Under the Hood: Peter Wolf on Recording “Homework”

On this day in 1946 the world was given Peter Wolf. As a young man he spent quite a bit of time as a fixture in the Boston blues scene getting to know artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters. This education became a big part of his work with the J. Geils Band. One of the few songs Peter recorded both with J. Geils and on his own, is the Otis Rush tune, “Homework.” Peter Wolf explains how he ended up recording it a second time.

We really didn’t plan on recording it. What happened was we were doing a sound check for the instruments in the studio and the engineer was checking for any instrument leakage. He asked me to just sing real close to the microphone so the voice wouldn’t leak through. I think Shawn Pelton the drummer just started playing that beat and then people started kicking in. Somebody just started playing the lines to ‘Homework’, and I was real close to the mike, so I was singing, ‘Oh baby, I might be your fool wasting my time about going to school,’ and we went into the control room to listen back to check the sound of the instruments and somebody said, What’s Pete doing? and it brought it up. It wasn’t meant to be a vocal. And everybody said, that’s great, and So, we left it on because it had such a unique feel to it. - Peter Wolf