More than 50 years later, Peter Wolf has no idea how his brain concocted Reputah the Beautah.
“Nothing was pre-scripted,” said the former frontman of the J. Geils Band. “Everything would change from day to day.”
On stage in November 1975, Wolf, then 29, rambled about a desperate man, the “Woofa Goofa with the green teeth,” who stomped up to a woman’s house, pounded on her door and demanded to “climb up to the ladder of your love.” He paused. “What’s the name of that chick with the long hair?” Drummer Stephen Jo Bladd shouted back: “Rapunzel!”
“Hey, Rapunzel!” Wolf said with a lecherous chuckle. “Hey, Reputah! Reputah the Beautah!”
This two-minute preamble to the Geils Band’s hit “Must of Got Lost” might have been forgotten to anybody other than the most dedicated of bootleg concert tapers, but it came out on the live album “Blow Your Face Out,” released 50 years ago, on April 22, 1976. The live version of the track spread to US radio stations as a cult favorite — including Boston’s WBCN.
“It didn’t become a hit on the radio. Detroit somehow got the word that Boston had played it,” said Maxanne Sartori, 77, a WBCN DJ from 1970 to 1977 who lives in Brookline. “In Boston, we had the freedom to do anything we wanted to. Nobody complained about it, really.”
The live version of “Must of Got Lost,” renamed “Musta Got Lost” on “Blow Your Face Out,” was recorded at either the Boston Garden or Detroit’s Cobo Hall, according to the album’s slightly vague liner notes. Wolf credited Mary Turner, a DJ with progressive-rock station KMET in Los Angeles, for airing this version, which spread to Colorado, Boston, New York, and Detroit.
After that, anytime he started the rap about “L-O-V-E, and if you abuse it, you’re gonna lose it,” and so on, Wolf said, “If I didn’t get it right, the audience would sort of correct me. It was funny.”
“I had to sit up in a hotel room with a cassette and try to memorize what I did, spontaneously,” he added in a recent phone interview. “The whole story.”
By the time of “Blow Your Face Out,” the J. Geils Band were hard-touring party rockers who’d graduated from clubs to arenas despite just two Billboard Hot 100 hits: The No. 30 song “Give It to Me” in 1973, and the original 1975 “Must of Got Lost,” which peaked at No. 12. Their label was the storied Atlantic Records, home of stars from Aretha Franklin to Led Zeppelin, but the band struggled to break out — until they switched to EMI and put out “Centerfold” and “Freeze-Frame” in the 1980s.
“As much as they loved that band, Atlantic couldn’t do [expletive] with them,” Sartori said. “It’s very sad, because they deserved to be one of the greatest live bands in America, and it just didn’t work out that way — until they got to EMI.”
In his teens, Wolf moved from the Bronx to Boston and made a living as a painter before getting hired at WBCN as a DJ, where he invented his fast-talking Woofa Goofa persona. (“It’s probably ‘f,’ like Frank,” he said, by way of verifying the spelling of Woofa Goofa, as opposed to the occasionally used Wooba Gooba. “But it’s really anyway anybody wants it.”)
After playing with Bladd in another band, the Hallucinations, the duo joined the J. Geils Band, named after its guitarist, who died in Groton in 2017. Wolf realized quickly he had to draw from his DJ skills, and his experience watching early rock ’n’ roll bands at New York’s Apollo Theatre, to interact with audiences and stall for time when necessary.
“The responsible role of a frontman in a rock ’n’ roll group, be it Mick Jagger or Bono, [is that] they’re the connection between the audience and the group," he said. “And I did it constantly.”
“I’m not sure what was going on before ‘Must of Got Lost,’ but there was something — it could’ve possibly been J. needed to change a string, or a string might’ve broke, or sometimes a microphone gets moved and technicians had to come out and move things around,” Wolf continued. “So my job was to fill up the space.”
At one point, when putting together the “Blow Your Face Out” album, the band considered cutting Wolf’s stage patter.
“We decided to keep this one in to give it a flavor of what it was like to see a show,” Wolf said. “And the most unusual thing was, the album came out and we would be touring and people would yell out: ‘Reputah the Beautah!’ Or ‘Rapunzel!’”
Wolf, whose memoir “Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses” came out in 2025, is touring sporadically this year, including two upcoming shows with his Midnight Travelers, at the Stone Mountain Arts Center, in Brownfield, Maine, beginning April 24. The set will include J. Geils Band material.
“These days,” Wolf said, “Reputah has a cellphone.”