I read a lot of musician biographies and memoirs.

It’s nice to learn something about the subjects’ lives and how those lives influenced their creative endeavors. It usually gives me a greater appreciation for their music, even if most of them follow a similar arc, kind of like an episode of VH-1’s “Behind the Music.”

Peter Wolf’s memoir “Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses” is not one of those books.

The singer, showman and music historian is like a real-life “Zelig.” There’s plenty of music in his story, but there also is art, literature, poetry and cinema.

Names like Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams and Alfred Hitchcock get used more than John Geils, Magic Dick, Steth Justman, Stephen Jo Bladd and Danny Klein, his J. Geils Band-mates.

They aren’t mentioned by name until page 282 in a 335-page book. The group had an acrimonious split in the early ’80s when Wolf was pushed out, and he calls the reunion tours they did about a decade ago a mistake. I saw two of those shows — 2014 at Quicken Loans Arena opening for Bob Seger and 2016 headlining MGM Northfield Park — and if Wolf was miserable, he did a good job hiding it.

There are no stories about the origins of “Must of Got Lost,” “Sanctuary,” “Centerfold” or any of the other songs Wolf and Justman wrote together, no explanation of the stylistic evolution that saw the group go from a guitar-and-harmonica-driven, house-rockin’ party band to the electronic keyboard-centered sound that dominated “Centerfold,” “Freeze Frame” and “Just Can’t Wait.”

JGB has a pre-“Love Stinks” fanbase and a post-“Love Stinks” fanbase — I’m both — and it would have been interesting to learn how the group dealt with the spike in album and ticket sales that was accompanied by grumbling older fans who felt the band abandoned it blues-rock roots. At times I wondered if Wolf had to sign an NDA in whatever agreement they made when severing ties.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not a fascinating read. It’s a better book than the one I expected.

One thing is evident — Peter Wolf must be a great hang.

He’s a gifted storyteller, and he comes off as someone with an insatiable curiosity. While he didn’t graduate from high school, he studied art on his own and attracted the company of writers and intellectuals as well as gifted musicians. He dined with the professors at the prestigious Boston colleges he never could have been admitted to, and legendary bluesmen hung out at his tiny apartments whenever they were playing in the city.

Some of his encounters with the famous are fleeting (at age 10, his parents took him to a foreign film at a New York moviehouse. Marilyn Monroe ended up sitting next to him, dozed off and rested her head on his shoulder). Others were coincidental (a post-high school roommate was future filmmaker David Lynch).

But he had lasting friendships — and occasional spats — with many fascinating characters throughout his lifetime. I’ve read interviews with acts who opened for the Rolling Stones who’ve said they were grateful for the opportunity, but they had little or no interaction with the band. When the J. Geils Band toured with the Stones, Wolf spent his off days hanging out in Keith Richards’ suite carousing and singing doo wop with Keef and Ronnie Wood.

His tumultuous marriage to Faye Dunaway gave him entry to a different world, one where he dined with directors like George Cukor and Roman Polanski, took meetings with Hitchcock and had some good times and bad times with Jack Nicholson.

I’ve had a couple of brief encounters with Wolf over the years. I talked to him at a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame event honoring legendary DJs from the ’50s and ’60s about 20 years ago. Wolf, who did a stint as an overnight DJ in Boston in the ’60s, was giddy surrounded by the guys he grew up listening to on the radio. On the flip side, the DJs mostly were a surly lot complaining about how the radio business had changed. It was kind of like sitting around with a bunch of veteran journalists today.

I also did a phone interview with him once (I think to preview the Seger show), and he was engaged, entertaining and gracious. Like many musicians, at the end of the interview, he said, “If you’re coming to the show, come backstage afterward and say hi.” Unlike 99% of those musicians, he then gave me his road manager’s cell number to make that possible.

I didn’t go. I usually don’t. Those backstage encounters usually leave me feeling weird and awkward. But spending a few hundred pages with Wolf through “Waiting on the Moon” couldn’t have been more enjoyable.

Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.