I say this having helped four boldface names pen their top-selling remembrances: Few rise to the vexing challenge of memoir writing — resisting the urge to make you, the memoirist, your narrative’s central character. See the conundrum? It’s yours, but it’s not about you. It is, rather, about something bigger, an idea or set of ideas that subtly nod to a way for the reader to see something new in the familiar. If you’re really lucky, you posit a story that amounts to no less than a prescription for how to live.

Peter Wolf’s Waiting On The Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses — we’ll be in conversation about it March 27 as part of the Free Library’s Author’s Series, for which The Citizen is a media sponsor — may at first glance seem like just a collection of vignettes from the front lines of the last five decades of creative genius. But it also brilliantly meets the challenge of memoir. It is a romp, and Wolf is a great character: Once the peripatetic frontman for the Reagan era J. Geils Band — sweeping onstage in a sequin jacket, blues-style — Wolf as a solo artist these last three decades just may be our last auteur.

Rolling Stone honors his albums in reviews and on its all-time lists, yet he doesn’t score pop hits. His albums tell stories of love and loss and resilience; they’re art, in other words, at a time when art has all but left the pop music scene.

Now, with Waiting On The Moon, finally comes proof that Wolf is more than a frontman of boundless energy and sonorous voice; he is also artist, intellectual, prankster, and something of a rock and roll Zelig, with guest cameo after guest cameo jumping off his pages.

Here he is, at 10 years old, taken by his parents to the French film He Who Must Die, seated next to a woman in a fur coat wearing a kerchief and black sunglasses. He is mesmerized by her intoxicating perfume; soon, she has rested her head on the boy’s shoulder and dozed off. When the lights come on, there’s a murmur of recognition as the crowd takes note of her and her lanky, bespectacled male companion as they scurry away. The chapter title? I Slept With Marilyn Monroe.

In art, game recognizes game, so it ought to come as no surprise that, like Jagger and Haggard, so many boldface names rush to work with Wolf: Aretha Franklin. Steve Earle. Neko Case. Shelby Lynne.

From then on, it seems, if it was a cultural happening, there Wolf was. His roommate in the Sixties? Uh, David Lynch. The early folk scene in Greenwich Village? Who’s at its center but Wolf, among the friends and followers hanging on Dylan’s every utterance, one night standing aside the young folkie at a bar while the Bard holds court, Wolf slyly downing Dylan’s drinks every time the young philosopher prince turns away to make another point to his enraptured flock. (Most writers would bear hug Lucifer for Dylan’s lengthy and syncopated back cover blurb.)

There’s Wolf again, serving as valet, apprentice and supplier of whiskey to Muddy Waters, James Cotton and a coterie of Mississippi bluesmen, who take him in, dub him “Boy Wolf,” and instill in him the pathos that informs their music. There’s the treks — almost spiritual pilgrimages — made by the likes of Van Morrison and Lou Reed to listen to records at Wolf’s Boston digs, a kind of shrine to American roots music, where he holds forth on the canon in late-night soliloquies like no other gyrating lead singer before or since.

There’s the fire of Wolf’s marriage to the actress Faye Dunaway in the 70s, complete with cocaine-fueled parties and a particularly poignant rendering of the night it dawns on the rocker that Jack Nicholson is upstairs bedding his wife. There are the nights of getting high while watching Julia Childs on TV — everyone, including Andy Warhol, who didn’t even smoke, laughing; cut to an invite to Childs’ home for one of the oddest dinner parties ever, prompting the question of just who was stoned, and when?

An astonishment of influences

Wolf is a great raconteur indeed, and he’s written a great memoir by letting us share his front row seat to decades of culture in the making. But by showing and never telling, he also reveals through his witness the influences that gave us his art. His expungement from the Geils band in the 80s is still the stuff of heartbreak. “As novelist Graham Greene wrote, ‘Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline,’” Wolf writes.

“For the Geils band, success took its bite with razor sharp teeth, causing a divide between me and my bandmates. They chose to change course and follow a captain whose blind compass would soon have them smashed against the rocks.”

At the time, the breakup sent Wolf reeling. But after a 10-year absence, Bruce Springsteen brought him back to live performing and the astonishing solo work has followed. Listen to Sleepless, Fool’s Parade, or Cure For Loneliness; in these pages, you not only get all that has informed these solo masterpieces, you also get a deeper sense of his song’s etymologies.

Of all people, a legendary actor’s tale of woe one night turns into It’s Too Late For Me, a haunting duet with Merle Haggard. A trek through the Ireland countryside with Mick Jagger, complete with a bribe to an English professor who may or may not be IRA in order to keep the peace at an upcoming Stones/Geils Dublin concert is a great tale, but also strikes a chord: Now no wonder Jagger harmonizes with Wolf on the country cover Nothing But The Wheel, a roadtrip song that, amazingly, never broke through on the charts for Wolf.

In art, game recognizes game, so it ought to come as no surprise that, like Jagger and Haggard, so many boldface names rush to work with Wolf: Aretha Franklin. Steve Earle. Neko Case. This stunner with Shelby Lynne:

With no explication, what emerges from Wolf’s narrative is a way to swagger through life. Watch his body catch the spirit on stage or find yourself lucky enough to glimpse an apparition-like late night sighting in the Boston clubs, checking out a band, dressed all in black, a self-described “midnight traveler” sauntering back out into the night, and what you’re seeing somehow goes beyond mere cool. The Spanish have a word for it: duende, loosely translated as soulfulness, a heightened state of evocation.

Dylan has said we don’t find so much as create ourselves, and Peter Wolf is a self-made man, a midnight rambler always in a state of becoming. Case in point: Wolf the autodidact, tutored by his neighbor and friend, Harvard literary scholar Edward Mant Hood, Jr., a gay transplant from the deep south who died tragically young. (No doubt one of the many losses alluded to in Wolf’s wistful A Lot of Good Ones Gone: “I feel the passing of the years in the teardrops / I see shadows everywhere / But I still do carry on / Though there’s a lot of good ones gone.”)

Hood turned Wolf onto e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound, introduced him to Warhol. Wolf, in turn, let his neighbor in on the sacred properties of Howlin’ Wolf’s Moanin’ in the Moonlight.

By definition, it’s hard for a memoir to be egoless, but like his solo work, Wolf, now nearing 80, seems preoccupied by bigger, more transcendent themes, like how art is our one true shot at flipping the bird to mortality. At one point in Waiting On The Moon, a young Wolf nervously makes his way backstage to pay homage to blues legend John Lee Hooker, who has just given his all to a sparse crowd. Let Wolf tell it:

“Mr. Hooker, you were amazing!” I said as he wiped his face with a hankie, then put on his hat.

“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it. Wish they had a bigger crowd, but you never know until you get to where you’re goin’.” It felt sad that such an important artist wasn’t drawing a larger audience.

One might be tempted to see in Wolf’s late in life work a similar pathos, like he’s some rock and roll version of Willy Loman, rolling from town to town on nothing but a backbeat and horns. But he’s so damn joyous in these pages and still so joyously free on stage, any such thought floats away. Waiting On The Moon confirms that Wolf’s musical quest is an admirably atavistic story in this commercial day and age. He’s an aging rocker who has made a covenant with the music that set him free, not unlike the bluesmen who helped raise him.

Life is two dates with a dash in between, the saying goes, and, after turning Waiting’s 329 pages you can’t help but shake your head in veneration. There’s no other way to say it: Here is someone who has lived the fuck out of his dash. No wonder Wolf likes to quote Faulkner, one of those authors Eddie Hood turned him onto: “The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

Thursday March 27, 7 pm, $5, Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street. Register here.

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