HE MUST OF GOT LOST : Where Has Peter Wolf Been for the Last 10 Years? Not on Tour--but Let’s Let Him Explain . . .

After taking a decade off from live performances, Peter Wolf is meeting the public again, singing his funky, bluesy rock ‘n’ roll and trying to clear up certain misperceptions, such as why it is not appropriate to address him by somebody else’s first initial.

“I found as I got back out, that some people need to have the dots connected,” Wolf said recently from his apartment in Boston. “Even in Boston, people go, ‘J. Geils, man. How ya doin,’ J?’ ”

From 1967 until 1983, Wolf was the skinny, black-clad, raspy-voiced singer of the J. Geils Band. He and his five blues-loving band mates played with sweat and grit, and kept it up long enough to turn their brand of party-oriented roadhouse rock into an arena-level attraction.

Guitarist J. (for Jerome) Geils gave the band its name, but Wolf had the crucial job of embodying its rowdy, hard-driving spirit on stage. He would leap and whirl and scream in a tradition handed down by Mick Jagger, Mitch Ryder and such R & B dynamos as James Brown and Jackie Wilson. Between songs, his mouth would do the scampering as Wolf let loose with trademark mile-a-minute spoken riffs in the jive-talking style of the AM radio deejays who had been his first musical tutors when he was growing up in the Bronx during the 1950s and early ‘60s.

Wolf, now 46, fronted the Geils band through 10 studio albums and three live releases. By the early ‘80s, the band had embellished its blues, soul and rock ‘n’ roll roots with polished pop melodies and brisk synthesizer-based arrangements. The result was “Freeze-Frame,” a million-selling album that remained at No. 1 on the Billboard chart for four weeks in 1982.

Instead of riding its newfound status as one of rock’s hottest sellers, the J. Geils Band quickly self-destructed. For reasons that remain murky--even after a halting attempt by the normally loquacious Wolf to explain them--the other members decided in 1983 that they no longer required their singer’s services. Keyboards player Seth Justman took over the lead vocals, and a Wolf-less album bombed in 1984, spelling the end of the J. Geils Band.

Wolf scored a hit in 1984 with his first single, “Lights Out,” but his solo career soon stagnated. He put out three albums but failed to tour.

Now he is trying to remedy that. Last summer, Wolf finally put together the Houseparty 5, a backing band named after one of the J. Geils Band’s signature stomps. His first West Coast tour since his J. Geils days brings him to the Coach House on Sunday, May 1. Wolf has no new record to promote, although he says he has one nearly ready to go once he can free himself from “a corporate quagmire” apparently related to his contract with a former label, MCA. At this point, Wolf says, he is just playing for the enjoyment of it and trying to remind rock fans who he is.

“I love performing, but I’m not one of these people who need to perform. It’s not a showoff thing,” Wolf said in explaining how a rocker known for his stage command could have stayed off the stage for 10 years. “It has to be with a band I feel comfortable with, and it has to be right.”

Wolf paid a backstage visit to Bruce Springsteen before Springsteen’s December, 1992, concert at Boston Garden and got a pep talk from the Boss that prompted him to plan his recent return to live rocking. Later, Springsteen called Wolf on stage to join him for a rendition of the Wilson Pickett soul oldie, “In the Midnight Hour.”

In their pre-show talk, Wolf recalled, “He said, ‘You should get out there. The (record) company does what the company does, but when you’re on stage the business cannot affect you. That’s when you have control and you can get to the audience.’ ” The following summer, Wolf began forming the Houseparty 5 (made up of veteran Boston area players) and playing the New England club circuit.

While Wolf made his reputation as a first-class ham, his first artistic love was that most solitary of pursuits, painting. But his upbringing gave him a strong taste of show biz: his grandmother had acted in the Yiddish theater, and his father earned a modest living as a singer, both in vaudeville and classical settings.

Wolf, a lively raconteur, recalled his own singing debut at the age of 11:

“I put together this band, the Three Imps,” to play at a talent show in Bronx Park (where, Wolf wants it known, he was crowned the checkers champion. He still keeps a checkerboard set up in his apartment and relishes a serious game. “I will play anybody, as long as they don’t say, ‘I haven’t played since the first grade.’ ”)

The Imps lineup, Wolf recalled, consisted of “me, two other guys and a clarinet player. Just before we were supposed to go on and do ‘Bye, Bye Love,’ his mother told the clarinet player maybe he should go solo. We had to slap him around a bit in the boys room.” Wolf says that while he was thus motivating his reed man, a toddler act went on stage, sang “This old man, he played one,” and stole the show. “It was that old show-biz cliche: never follow dogs or young kids. We lost and I decided to retire at the age of 11 after my singing debut.”

But Wolf continued to absorb a wide range of music.

He entered a high school for the arts a few blocks from the famed Apollo Theater, the Harlem mecca for great soul, blues and rock ‘n’ roll talent. Wolf took in shows there and at Manhattan’s jazz and folk clubs. He had plenty of freedom to come and go: at 14, he says, he left his parents’ cramped apartment and moved in with friends.

That seems like a shockingly young age to be on one’s own in the big city, but as Wolf points out, “it was a different time. You didn’t have the drugs. I remember riding on the subway at 2 or 3 in the morning, and there was no sense of danger. You could sleep on the roof top or in the park, and there was no sense of danger. The idea of being killed over $20 (was foreign). It was a different era, a different sensibility.”

In the mid-’60s, Wolf moved to Boston to study painting at a school connected with the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. By happenstance, he wound up sharing a tiny apartment with fellow art student David Lynch, who went on to fame as the creator of such weirdly compelling screen entertainments as “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks.”

“We had one room, no money and a lot of cockroaches,” Wolf said. “We were like the odd couple. He was dressed up in suits, and I was a slob. He didn’t smoke, and I smoked three packs a day. He liked the Beach Boys, and I was into Thelonious Monk.”

Wolf says he suffered in his art-student days from a classic case of teen Angst that might sound familiar to today’s grunge-rock crowd:

“I was a very nihilistic, depressed young guy. A lot of Angst about ‘Who am I? What am I?’ A lot of confusion about life, wondering if you’re going to be good at what you do.”’

The turning point, fittingly enough, came at a house party--actually a loft gathering where the entertainment was a blues band made up of other art students. Wolf showed up in his $3 thrift shop tuxedo. When the singer didn’t know the words to a Sonny Boy Williamson song the band was trying to play, Wolf (who relates the story with sung embellishments), got up and put his extensive blues acumen to work. It was, he says, his first time on a stage since his foiled attempt to win the Bronx Park talent show.

“It was this incredible moment. All of a sudden there was this camaraderie and interchange, and this collaborative thing.” Wolf put down the solitary tools of a painter, and started singing the blues. He also changed his last name from Blankfield to Wolf, adopting the surname of the grandmother who had been in the theater.

The art-student band, called the Hallucinations, shared club and coffeehouse gigs with such visiting eminences as John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, the Shirelles, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and the Mothers of Invention. When it broke up, Wolf and the Hallucinations’ drummer, Stephen Jo Bladd, joined forces with another local blues act, the J. Geils Band, which featured guitarist Geils, bassist Danny Klein, and harmonica wizard “Magic Dick” Salwitz. Later, keyboards player Seth Justman would complete a lineup that first recorded for Atlantic Records in 1970 and remained intact until Wolf’s departure in 1983.

For about a year in the late 1960s, Wolf entertained New Englanders in another way: he landed a shift as a late-night disc jockey on WBCN, Boston’s top free-form FM rock station.

Wolf says he got the gig when an acquaintance who used to hit the bars in Wolf’s neighborhood and sleep off the results in Wolf’s pad took note of his extensive record collection. The fellow had just bought WBCN and invited Wolf to go on the air.

A quarter-century later, Wolf needs no invitation to narrowcast his old shtick over the phone. This was the era of FM deejays who were mellow-unto-inertness. But mellow wasn’t Wolf’s style; instead, he re-created the mania he’d heard over the New York airwaves during the golden age of AM rock ‘n’ roll radio.

“Cool was in, most definitely,” Wolf noted, launching into an illustrative impression of the favored FM style. “Who was that flute player band, the guy with the peg leg? Oh yeah. ‘Now we’re going to do a little Tull,’ ” he crooned in a low, soothing, near-whisper of a voice. “ ‘Wow, it’s raining. Let’s do some rain songs.’ And then I would come on: ‘Yow! Wah! Cabba de labba!’ ” For on-air purposes, Wolf dubbed himself the Woofa Goofa Momma Toofa Hoffa Loofa.

Wolf’s radio career was short-lived, but J. Geils turned into a hard-working, steadily barnstorming band. The singer teamed with Justman in a songwriting partnership that produced such ‘70s album-rock staples as “Give It to Me,” “Must of Got Lost,” “Detroit Breakdown” and “One Last Kiss.” The Geils band also had a knack for appropriating obscurities from the R & B canon, such as “Houseparty” and “First I Look at the Purse,” and turning them into signature songs of its own (most of the band’s highlights are included on “The J. Geils Band Anthology: Houseparty,” a 38-song retrospective issued last year by Rhino Records). The band enjoyed an active but not spectacularly lucrative career: in its first 10 years of recording, it placed just one album, “Bloodshot” (1973), in the Top 20. When Wolf wed actress Faye Dunaway in 1974, he was decidedly the lesser-magnitude star. The marriage broke up in 1979.

Major success finally arrived with the early-’80s albums “Love Stinks” and “Freeze-Frame.” Geils headlined in arenas and toured Europe with the Rolling Stones. Then, Wolf says, the others made him resign.

“Seth had a lot to do with the success of ‘Freeze-Frame.’ He produced it. At that point, I think he felt he wanted to do more by himself, and maybe he felt my contributions weren’t valid. Those were some of the issues,” Wolf recalled. “It started deteriorating and getting more difficult. I think it was all based on the music, with maybe subliminal aspects” of personal conflicts between Wolf and the other members. “It’s ironic, and I think quite tragic, that we couldn’t keep it together once success and opportunities were finally there for us. It’s a tragic tale and it disturbs me, and I think it was quite wasteful. The solo thing came not out of choice, but was something I just had to accept.”

Wolf says he was still too stunned by his break with the band to tour after his first solo album, “Lights Out,” enjoyed moderate success. Business-related complications thwarted his plans to mount tours in support of “Come As You Are” (1987) and “Up to No Good!” (1990).

He says he has made overtures about re-forming the J. Geils Band, but to no avail.

“I’m sure it would make a lot of financial sense, but for me it wouldn’t make sense unless there was that commitment and passion,” Wolf said. “A band like the J. Geils Band can’t fake it. It’s that primal. It’s got to be there and have energy and be magic. I tried a couple of times to put together a New Year’s benefit (reunion) or something else that might make sense. Some of the guys just didn’t have the passion, so let it be, as the song goes.”

(Justman, quoted last May in the Boston Globe, said: “If Peter really wanted to do it, and would be fair about it, then (a reunion) could happen.”)

Wolf is vague about his current prospects of getting a record deal and releasing a fourth solo album that he says is largely completed. It will include songs he has written with fellow Bostonian Aimee Mann, the former ‘Til Tuesday leader.

“It’s being dealt with, and I hope it passes and I can get on with what I want to do,” Wolf said of the corporate problems that he says have held him back. “It could be out quite soon if all systems are go. I’m obviously being evasive, but I want to let the brush fires remain brush fires. I want to let this stuff resolve itself and not get into one of those press things. In this kind of stuff, actions have reactions.

“My agenda now . . . is like the early days of the J. Geils Band, where you get in the station wagon and do it because you want to play,” Wolf summed up. “I just want to get back out to places that were important to me and I think it’s important to play (now). Workin’ the highways and byways and hopefully meeting new people, getting into new experiences and looking for new things to set my soul on fire. I think that’s the best revenge.”

* POP LISTINGS, Page 23

* NIGHTCLUB LISTINGS, Page 24

Who: Peter Wolf and the Houseparty 5.

When: Sunday, May 1, at 8 p.m.

Where: Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: Take Interstate 5 to the San Juan Creek Road exit and turn left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal: $19.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.

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