basker and I go off to have a drink-a-thon.

And the Jay Giles band ends up getting signed to

EMI America, and there we had our first real, first record was Sanctuary, followed by Love Sting

and then Freeze Frame.

But the difference was we're in Atlantic, which was a great label.

They really didn't, you know,

they forgot about the Jay Giles band.

But EMI really wanted, you know, got behind us.

Yeah.

And that's when we really, between that academic TV and the whole

arc of stuff, the band really, you know, after 17 and a half years of doing, I mean, literally one nighters after another, you know, throughout the country, country, driving around station wagons or, you know, those years before deregulations, you can get on a flight pretty cheap, you know, and you can fly around.

We just did nonstops, the guy's shit.

You know, and we played with.

Bluesman.

Yeah.

And our opening acts were people, once we finally, you know, got, you know, with freeze frame and centerfold and all that, and we were doing nothing but arenas.

And just before that, our opening acts were people like Tom Petty, Billy Joel,

U2,

and the Eagles were another one.

And, you know, a lot of acts, and we just remained friendsly.

At least I had friends with all these artists.

And

last night I was doing a panel on a book and

with Mike Campbell.

I stay in touch with Bono and

because all these people, when you're coming up,

you're the most vulnerable.

And so I would go into the dressing dressing rooms of the opening act and spend a lot of time getting to know those guys

as Peter Green and Spencer when we were opening up for Mick Fleetwood and all of that.

So it all goes around.

But those years were

amazing years, which I tried to chronicle about the band, about music.

I remember when

Free Frame came out.

I must have still been, what was that, 80?

Freeze Frame came out in 1982.

I was just so excited.

I listened to that song over and over again.

And I knew,

being sort of the representative of the band or the business representative of the band, I knew it was going to be a big

record because it was at the point when disco was finally

dying off the charts and songs like I Love Rock and Roll by Joe Jack and groups like REO were coming on the charts and Seeger was getting on the charts and I knew you know for all these years that we were next.

Oh good.

You know, I just felt it in my bones.

Well, I'm glad you had that.

Yeah, me too.

And I'm glad it happened.

Do you keep in touch with Van?

I saw Van a couple of weeks ago, but he was out here in California and before he came out, he and I spent, you know, every day we had lunch and dinner and still stay in touch with him.

Oh, good.

Yeah, because I love that story.

There's so many good stories.

Obviously, we can't tell all of them.

It'd be the whole book, but it was great.

I really enjoyed it.

I enjoyed talking to you.

Thanks for coming by.

No, thanks for having me.

And if Zenyu's got to come out, because that's what rock and roll is all about, do it to it and stay right through it.

Always keep a smile.

And this wolf goof mama too for telling you, life comes once, and when it comes, you got to grab it fast, because you never know how long this life you live is going to last.

Yes, there's that DJ.

There you go.

Peter Wolf, kind of guy that, you know, could, we could keep talking for a very long time.

But go, I would read the book.

It's called Waiting on the Moon.

It's available now.

All right, hang out for a minute, folks.

Hey, people, there's more music on the Full Marin this week.

We've got another live music mixtape featuring performances here in the garage and the old garage by guests like Lucinda Williams, Tenacious D, Jay Maskis, and John Doe from X.

You are

the hole in my head.

I am

the pain in your neck.

You are

the lump in my throat.

I am

on the tip of your tongue.

We are tangled.

We are stolen.

We are living where things are hidden.

You are

something in my eye am

The shiver down your spine and you are

the lick of my lips I am

on the tip of your tongue

We are tangled,

we are stolen

We are buried up to our necks in sand We are luck

We are fate

We are the feeling you get in the golden state.

We are love,

we are hate,

we are the feeling I get when you walk away,

walk away

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And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by ACAST.

And here I'm just kind of, this guitar, I laid down a thing, but I think I got to use separate amps.

It kind of, I don't know, that you can't have both of these guitars coming out of the same amp, but I'm working on my leads, man.

I'm trying to go into the major and minor and mix Olydian thing, okay?

So, you know, I just want, I just want you to be, I want you to be there for me learning.

That's what I want.

Boomer lifts, monkey and laponic out angels everywhere.