Submitted by Doug on
As solo artist and front man for the J. Geils Band, Peter Wolf had no shortage of voice. As author of his memoir, that’s exactly what he has. A ghostwriter could have helped with that.
While our written voice is almost never exactly the same as our conversational voice, it ought to bear some resemblance to us. Readers should be able to hear our essence in there somewhere. Otherwise, there’s going to be so much distance between author and reader that it might as well have been written in third person by someone who doesn’t even know us. And that’s the problem with Waiting on the Moon. The writing has all the personality of a high school paper where the student is focused entirely on acing the grammar.
Wolf acknowledges that he had trouble getting started: “I made numerous starts. I tried writing longhand, dictating into a recorder, and even using my one-finger typing, but nothing seemed to provide me with any fulfillment. I just couldn’t seem to find my voice on the page.” After taking a break and doing a lot of reading, he finally got his finger moving in earnest, and “one chapter led to another … and another and another.”
Well, yeah, the chapters are there, but the voice he found sure isn’t his. In a meeting with prospective manager Dee Anthony, Wolf says, “Dee, I’m coming to you as one Bronx street kid to another,” and he reminds us so often that he’s from the Bronx that he clearly regards it as a defining quality, but he never sets it free on the page. In the following passage, see if you can spot the word that a Bronx street kid would never use this way in conversation: “During the day, the limo driver would pull up to the house and wait outside for me. It was a waste, for I usually stayed inside, either songwriting or talking on the phone, arranging the band’s schedule.” I’m guessing that as quiet a word as for usually is, it hurt your ear a little in the second sentence. And what about: “There was a gentle round of polite applause followed by hushed whispers, like those one might hear at the wake of a distant relative.” Excuse me? “Like those one might hear”? Where did you say you’re from?
Even the dialogue sounds inauthentic. In one of countless examples, Wolf quotes his sister, looking at the cover of Bob Dylan’s first album, as saying: “I met him when I was in college in Wisconsin. He was playing the piano with a harmonica attached by a wire to his neck. That’s him on the cover. It was at a gathering in the room of my guitarist friend Danny Kalb.” Would Pete need to be reminded where his sister attended college? And who else’s portrait would that be on the cover of Dylan’s debut album but Dylan’s? And then there’s the strictly utilitarian delivery of information in the other two sentences. All in all, it sounds like very thinly disguised exposition to me.
What kind of amateur ghostwriter would pull this kind of—oh wait, that’s right. He didn’t have a ghostwriter. Well, what about his editor then? Turns out he didn’t work with one of those either, opting to seek the wisdom and encouragement of a painter friend instead (Grace O’Connor). And I can’t see where the editor who Little, Brown assigned after delivery of the draft did anything substantive to improve matters. Even easy fixes like cutting clunky excess words haven’t been made. Why not save the reader time by trimming the “level” from “The excitement level built to a crescendo”? And by avoiding the overuse of full names? In the span of three pages, Muddy Waters’s full name is used four times, and the full names of his band members James Cotton and Otis Spann are used three times. How many Cottons and Spanns would we confuse them with if we weren’t repeatedly told their full names? And how many other Muddys have we ever heard of?
It may sound like I’m nitpicking, but Waiting on the Moon is infested with nits, and they’re constant distracting reminders that Wolf doesn’t write prose professionally and that the voice we’re hearing isn’t his. It’s the farthest cry possible from memoirs like Patti Smith’s Just Kids and M Train, Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, Willie Nelson’s It’s a Long Story, Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light—memoirs that feel like colorful conversations with people who, as near as we can tell, are showing up with their authentic selves.
On that list, Nelson’s is the only one that was written with a ghost, but it has as distinct a voice as the other titles. Good ghostwriters have an ear for what make someone’s voice unique, and they know how to translate it from the spoken word to the written word. Usually, as objective observers/listeners, they have a better ear for a first-time author’s voice than the author does. In Wolf’s case, a good one could have injected his memoir with at least a little of the barely contained energy he always brought to his performances. One of the hallmarks of the J. Geils Band’s music was that it wasn’t the least bit fussy—it felt sloppy in the best possible way—but Wolf’s writing is fussy to a fault. If he channeled any genuine inspiration as he worked, he’s polished it to death, along with any trace of personality we’d recognize as uniquely his.
All a ghost can do is sigh at the lost opportunity.
None of this is to say I don’t unconditionally recommend the book for anyone who loves rock and blues lore, though. The stories are priceless: the encounters with Dylan, David Lynch (Wolf’s art school roommate), Sly Stone, Van Morrison, John Lee Hooker, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, etc. The stories of touring with the Stones. The visit to the home of Alfred Hitchcock, who nearly begged Wolf to have a glass of wine so he could have one too (wife Alma wouldn’t let him drink during the day unless a guest also wanted to imbibe). The roller-coaster marriage to Faye Dunaway, including the night she cheated on him with Jack Nicholson at Nicholson’s house for hours while Wolf waited downstairs. Wolf answered the insult by dumping some expensive furniture into Nicholson’s pool before letting himself out. You know, things that only seem to happen when the rich and famous get together.
It won’t be too long before everyone who can provide firsthand accounts of ’70s antics like these will be gone and those of us who eat this stuff up will have to find a way to go on without it. Until then, we can only hope our heroes will recognize the specific artistry it takes to tell stories in writing and leave it to the professionals. Otherwise, those stories may read like nothing so much as lost opportunities—lost opportunities for the authors, ghostwriters and millions of readers.
Maybe if we all agree to make the most of the time we have left, we can help each other to tell stories that will outlive us, stories told with voices so clear and distinct that they linger in our cultural memory. Posterity’s counting on us.
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