The show was an important aspect of what we did. We had 20-foot guitar chords and we’d jump into the audience. “The Hallucinations did blues and R&B and were like neo-punks. “It was a fusion between a straight blues band and mine,” Wolf recalls. With the addition of student and piano player Seth Justman, the J. In need of a new drummer and singer, Geils drafted the duo in. The Hallucinations were another young outfit making local waves, who counted Bladd and Wolf among their number. “We ended up being the house band at the Unicorn coffee shop downtown.” “We were pretty much modelling ourselves after the Junior Wells-Buddy Guy quartet,” Geils says. By the spring of 1967, they’d dropped out of college and moved to Boston. Studying the songwriting credits on the latter’s first album led to the discovery of Little Walter and Muddy Waters. There he met Dick and Klein and set about forming “a bluesy, folky jug band”, influenced by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Geils, another New Yorker, had arrived at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as a student in the mid-60s. And you really believed it it was total credibility.” They’d tear their jacket off, get down on their knees. If someone was singing a love song, it was like high opera. They were almost preaching to the audience. “It was an incredible learning experience of how the artist made himself connect with the audience,” he says. It was there, watching James Brown, Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson, that he’d witnessed the art of stagecraft up close.
As a child, his older sisters would regularly take him to The Apollo, the venerated soul and R&B venue in Harlem. Peter Wolf was born and raised in New York, but by the mid-60s he’d headed up the coast to Boston.