I saw Peter Wolf one of my music heroes last night at the City Winery. He leaves his blood on the stage. Before he was a musician, Peter was a younger brother in the Bronx who dug his sister's 45 singles and the way she and her girlfriends danced. Later while studying art in the Boston area, he was a DJ and his first love, the music, the people who made it, haunt his live show. Peter is cut from the same cloth as the legends he reveres. He channels them and their spirits wrap themselves around him. Peter always sends me home with a shit ass grin. If you love R&B, if you love the Blues, if you love J Geils, Rock & Roll, see Wolf, he's the real thing. My life is better with Peter in it.
In “Over Her Dead Body,” my soon to be published short story included in “Have A NYC 2” New York Stories anthology (Three Rooms Press, May 2013) the J Geils Band plays a prominent role.
A memory of mine: In 1979, my friends and I struck gold in Central Park. A group of us who played rugby together for St. John’s were good friends with a bouncer at the summer Doctor Pepper concerts in the Woolman skating rink. Tony rucked for the Long Island Rugby Club. The deal: we met Tony at the VIP gate shook his hand and he palmed the five-dollar bill we each gave him. This gave us access to the third row in the orchestra right behind the press and special guests.
J Geils was our band. We started that night with a cocktail hour inside Ekis’s apartment before the Mom came home. “Looking For A Love,” was our go out song from the Lp “The Morning After.” Important element for beginning a solid evening. Light rain fell before the show. Since it was a sprinkle they let us in at the normal time. In the third row, we used our shirts to dry the rain off the seats. As I turned to sit down I looked up over the Plaza Hotel and saw a breath-taking cloud racing towards us. A minute later it dumped buckets of rain. So intense, I laughed and welcomed it. A stream raced from my head to my chest to my lap to my feet. My sneakers were squeaking, my tee-shirt and shorts attached to me like suction cups. After a “It’s never going to stop,” ten minutes, the sun pushed through and edged the cloud away. It was over, but there was three inches of water under our seats. “Canceled,” I thought. We sat glum waiting for them to tell us to leave.
Two minutes later, Peter Wolf came out on stage looked over the less than half filled space and started laughing. Then the band joined him. He looked directly down at us, six wet rats alone in the row. He instructed us to do a new dance, “The Canoe.” Wolf’s arms went back and forth like he was traveling upstream without a paddle but thought he had one. We did the same thing, Stephen Jo Bladd banged the drums and the band began “It Ain’t Nothing But A House Party.” They played for two hours and forty minutes. We did “The Canoe.” Life was good.
