Peter Wolf’s Jumpin’ Jive: The Origins Of The Music Video For “Come As You Are”

Peter Wolf’s Jumpin’ Jive: The Origins Of The Music Video For “Come As You Are”

Music fans may know Peter Wolf as the hot-footed hyper-patter lead vocalist for the J. Geils Band, but his solo work stands strongly on its own; his 2002 album Sleepless was one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 greatest albums of all time. Whether you long for his wild antics during the J. Geils Band’s Houseparty live-band-on-fire era, his desk dodging among the lingerie set in the “Centerfold” video, or his hip-swivel moves during “Lights Out,” one things for sure: the man can MOVE.

Wolf, currently on tour to support 2010’s Midnight Souvenirs album, had his share of hits and misses with his solo music videos. “Lights Out” had heavy rotation and resulted in a #12 hit on the Billboard Hot 100; the follow-up “I Need You Tonight” had a video directed by Michael Mann, but the single barely cracked the Top 40. The most ambitious of all his videos, however, has to be the “one-take” experiment “Come As You Are” where Wolf jumps continuously throughout the video, making his way from house to house throughout a suburban neighborhood. Director Edd Griles (Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis) spoke to THE GOLDEN AGE OF MUSIC VIDEO about the origins and execution of this video.

GAMV: How did that idea come about?

Edd Griles: The idea was Peter Wolf’s. Peter wanted to pay homage to Bobby Van, and Bobby Van originally did that dance number in the movie Small Town Girl. And I looked at Peter, and if I remember this correctly, we met at his apartment up in Boston, and this is actually during his marriage to Faye Dunaway, and I said, ‘Do you realize the kind of shape that you have to be in to do that?’ and he went, ‘Yeah.’ and I said, ‘Well, if you are willing to get into shape for that, then let’s take a shot at it.’ And in fact, when we did it, if you look at the video, there is one shot where Peter jumps past a movie poster, and the movie poster is for Bobby Van’s Small Town Girl. We wound up hiring what we called a ‘jumpologist’ and the ‘jumpologist’ trained him to jump, and that piece was done, and there were only two edits in that piece. Excuse me, It take it back, three. One, two, three. There are three edits in that piece.

GAMV: You obviously have to shoot this more than once. How long, and how much, and how often did you shoot that sequence? And did you have to ice down his legs between takes or something?

Edd Griles: If I recall, we shot that over two days. We did that on the back lot at Warner Brothers. We wanted that kind of ‘50s look to it, that feel, and I can’t recall but it may be that is exactly where Bobby Van did it as well.

So here again, you’re actually right, we built it and designed it so that it would look as much as possible like the Bobby Van piece, but there were certain other things that we needed to do — the dog that’s in there at the end is jumping. There was a dog in the Bobby Van one too. We added the part where Peter gets up in the house and we took him from in the house to outside the house, just to make it harder on us, I guess. (laughs)

GAMV: it’s an amazing thing to watch.

Edd Griles: You know that there’s another group, I think the name of them is Goldfrapp, that did an homage to our homage to Bobby Van! They did another version probably three to four years ago of another song, but the same thing with the jumping.

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Check out Peter Wolf, Bobby Van, and Goldfrapp below. And you can check out Peter Wolf’s live show tonight at the Bell House in Brooklyn; October 29th at The Egg Center for the Performing Arts in Albany, New York; and October 30th at Infinity Hall in Norfolk, Connecticut.