Peter Wolf & the Midnight Travelers, Detroit, MI, April 17, 2026
Doing the Detroit breakdown.
Hello. There's some links at the bottom of this post about the ebook release of my Patti Smith chapbook project as well as a note that I've opened free subscriptions for Radio Nowhere if you're looking for 2026 Springsteen tour content.
Immutable facts: the J. Geils Band were superstars in Detroit. They sold out FOUR NIGHTS at Pine Knob back in the day, when the only other person who could do that was Bob Seger. (There’s a reason Pine Knob’s street address is 33 Bob Seger Drive.) They recorded Full House at the Cinderella Ballroom, which was located about a 10 minute drive from where I live right now.
I don’t know how the hell I grew up knowing about the connection between Detroit and J. Geils, probably because of CREEM Magazine but also I spent the 70s reading music magazines cover to cover, trying to learn as much as I could before I was finally old enough to go to concerts and buy as many records as I wanted. So I only saw J. Geils once back in the day, at MSG on the “Love Stinks” tour. Over the years I have explained more than once that while I absolutely liked the J. Geils Band, as a teenager there was only so much money and so many schemes I could run to sneak out of the house and go to a concert.
So when I saw that Peter Wolf was coming to Detroit on his most recent tour, I was going to buy the best ticket I could afford. That turned out to be 8th row stage left, just off the center aisle. Every fourth dude was wearing some kind of vintage Geils t-shirt, with the most popular appearing to be the blue handprint on the cover of Sanctuary. The gentlemen next to me were from the Bay Area and used to see J. Geils at Winterland and Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum. They flew out for this show for the same basic reason I came to Detroit to see the M50 tour: it hits different at home, and for J. Geils, this was just as good as home once upon a time. A few minutes later, one of the party had his arm around the shoulders of a new best friend where they, in unison, recited the Wolf’s speech from the intro of “Must’ve Got Lost.” They were not the only dudes I observed doing this.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why J. Geils were so huge in Detroit, and the best theory I can come up with is that they sat in that sweet spot of heavy blues influence mixed with classic rock, combined with solid melodies and lyrics that were clever and intelligent. Plus, Peter Wolf is a performer. He is not an aggressive front man but he is borrowing from the kind of footwork that was once taught on West Grand Boulevard. And music fans in Detroit know their history, they know where they are, they know what happened here. That particular cocktail of critical factors spoke to Detroit music fans and tonight you got to see all of that in action. The audience is going to vibe hard with J. Geils’ translation of Otis Rush’s “Homework” and deeply appreciate Wolf’s later-day cover of Patty Loveless’ “Nothin’ But The Wheel.” The crowd was chatty, and there were a fair amount of beer runs, but most people stayed put and paid attention. You would have had to work to be distracted.
Peter Wolf comes out wearing exactly what you want and expect to see Peter Wolf wearing: black button-down shirt, skinny black jeans, and a crushed velvet tiger striped tuxedo jacket. He looks like he walked out of a door reading 1978, hair and mustache and shades. Wolf’s default is moving, jiving, side-stepping, arm rolls. It’s so fluid and second nature that it feels subconscious, like if you saw him in the vegetable aisle at the grocery store, he’d be moving the same way. He’s backed by a five-piece, the Midnight Travelers, who are individually virtuoso and solid as hell. My favorite was the keyboard player, who moved between the Hammond B3 and an electric keyboard, but they were all fantastic. You could catch Wolf giving cues from time to time in that old school r’n’b bandleader kind of way: he leans, he looks, he holds up a hand, he points. He didn’t need to direct them much but a band is a living organism and it will occasionally go in its own direction.
Woofa Goofa — Wolf’s DJ nom de guerre — has not lost his Boston accent one iota. There was a moment where he tells a story about a woman whose date can’t be bothered to show up on time and she gets dressed up and calls an “Ubah.” It is charming to still hear regional accents, and to know what they are. Wolf’s voice is still strong and elastic, which is particularly notable not just because of his age but because after reading his excellent memoir, Waiting On The Moon [amazon | bookshop] and the stories about various massive piles of cocaine seemingly everywhere, all the time, it seems improbable. He is 80 and this does not seem possible from his onstage presence. He never seems to age; I saw a J. Geils reunion tour in the 00s and have seen him solo and the biggest factor in the performance is simply how good the band behind him is. He is still moving and singing and talking like Peter Wolf.
This was an excellent show by any reasonable standard but it went beyond just seeking the dopamine of remembrance. Yes, people are here because they want to relive their youth but they’re mostly here because the J. Geils Band were a powerhouse and this was their second home. They want to hear the songs again, sung by the person who originally sang them, to stand with their friends and brothers and sisters (hereditary and spiritual), to stand arm-in-arm with their sweethearts and to reconnect the synapses that fired the first time they heard these songs, They are here for a chance to make some new magic and to try to conjure the magic of the past.
Wolf constructs this setlist with absolute deliberation, which you realize only once you’re in the middle of it. He knows when to give the audience what they want and to offer them what they need. He feeds the crowd some early recognizable hits, then detours through his excellent and neglected solo albums, before coming back to “the Geils band,” as he refers to them in his memoir. The sets have been mostly the same, the difference last night being that we didn’t get his Dylan cover of “Going, Going, Gone” but instead got the blessing of “Night Time” at the end of the night during the parade of hits. It was the right call for Detroit, even if I had been looking forward to hearing his take on Bob, especially after reading the Dylan chapter in his memoir.
But there was a moment in the keyboard break of “Give It To Me” — J. Geils doing reggae before most people had even heard of it — where I will swear the veil shifted for a minute, and it wasn’t just that I could remember hearing this song on the radio — that small box that opened up the entire world to me — but I could feel what it felt like lying there on my purple shag carpet in my purple room and listen and dream, when a radio was a window that represented hope and freedom. It wasn’t a temporal shift as much as an old and familiar spirit drifting through the room.
Wolf introduces the band, but he doesn’t just name them and move on, he introduces the band, one by one, with superlatives and then everyone gets their moment in the spotlight. He thanks the promoter, and the venue, and mentions the lighting tech, who he wants to thank by name but “she was so beautiful I just said hello and didn’t get her name.” With that, several hundred men start yelling “RAPUTA,” who, despite the twists and turns the intro may have taken over the year, remains the heroine of the story that prefaces “Must’ve Got Lost.” It wasn’t a bit! He was just trying to thank the lighting director. The intros are sincere, but they also let him take a break and recharge a little, because the following run of songs are high power and non stop.
There had been an announcement before the show asking for no photographs or video, which the crowd in the rows in front of me mostly honored (no idea what anyone behind me was doing, to be fair), until the Wolf said, “Detroit Breakdown” and every phone in the room came out, including mine. Holy shit, here we go:
“We’re doing the Detroit breakdown…”
“YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH”
“Motor City Shakedown”
“YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH”
Holy fuck. The room vibrated with joy and remembrance and that communal group satisfaction when you are surrounded by hundreds of other people singing with you in unison, just like church and this, right here, is exactly church, the roots of rock and roll, but also? You are united in that moment singing with your whole chest along with everyone else in the theater, in response, on cue, this song written about this place. As Wolf would later say, people come up to him all the time saying, ‘Detroit is back!’ and he responds that Detroit never left. He namechecks Motown, Jackie Wilson, the MC5, the Stooges, the White Stripes (among others). They were honored that this city loved their band so much given the music that came out of here. And all of that is in everybody’s YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAHs tonight.
The show ends with a solid, well-tuned run of hits: “Love Stinks,” “House Party,” “Lookin’ For A Love,” and finally, “Must’ve Got Lost,” complete with a version of the story about our hero and his damsel Rapuna, the story everyone in this particular room knows by heart and has listened to a million times already but would gladly listen to it another million times, especially when we get to hear Wolf tell it to us.
For those of the Springsteen persuasion, I've at least temporarily reactivated free subscriptions to Radio Nowhere so I don't have to update two websites and spam people who don't care about Bruce with reminders to go read essays about him. Tour analysis post coming in a couple of days. I'll be covering Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and DC (unless I lose my complete mind and add more).
My Patti Smith chapbook project, Three Chords and Blessed Noise, is now available as an ebook!
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I wrote about seeing Dylan in Detroit (and two other shows in Grand Rapids and Saginaw) over at Ray Padgett's excellent Flagging Down The Double E's:
Ray Padgett
And my most recent Salon column was about two excellent new books:
Caryn Rose
