Robert A. Wolf stands on his porch and watches me pull into
the driveway of his west side home. It’s a beautiful place, surrounded by trees
and overlooking a small lake. He comes down the stairs and greets me cordially
as I get out of the car before inviting me up the stairs and inside his house.
Wolf’s
recent achievements include the release of his new album, Krakatoa, and the music for two films—James Arnett’s horror film Dead on Site and Marc Pivot’s Scorned. Scorned, which was filmed in Evansville,
is set to have its premiere locally sometime in July. He explains that he first
started writing songs in the early 1970s. He was drawn early on to the emerging
synthesizer movement, made popular by the progressive rock of the time. When
not playing music, he spent his college days working as a DJ at Mount Carmel’s WabashValleyCollege.
In the
early part of the 1980s, Wolf was busy experimenting with synthesizers and attending
Nashville’s BelmontMusicSchool
and the Full Sail Recording Workshop in Orlando,
Florida. He also spent this time
writing solo songs including 1981’s contest-winner “Ride the Cosmic Wave” and
playing keyboards in Evansville-based rock groups Moonrocker and Side Effex,
playing various shows around the Midwest and Florida.
“Evansville had a really
big local club scene back then,” he explains.
In 1987, he
packed up and moved out to Los Angeles
after some friends invited him out there. Wolf joined the band Tremor shortly after his arrival, with
whom he played in various clubs in Los
Angeles, including the Roxy, Whiskey a Go-Go, and the
Troubador. When not playing music, he worked as an extra through the Central
Casting agency and appeared in some major films, including 1992’s Wayne’s World.
“L.A. was a different scene from Evansville. Bands out there wrote all their
own material and rarely played covers. It was a lot of fun, though,” he
recalls.
It shows in
photographs on Wolf’s Myspace page. In them, he looks to be the very archetype
of 1980’s rock glory, with long hair and skinny jeans. So how did someone like
Wolf end up working primarily as a film composer these days?
It started
around 1993. Independent filmmaker James Arnett called Wolf and asked him to
write the music for The Tell-Tale Heart,
an adaptation of the classic Edgar Allan Poe story. Wolf’s score won second
place at that year’s World Fest film awards. In the same year, he took some of
his compositions from the Arnett film and other original pieces and released
his first album, Sanctuary. Sanctuary went on to sell a modest 2000
copies in Asia.
Wolf moved
back to Illinois
not long afterward, in the meantime setting up a deal with record company
Statue Records and taking advantage of the new creative opportunities provided by
the Internet. Sometime in 1995, Wolf parted ways with Statue and began his own
small production company, Wolfymusic. In 1999, his creative efforts culminated
in the second album, “Paradox.”
Wolf took a
break from serious production work in the first part of the decade, instead
dedicating himself to family life. It wasn’t too long, however, before James
Arnett came calling again.
“He found
me on the internet and called me. He’d been looking for me for awhile because he
needed another score and really liked what I’d done for him the first time
around.”
Wolf found
himself recording music in 2007 for A.I.A. Productions’ full-length picture, Mary Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’. After
that, Arnett used more of Wolf’s music for Dead
on Site, which premiered in Tuscon,
Arizona in May. His most recent
work will appear in this month’s premiere of Scorned.
Wolf is
optimistic about his music career and enjoys the quiet life Evansville provides. One thing he wishes,
however, is for Evansville’s
creative scene to reemerge. He remembers a much bigger creative community
during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and wishes the city would work to embrace and
foster that creativity again.
“It’d be
great to see a new scene come back,” he says.
With more
people like Robert A. Wolf working in Evansville,
there’s a solid chance that it will.
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