Return of the Wolf Man

by Ken Tucker

If you'd told me that one of my favorite CDs of the year would be one from Peter Wolf, I'd have laughed in your face. Peter Wolf? The J. Geils Band guy? "Centerfold" Peter Wolf? "Freeze Frame" Peter Wolf? I mean, I always liked the guy's scratchy voice and hipster attitude, but, y'know, what's he done for me lately -- like, the past 10 years?

The first time I put on Wolf's new album, "Fool's Parade" (Mercury), though, I listened to it all the way through. Then I played it all the way through again, right away -- something I haven't done in quite a while. The music was a shock: Fresh and swaggering, yet deeply rooted in the rhythm & blues history to which Wolf and the Geils Band had always paid homage. But like supposedly-past-their-prime performers ranging from Bonnie Raitt to Tina Turner to Roy Orbison did on, respectively, "Nick of Time," "Private Dancer," and "Mystery Girl," Wolf, now 52, has seized upon long experience and middle age to give his music an urgency. Songs like "Long Way Back Again" and "Turnin' Pages" are melancholy without being self-pitying; his cover of neglected R&B crooner O.V. Wright's "I'd Rather Be Blind, Crippled and Crazy" is blue-eyed soul at its bluest. Maybe it helps to be a grown-up to like this CD, but listening to it will also help you to grow up.

"Fool's Parade" has been out for about a month now, and I guess it's commercially doomed. The music is too rough-hewn to be added onto radio playlists that include either Celine Dion or Jay-Z. Its most logical precedent is, in a way, Raitt's 1989 "Nick of Time" -- that is, an album that distills the greatest strengths of a long-established performer, updating the sound just enough to make the music revelatory. I think if you ever had any fondness for Wolf and the Geils Band and you heard "Fool's Parade," you'd buy it, and tell your friends about it, and that a year from now, Wolf, like Raitt circa "Nick of Time," would be diddy-bopping home with an armful of Grammys.