Peter Wolf - "Come As You Are"

(Not Available on iTunes)

(Debuted February 28, 1987, Peaked #15, 15 Weeks on the Chart)

Memories are made of this...in the spring of 1987, I was in the ninth grade and on the junior varsity baseball team. Before heading out to the field one afternoon for practice, one of my teammates started singing this song as we walked through the hall of the school. As he sang the lines, I went ahead and added the "woo woo" part at the end of each line for him. While my baseball "career" was over after that year (I finally realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was), this song takes me back to that moment whenever I hear it.

After leaving the J. Geils Band in 1983 to go solo, Peter Wolf had a couple of successful records and a handful of hit singles. "Come As You Are" would be his final Top 40 hit, as well as a #1 song on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks. It was another tune that seemed to show off Wolf's sense of humor and the showmanship he picked up as a radio DJ and over 16 years of fronting his former band.

That spilled over into the song's video as well (shown below). Aside from the gimmick of having Wolf jumping all over the place, the question begs to be asked: how many 1950's Middle America stereotypes can you fit in a video? The milkman is there, along with the traffic cop, the kid on the vintage bicycle, another kid dressed up like a cowboy, a barber, a street sweeper, a shoeshine boy. There's even a street sign showing he's on a state road in Missouri. It may have been a pain to get all the details straight, but that video looked like it was fun to make.