WAITING ON THE MOON

Elegant, eloquent vignettes from a star-studded life.

“David [Lee Roth] and I were lead singers, each to varying degrees demanding, difficult, obsessive, paranoid, neurotic, and competitive. Ironically, both he and I would end up being kicked out of our bands, but for very different reasons.” A kid from the Bronx whose dad was also a talented vocalist, Wolf is best known as the lead singer of the J. Geils Band from 1967 to 1983, but he also had a solo career and studied painting in Boston before he was a musician. He was married to actress Faye Dunaway during the peak of her career; among many interesting photos is a poolside shot titled The Morning After: the two of them with her Oscar, scattered newspapers, and a copy of Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy. The chapters focus on a wide variety of cultural figures with whom Wolf has crossed paths: musical greats from Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker to Van Morrison and Mick Jagger, but also Eleanor Roosevelt, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Lowell, Julia Child, Tennessee Williams, and more. Describing Bob Dylan playing “A Hard Rain a-Gonna Fall” for the first time in a nearly empty New York club: “In one seismic moment, he had brought us into new and unexplored terrain, just as Picasso helped radically reshape the landscape of modern painting with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” On setting up a recording session with Merle Haggard: “I could not have prepared a bank heist with greater attention to detail.” During an anxiety-filled afternoon audience with Hitchcock at his home, hoping for a soundtrack commission, the master repeatedly offers his guest something to drink. Sensing “that this was his way of checking to see if I was one of those hard-drinking, drugged-out, unreliable rock-and-rollers,” Wolf sticks to tea. Nothing comes of the meeting. Only years later does he learn that Hitchcock’s wife “strictly frowned upon his drinking alone at home in the afternoon. However, he could indulge if he was with a guest.”

Recollections of a rock ’n’ roll life, charmingly related.