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The man certainly needs no introduction, but what the hell. Frontman/madman for the J. Geils Band, raconteur, artist, musician, lover of fine wines and fine women and a seminal part of rock'n'roll history. And although the band did have a brief reunion last year, it was a momentary pleasure, not a look backwards. Peter Wolf's solo career might have begun along the same path as the Geils band ("Lights Out" could pass as one of their hits); the recent musical road is a well-worn dirt path where blues, jazz and soul music walks by night. Wolf mixed the ingredients perfectly on his fifth solo effort, Fool's Parade, and the new record, Sleepless, is another chapter in that journey. I was delighted to find that Peter was as charming, interesting, polite and impish as I imagined and hoped he'd be, excited about the just-released project that was yet another labor of love...
Cosmik: This record is a great bookend with Fool's Parade, with the mix of soul, blues and roots, but I think I might like the production even better. It's a really organic sound, timeless.
Peter: Thank you very much!
Cosmik: You strike me as the type of person who would enjoy pulling albums off the shelf all night for a friend as the conversation took its different tangents. As the night wore on you'd be going "Oh, you gotta hear this!.." I was wondering if that's how this type of project came together.
Peter: Bill...have you been up at my house? (laughs) That's exactly what I'm like. When we have conversations with people we'll talk about this thing and all of a sudden it will lead into something else like Jerry Wexler or some sort of rock band from Germany in the 70s, or 90s, or some punk thing or some sample...it's just part of it. But the way the record did start was just that kind of way, in my living room, with Kenny White, who's been an important part (of my records). He's a musician and a performer, but he's also a producer. He would come up to my house, and I'd present him with some ideas and we'd sit and talk about what kind of record we'd wanna make - different from Fool's Parade, but somehow a continuation. I'd play songs, and we'd start pulling out songs and say "I love the introduction from this" or "the way they use the backgrounds here is great" and records would be flying all over for three or four hours. We'd go out, get a bite to eat, grab a couple of glasses of wine and then come back and have notes and CDs and a pile of vinyl all over the floor. Then, in a couple of weeks, he'd come back and we'd re-examine where we were at. Some songs might get added, some deleted - does this sound good with that? - and we'd have three, four, five sessions like that, deciding. It was kind of like putting on a play, trying to get the screenplay going, meaning the songs. Figuring out who would be the good "actors" to make the parts come alive. He and I were like the producer and director of this play, and that's how we approached this thing.
Cosmik: There was a comment I read somewhere about your friend Tennessee Williams writing A Streetcar Named Desire, but not writing it with Brando in mind. But then you bring Brando into the mix and it kind of gets its own life.
[Peter with Tennessee Williams]
Peter: Oh, definitely, that's so very true. And when people think of Streetcar they think of Stanley Kowalski and Brando. But when the play was written, it was -
Cosmik: It was the Blanche story.
Peter: Right, Blanche was the heroine, and the central character. The whole play was the arrival, the deterioration and the tragic end of Blanche. But in the stage play, and in the film, Brando became so strong he almost became the central character. Matter of fact, in most people's minds, he is the central character.
Cosmik: I imagine the fact that the last record was so critically lauded was a good reinforcement for you to continue down this path. How long did it take you to pull this project together, because I imagine you could go on forever. When did you feel that you could put a stake in the ground?
Peter: Well, you decide on a cast of characters, who the musicians are going to be. These guys aren't just sitting around! They get busy, so we have to figure out when the window of opportunity would be to get the players that we want, all in the same studio at the same time. Then it helps define for us when the start time is going to be, and we use that as our deadline. Like with a play, when the opening performance is on such-and-such a date, you gotta get ready and whatever you've got to get together before the opening, you've got to get together.
Cosmik: As I was listening to this record - and there are so many good parts to it - I really think the secret weapon once again is the organ and piano of Kenny White - he adds tremendous flavor to every song on the record. It reminds me of so many records that I like -
Peter: Touch and sensibility, you know? It's sort of like the old Gamble/Huff teams, when both people are working together in tandem on the same project...Leiber/Stoller kinds of stuff. With Kenny and I, it's kind of like that. He was an important collaborator in so many ways. I don't know how the Coen brothers work, but I imagine it's probably similar.
Cosmik: They're a two-headed monster. But this record brought me back to the Atlantic Records era. Another one of the records that popped into my head was a John Hiatt record from the mid-80s that Nagle and Matthews produced, and a song called "Lover's Will," with that fat organ sound that's so sweet. A real Booker T feeling, great stuff.
Peter: That's funny, because I just got a phone call from Jerry Wexler today, who heard the record and called to congratulate me.
Cosmik: To me there's great sense of loss on this record, from the obvious titles like "A Lot Of Good Ones Gone" to people influencing or mentioned in the songs. Tennessee Williams, Tim Mayer, even the Geils band if you want to go that far, and your 'sweet lady fair' from "Growing Pain." It's almost as if you're trying to get closure. Or am I reading too much into that?
 Peter: No, I don't think you're reading too much into it. Closure is a word that kind of...it's a more recent word, and I hear people say it like "I wrote this book and when I wrote it I was able to put closure on the situation"
Cosmik: Bad word from me...maybe acknowledgement is a better term?
Peter: I think it's more acknowledgement because I think it's always a part of me. It's kind of a sense of malaise that runs through, and if the glass is half empty or half full, I've always tended to move to the darker side. And that's why the whole interesting enigma with the Geils band, because the Geils band was this rip-up bar band, party band, "get your ya-yas out" sort of thing. Which, in a sense, was one aspect of it. But it's like that famous joke where the comedian goes to the psychiatrist in ancient times. You know that one?
Cosmik: Nope, go for it.
Peter: A guy goes to the doctor in fifteenth century Italy, and the doctor says "What's wrong?" and the guy says "I'm depressed. I can't get much going in my life and everything seems so pessimistic and so dark. There's death all around me and it's so hard to get my spirits going." So the doctor says, "You should go see The Great Grimaldi! He's one of the greatest comedians, and he - only he - will be able to lift your spirits!" And the patient looks at the doctor and says "Doctor, I am The Great Grimaldi!" It's that kind of aspect that the Greeks had, with the two masks of theatre...it's the tragedy juxtaposed with the happiness. The duality of that which somehow runs through it all.
Cosmik: Well, out of pain sometimes comes a greater, closer realization that -
Peter: (Laughs) Now see, in one sentence you said what I'm trying to say! It's true, and I think with this record there's a certain mood. And then of course with a song like "A Lot Of Good Ones Gone" the song had been done and we were mixing it in a studio in Lower Manhattan, and it was right after 9/11. Just hearing that kind of minor chords and the dirge aspect of that song, and then leaving the studio when you got that smell from the World Trade Center...I was going to mention something in the notes, but I was afraid it would come off as being exploitative, and I was very concerned not to let that happen. The song was written before that, but it took on a different kind of meaning during that terrible time.
Cosmik: Yet in the song "Sleepless," you're a survivor and you seem to be restating that you have something to say and you have a new way of saying it. You're not a period piece - you have that line "save a place there at your table" - the industry might be different but you've found a new direction, a new voice, and it needs to be heard.
Peter: Well, thank you, but when I came into music, there was regionalism that played such an important part in everything. And by that I mean that Atlantic Records had one sound, and you could tell the sound of a record from New Orleans. Your relationships with the radio stations was personal, your relationships with the record company was personal...they were always businesses, but now they're de-personalized corporate businesses, and it's a different kind of animal. It's the kind of animal I'm not used to, nor do I enjoy (it). I remember when MTV just started, I'd be hanging out in their living room, with the guys who started it, and you'd have an idea and the next day you were in some bar filming it...it was a lot of fun. Then, like most things, it became extremely corporate and became something completely different. And a lot of what's going on in the record industry - and one of the reasons that might have led to a darker vision - is that when I was making Fool's Parade, a large part of the record industry was being morphed into one company. We lost Mercury, which was a great independent label when it started. We lost A&M, Island, Motown, Interscope; tons of labels and things were being morphed into one...and time has proven it to be a disaster. If you read the business sections of the paper they'll tell you it was all a mistake, a lot of good people were fired who were part of these organizations for years, and it was a bloodbath for creativity and for the record world as I knew it. Fool's Parade was a victim of that, and as I looked towards moving forward with the new record, you can't move forward without dealing with how unusually different the world that I have to deal with is and how it has changed. It's become like that for a lot of America; I don't want it to seem like I'm crying for me. It's like these big shopping malls eating up and trying to outdo and destroy the competition. It's happening in radio, it's happening on business, in retail...it's happening everywhere and I don't feel that it's a positive step.
Cosmik: No, it's a Clear Channel America all across the board, from newspapers to radio to television. And you can't really pursue an idea or have a career, as a musician you don't have a career. You have a chance, and then if you don't sell, it's whoosh...you're gone.
Peter: Most definitely.
Cosmik: And then if someone succeeds - you see this in TV and in movies - it's "let's make five more of that" or "let's make something just like it" and if you look at the numbers that an artist must sell on a major label just to break even, it's ridiculous!
Peter: And to really get to the point, Bill, when I was making this record I said that "look, there is no single on this record." We weren't making a single and then some other songs, we were just making a CD, a total CD, and that's how we used to do it. Whatever became the lead track that went to radio, people figured out later. And now it's like "what's your lead track? If you don't have your lead track, don't put out the record!" And I try to go back to the sensibility with Kenny, where I asked "what is radio today?" I mean there's some that are better than others, but the great creative AOR radio is harder and harder to find. So lets just make a CD where the CD just represents a mood, where if you think of "Exile On Main Street," you think of a mood. If you think of "Astral Weeks" or "Electric Ladyland," there's a mood. Certain Spinners records, Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On album, Stevie Wonder albums make you think of moods, and that's what we tried to do with this. Like the O Brother (soundtrack) was a vibe and a mood, and it wasn't necessarily a song. You know what I'm saying?
Cosmik: I understand exactly, because you were talking before about regionalism. I'm not much younger than you are, and I remember when an album label was an imprimatur. If something came out on Motown, you knew what it was going to be. If something came out on Atlantic, you knew what to expect. It was almost that you had faith in the quality control system at those labels because they didn't want to put out something that was shitty. They really didn't care if every single record...sold. They took pride in the fact that "we have Van Morrison on our roster" or "we have Bob Dylan."
Peter: You're a hundred percent right, and there was a time when I remember that Columbia Records resigned Miles Davis because they thought that he was an important artist to have on their roster. Not necessarily that he was going to sell lots of records. It proved, because he was important, that he could sell lots of records and become an American icon. But you'd buy a certain label because of the sense of quality. But now, because large corporate conglomerates run so much of the entertainment industry, it's controlled by Wall Street. And "contemporary" tends to mean "temporary." With new artists, they really don't care about investing in a long future, they just want to make a profit and move on.
Cosmik: That's pretty much the way it is. I hope there's a resurgence because it's gotten so tight and so bad that enough people will go out and...well, I've been a bin browser all my life. I've always read every magazine I could find and spent hours in record stores, and the vision I had of you hanging around your place pulling albums off the wall is because that's a lost art form. I think it's getting to the point where kids - well, maybe not kids because they're being force-fed everything - but some young adults are sitting around thinking "okay, I know there has to be something better than Matchbox 20. The CD store is as big as Sears but I'm only getting fourteen songs a week, there's got to be something else in here worth finding." And I'm hoping that for music like yours - and a John Hiatt or Van Morrison, someone of quality who makes music from the heart and is not worried about which track is the single - that enough of those records will see the light of day. They'll get the right write-ups or whatever so people say "wow, that was great...maybe I should look for another one like that! Where can I find another artist who puts the care into their craft that this person does?" And that's what I get out of Sleepless, Peter.
Peter: I agree with you, and Bill...that's why I wrote the liner notes. I came up with learning bits of information like "Teddy Pendegrass started as a drummer and he worked here" or "Otis Redding worked as a roadie for this band" or "this player started with this guy." It's like when someone got me a tape of Little Richard playing in Boston in 1964 or 1965 with a band and you hear this incredible guitar playing, and lo and behold it's Jimi Hendrix! That's the kind of aspect that I find important. The bands or artists that I respected had the same desire to want to know...I mean that's why the Stones wanted to know about the past and the great legacy of music out there going from blues to jazz to pop.
Cosmik: Well, they didn't act like they invented it, like a lot of people do today. And I enjoy your notes tremendously. I might or might not have known otherwise that "Five O'Clock Angel" was about a cocktail. But it was great to read the backstory for the songs and what was going through your head when you wrote them. Especially listening to the record again and reading the notes, after already hearing the record without them. It was validating to say "oh yeah, I picked up on that Drifters reference" knowing that was what the intent was. I know you were a disc jockey back when that meant something, back when you could make a difference...we both pretty much agree that radio is such a wasteland now. Finding a good station today is a rare occurrence. You've got people like The Smithereens' Pat DiNizio doing a show on XM Radio, playing what he likes, and Little Steven is doing his syndicated garage show. Now you're well known for your encyclopedic knowledge and love of all kinds of music. Have you ever thought of going back into that arena and trying to be the exception to the rule?
Peter: You mean radio? That's what I did this weekend. I did a three hour Woofa-Goofa House Party and Fish Fry Revue, where I just played three hours of stuff from my collection and took phone calls and had fun.
Cosmik: Not being in Boston, I had no idea. Vin Scelsa, to me, is the Last Man Standing.
Peter: The thing is, I don't consider myself a historian or a record collector. I just consider myself a fan. There are people who will expound on this or that, but I just consider myself a fan. I still go see bands do this or that, grab the new Beck record, keeping up and seeing what's coming down the pike, be it The White Stripes or The Hives, or going to see James Cotton. I'm interested in all of it.
Cosmik: Well, that's like why I started writing. I had this need...it wasn't so much that "I know more about music than you do and I'm going to write about it to prove it." More that I dig music so much and I love to write about it in hopes that someone reads it and gets the charge that I'm getting. Maybe they've never heard of who I'm writing about but the way I describe it gets them interested, and they play a record that they wouldn't have played, and they get that same...bolt that I did when I first heard it. And then they turn somebody else onto it, and it goes on from there. That's the big thing. I don't get that immediate feedback that an artist gets through applause, or the validation that might be measured in sales, sometimes it's just out there in the void. Did anyone read that? Did anyone give a shit? Or did somebody's life change because they picked up a John Hiatt record or a Del Lords record after I wrote about it and say "Oh my God!"
Peter: Did you like the movie Almost Famous?
Cosmik: I thought that was about my life.
Peter: Yeah, yeah...I was surprised that it wasn't more popular than it was. I thought it really kind of focused in, for somebody who would be fifteen now, on a mythic era. Or for someone who'd be thirty-five now, or fifty-five! I thought it really captured...it was a sort of valentine to the whole love of music and the records and the sacredness of it, and the innocence of it. And the exploitation of it! I thought it was a really well put-together movie.
Cosmik: My favorite scene was when he was flipping through his sister's box of records after she left home. Anyone who owned those records was thinking "oh, yeah!" You could almost guess the next album that would come up as he was flipping through. The only thing that surprised me was that I would have thought Cameron Crowe would know that there was a real band named Stillwater. They were a label act on Capricorn and had the singer from Wet Willie, so it wasn't like they were anonymous. I think they put out two records.
Peter: What was that song they did? Kind of a Jagger vocal to it... (starts humming inaudibly)
Cosmik: Man, I don't know, Peter. That dates back to my college radio days in the seventies and that whole decade is pretty foggy.
Peter: Where did you go to school?
Cosmik: Syracuse, New York. I used to see you guys a lot then. I thought there was a law that any time a show hit the War Memorial, the J.Geils Band had to play on the bill. (laughs)
Peter: (laughs)
Cosmik: You seem to really be finding your voice as a writer without being locked into any one musical style. Yet you have an obvious love for worthy material from others. Does this present a challenge as you assemble the material for a record, trying to mix your songs with the chestnuts you pull out from other places?
Peter: It's not unlike cooking a meal. You can say "let's have Italian food" but you wouldn't think of adding curry. The same is true with music, where you get a vibe going but don't want to add something that might throw it off kilter. I've heard albums where I said "Damn, why did they add that? It seems so off the wall!"
Cosmik: I thought the cover tunes on this record were really well chosen. "Never Like This Before" just put a big smile on my face, and it jumps off the record like "Blind Crippled and Crazy" did on Fool's Parade. What struck me was that the whole album was very cohesive, despite the different musical styles of the source material. You cook well, Peter.
Peter: Julia Child would be proud!
Cosmik: We talked about the old Atlantic Records era. "Too Close Together" and "Hey Jordan" are two completely different types of songs, yet even with brush drums they both really swing. They've got a groove, which seems to be a lost art nowadays.
Peter: Thank you! But a lot of that is because of the musicians on hand. They were swingers!
Cosmik: Most guest artists usually make a cameo, but Mick Jagger really adds a great vocal to "Nothing But The Wheel".
[Peter with Mick Jagger]
Peter: I thought he really worked it, really worked hard on it. He was very generous with it, too.
Cosmik: And you mention "Exile On Main Street" - the beginning riffs do remind me of "Tumbling Dice." But I hear a lot more of "Let It Bleed" or Beggars Banquet, or at least the time when Gram Parsons was hanging with Keith trading licks. That's my favorite track on the record - besides Mick, the pedal steel is sweet and you really nail the vocal. And it's just a fabulous story. You sound very comfortable in that arena - your song with Steve Earle sounds like a natural pairing. You could have slipped onstage at the Down From The Mountain tour with that one.
Peter: I think that country and blues...good old country like Buck Owens or George Jones, I hear that the same way I hear Little Walter or Muddy Waters. They're ethnically different but coming from the same blue-collar joints. They were making music that was meant to entertain people at those places, so I find good honky-tonk music and good Southside Chicago blues both to be very soulful. I don't see it as being apples and oranges.
Cosmik: When you hear these songs, and you're working with Kenny on different arrangements, do you immediately think of specific people; "we've got to get this guy to be on this tune," and so forth? Or do you hear them differently in your head where you clearly want to try them a different way?
Peter: It's totally collaborative. You'll try the tempo one way, and then after you put it down you're thinking of something different. For instance "Never Like This Before" was a lot faster, and we slowed it down. I've never slowed anything down! That was an example to me of when a collaborative effort really helped; it really made the song happen.
Cosmik: Is there anything you wanted to do on Sleepless that you didn't get to do because you couldn't line up the artists and the schedule?
Peter: Yeah, but hopefully there's more to come. So that will reveal itself, to quote a phrase, "as time goes by."
Cosmik: You wrote a lot with Will Jennings, whom you seem to have a lot of respect for. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember his ads in the back of Rolling Stone in the seventies where he was looking for collaborators to work with. I didn't hear anything about him for the longest time, but it looks like he made out okay the last few years.
[Peter with Will Jennings]
Peter: I don't know if that's true, but I could be wrong. Will was a schoolteacher and then he moved to Nashville. And then he worked a lot with Billy Joe Shaver and Kris Kristofferson and fell into the whole scene and had a pretty good run. Then when he left Nashville he went to L.A. and hooked up with Stevie Winwood for the Higher Love stuff and worked with B.B. King. Every once in a while he'll do a small soundtrack; recently he did a French play, so he's always going from on extreme to the other. His base is really out of the bluesy honky-tonk West Texas tradition. But he's had many different kinds of commercial success.
Cosmik: How did you first get hooked up with him?
Peter: I really loved the Stevie Winwood stuff, and I was talking with someone out on the West coast who knew Will. I was saying that I'd love to collaborate with someone with whom I could talk about music and talk about books and talk about all sorts of topics, and someone asked me "Did you ever meet Will? I think you and he would hit it off." So I ended up hunting him down in a hotel room in Nashville, and he was already two bottles of wine in. He was a big Chet Baker fan and he had found out that Chet Baker died that day. So we went on a little bit of a gin jag that night and that sort of solidified the friendship. I ended up coming to his house a couple of weeks later and we wrote our first song together.
Cosmik: When was that?
Peter: That was on a record I did called Up To No Good, and the song was called "Never Let It Go." (Sings) "Woke up in Boston, a town I was lost in..." (laughs). And the lady that was mentioned in that song is the same lady that pops up again in "Growing Pain."
Cosmik: That would be your old high school sweetheart.
Peter: Yes, Edie Marie.
Cosmik: Is there any possibility that you'll be going out on the road at all in support of the record?
Peter: I hope so. That's what I'm planning to do tonight, when we're done here, to go meet some guys and talk about putting together a band.
Cosmik: It will be tough to recreate the mood here...will Kenny be going out with you?
Peter: I hope so! Kenny's got a record of his own out there, it's called Uninvited Guest I believe.
Cosmik: I'll try to track that down, anyone who plays like he does is worth hearing more from. One last thing I have to ask you about...I love that puppet! [note: A likeness of Peter Wolf adorns the inner booklet] I had to pull out my old Faces album, A Nod Is As Good As A Wink to see if it was the same guy, but that inner sleeve is long gone. Is there a story behind the puppet?
Peter: Well, we did the photo session, and I was thinking how tired I was of...well, I don't want to be on the album cover. I was asked why not, and I said, "I don't know. Maybe we can come up with a puppet or something"...and then they came up with it! It was quite incredible. It came in a box that said "is this what you're thinking of?" And there he was...little Petey.
Cosmik: You were probably glad to see that there were no pins stuck in him!
Peter: We had the picture of him all set, but then some people thought it would cast too much of a novelty slant to the record. They said that the record was a darker, more serious record, and it might send the wrong signal, so we decided to put him on the inside. But I enjoyed it!
Cosmik: Peter, thanks for all the time you gave us today, I appreciate it a lot. I wish you the best with the new record and hopefully I'll see you somewhere out on the road really soon.
Peter: Well, hopefully one day we'll both be in the same room and we can just be listening to records and CDs and going through it from A to Z. That would be fun.
Thanks to Sage Robinson of Artemis Records for her assistance, to Dr. Bristol for the transcription, and especially to Peter for continuing to travel his musical odyssey led by his heart and his soul.
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