Boston rock icon Peter Wolf is reflecting on the loss of his long-ago roommate, director David Lynch.
Lynch died Wednesday, with family members announcing the news Thursday. The visionary auteur was renowned for breaking new ground in cinema and television, with movies like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and shows like “Twin Peaks” bringing experimental work from the underground to the edges — and sometimes the center — of the mainstream. Film critic Pauline Kael once predicted that Lynch might become “the first popular surrealist.”
Wolf, frontman of The J. Geils Band and a successful solo artist in his own right, first knew Lynch well before either found fame. The two met as students at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1960’s, when Wolf was scanning a bulletin board for apartment listings.
“I heard a voice behind me say, are you looking for a place to stay?” remembered Wolf. “I turned around and there was a very handsome fellow with very brown hair, dressed in a suit and tie.”
The two ended up living together for several months in a small apartment on Hemenway Street in the Fens neighborhood.
“It had a little kitchenette, a bedroom with a bunk bed,” said Wolf. “I was on the top bunk. David was on the bottom bunk.”
Wolf and Lynch shared a deep interest in and commitment to visual art, with the future rock star enamored with German Expressionism and the future filmmaker “very into abstraction,” per Wolf.
They also shared a love of smoking.
“I smoked two or three packs [a day] of Gauloises cigarettes,” said Wolf. “He smoked Marlboros. We had to keep the windows open because we both smoked so much.”
Smoking caught up with Lynch, who last year announced he’d been diagnosed with emphysema.
The two had less in common when it came to cleanliness.
“We were like the odd couple,” said Wolf. “He was very neat and kept things very much in place, and I, I guess to be polite, was just a slob.”
Even so, Wolf said that he and Lynch built a friendship as roommates. And while they were focused on their studies, they also enjoyed the seamier side of college life. Wolf recalled a trip to New York, where the legal drinking was then 18, compared to 21 in Massachusetts.
“I came up with the great idea that if we borrowed a friend’s car and it was 10:00 PM and drove down to New York, we could make it there by twelve or one in the morning and drink for another hour or two and drive back,” said Wolf. “We thought that was the greatest idea.”
The artists’ paths diverged after their time on Hemenway Street, with Wolf launching his career in music and Lynch in film. But they stayed in touch through the years.
“I remember the last time we were together. We were at this Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, and we just closed the place down, he and I. Just one bottle after another, reminiscing [about] our adventures together,” said Wolf. “It was always a pleasure to see him.”
