Soul man

This particular club figures strongly in Wolf's ongoing comeback. His new CD, Long Line (in stores May 14), is partly dedicated to the place, bearing a few photos that were shot there. It's the local club where he was spotted drinking champagne after his Reprise contract was finalized, the place where he exhibited his paintings and drawings last year, and the one where he played his first comeback show with his band the House Party 5 (since renamed the Street Ensemble). And it's where he can plug into a local scene he's been enthused about for 30-odd years. He credits scenester Billy Ruane with introducing him to the place, adding that he's never been the type to shut himself away.

"That goes back to the J. Geils Band, which was one big bar band. Our mission was to rock the house and make sure that everyone had a great release. Part of that is dealing with the audiences, and that's never been a problem. We used to drive back from playing the Cape Cod Coliseum, and if we saw a cat hitchhiking, we'd throw him in the van. It's a free-for-all, and that goes with the territory."

The comeback continues with Long Line, a gutsy disc that includes some of his best, if least characteristic, work. If you're looking for a non-stop party album in the old J. Geils Band vein -- and let's face it, a lot of the fans that came to his first comeback appearances probably were -- rest assured that Long Line isn't it. Instead it has Wolf shedding his wild-man persona, showing a darker side and singing with real depth and soul. The opening title song finds him announcing that "I been tossed around and twisted up, I'm on the outside looking in," and that sets the tone for the album -- both for its semi-acoustic setting and for its grizzled-survivor tone.

The music is usually closer to Van Morrison's neighborhood than to the Geils Band's -- a surprise, since the first round of House Party 5 gigs saw him and the band doing faithful versions of the old group's greatest hits. The album's token rocker, "Sky High," proves he can still sing in his familiar style, but it's the slower numbers that bring out his best efforts -- notably the whispered final verse of the countryish "Wasted Time" and the late-night ballad treatment of "Two Loves." A live-band sound can be heard throughout; the one departure ("Riverside Drive," a hip-hop number with jazz overtones) is just weird enough to work.

Written with various collaborators, including ex-girlfriend Aimee Mann, the album airs parts of Wolf's personality that have seldom come out before. He's more vulnerable on the ballads, flat-out romantic on "Seventh Heaven." He also gets good and cynical on a pair of deceptively sweet-sounding pop tunes written with Mann. When you consider the usual tone of her songwriting, it's a safe bet that the sentiments aired on "Starving to Death" ("The more that she gives me, the hungrier I get/But I wouldn't give an inch if I was starving to death") were hers. But "Forty to One," the album's high point and its original title track, makes a good mix of Mann's pop knack with Wolf's R&B know-how, her cynicism with his dogged optimism. Wolf's vocals throughout are subtler than usual, yet even on the album's heavier moments -- notably "Romeo Is Dead," an R&B number full of modern-world foreboding -- he throws in the occasional "ooh, yeah!" to let you know it's still the same guy.

"A lot of the people I admire -- whether it's Van or Springsteen or Aimee -- are people who can project into their work whatever's going on in their lives," he says. "They were connecting with lifestyle things as opposed to hooks. What was great about the Stones was that a lot of what they were going through came out in their songs; you believed that what they were singing about was credible. Same with the great R&B singers, like Wilson Pickett singing, `This fine foxy woman kept me up all night' -- there was a credibility in that. I think I was trying to do some of that. I came into music from an art-school background, and it took time for me to become more personal.

"I still am the Woofa-Goofa-Mamma-Toofah. But there's another part of me that's beyond the jive. This album came out of a pretty dark period for me, when I realized how hard it was to prevail in an industry and make the records I wanted to make. And when you have a certain degree of notoriety, people are judging you by whatever celebrity you have. There's a woman I'm friends with, a painter who works for the New Yorker, who said to me, `Listen, Wolf, when I tell people I'm your friend, it sends out a whole different vibe than people get when they really get to know you. I think that you owe it to yourself to explore that part, wherever it may lead you.' "

One reason that Wolf's been down is that his career spent a number of years in suspension. After splitting from the J. Geils Band in 1983, he released three solid albums that fell short of re-igniting his career. The first two (Lights Out and Come As You Are, both on EMI) at least drew some attention; the third (Up to No Good, released on MCA just before Irving Azoff's departure from the label) got hardly any. His long recording silence was due partly to his efforts to get off the label.

"That was the start of the limbo period for me, and it wasn't the easiest time; a lot of people I knew were having similar problems, looking for a home. If I'd go to a Springsteen show, or see Van Morrison, they'd be asking me, `What have you been doing?', and I'd say, `Nothing.' I hadn't performed in eons, and that's why I put this band together -- to keep me from going nuts."

When he eventually signed to Reprise, he made sure to keep more of an upper hand. "We did the album in about two months; they kept asking for demos and I never sent any. Finally, they sent someone up to Long View [studios, in western Massachusetts] to see what was going on. Fortunately they liked it. I just told them, `Look, I don't make demos; I make records.'  "

Wolf considers himself more of a local-scene supporter than a rock-and-roll jet-setter, but he's done time as both. Nothing sums up his double life better than the fact that when he launched his on-stage comeback in late '92/early '93, he made two guest appearances within a month. The first was with Bruce Springsteen before a full house at the Garden; the second was with Willie Alexander at the Rat. Mention Alexander's name and Wolf throws in one of the nuggets of local history that pepper this conversation: Alexander's mid-'60s band the Lost were the first band to play an opening set at the legendary Boston Tea Party club. Wolf's original band, the Hallucinations, were the second. The Hallucinations may now be considered a pre-Geils footnote in local history, but they played their share of pivotal gigs: Wolf reckons that they opened for the Velvet Underground at least 40 times.

The Tea Party was also the home of WBCN's original studios, where Wolf was one of the first DJs; and it boggles the mind that most of the Tea Party shows were recorded through 'BCN's facilities. Many of those tapes are now in Wolf's archives, along with formative Geils recordings, all-star jams (there exists a tape of him and Mick Jagger singing Prince's "Little Red Corvette" during the Lights Out sessions), and Lord knows what else.

"If you visit my house, you'd see that it's a lot like Billy Ruane's. Trunks full of books and records. That's my world."

And the memories go on. As we walk down Green Street, Wolf recalls the time in the late '60s when Van Morrison lived there. "He had a mattress on the floor, living on Green Street with his wife and kid, and absolutely no money. I remember him sitting there with an acoustic guitar, playing what would eventually become Astral Weeks. That's one of the great moments that comes to mind . . . Seeing Muddy Waters soundcheck at Club 47 would be another." Asked for something that's impressed him more recently, Wolf names the Guided by Voices show at the Paradise last year. The guy's got a knack for hitting the right place at the right time.

The release of Long Line gives Wolf a chance to relaunch his solo career in earnest now that the possibility of a J. Geils Band reunion has pretty much been written off for good. He says that a last stab made for the closing of the Garden fell apart fairly quickly: "The only easy way would be to lock those six guys in a room and say, `Make some music' -- but there seemed to be all these negotiations and talking. Like when two people want to get it on, you either talk about it or you say, `Look baby, let's get it on.'  "

Nonetheless, he looks forward to getting it on by himself. "It's also a little nerve-racking right now, because I've seen how things can implode and you never know what's going to happen commercially. But I'm just glad to still be doing it -- other than painting, I don't know what else I'd be doing. I feel like it's time to get back on the long line."

COMING UP