After 57 years of performing on rock stages around the world, with the J. Geils Band and on his own, Peter Wolf has become well-known and much loved — as the self-proclaimed “woofa goofa with the green teeth” and as the singer of hits such as “Give It To Me,” “Love Stinks,” “Centerfold,” “Freeze-Frame” and “Lights Out.”

But his new memoir, “Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses,” is showing fans there’s even more to know about him.

The 339-page book published by Little, Brown is filled with anecdotes, all the way back to birth as Peter Blankfield in the Bronx, where his future hyperactivity was telegraphed as a toddler so mobile that his mother used to leash him to trees in the park lest he wander away. “Waiting on the Moon” is intentionally a collection of tales rather than a straightforward autobiography, rolling through a Forrest Gump-like life of encounters with notable figures.

The opening chapter is even titled “I Slept With Marilyn Monroe,” in which Monroe literally fell asleep on a 10-year-old Wolf during a screening of the French film “He Who Must Die” at a local movie theater. (With Monroe’s then-husband Arthur Miller sitting on her other side, mind you.)

“My goal was to make it a book of short stories, to treat each chapter like a short story … with its own beginning, middle and end,” Wolf, 79, explains by phone. “You can go from Aretha Franklin to Julia Child to Alfred Hitchcock to Don Covay or the Rolling Stones and then arrange these stories into a timeline.

“And I also didn’t want to do a kiss-and-tell book. I just wanted to write about these incredible people that I had the privilege and get to know to certain degrees and capture that. I thought that was the essence of the book.”

It’s certainly an epic story.

After moving to Boston to study at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts (where David Lynch was a roommate), Wolf became a popular local radio DJ (he coined the Woofa Goofa person on WBCN) and musician who hung out with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison, among others.

“It is as it reads,” Wolf notes. “Of course I couldn’t believe Muddy Waters was hanging out in my apartment, or that I took Howlin’ Wolf to an all-night cafeteria.” The Geils band, meanwhile, formed in 1967 and was fronted by Wolf until an acrimonious parting in 1985; the group found a particular stronghold in Detroit, a “second home” where it recorded all or part of its three live albums and sold out multiple nights at Cobo Arena and the Pine Knob Music Theatre.

The band — which played sporadic reunion shows, with Wolf, between 1999 and 2015 — serves as a through-line for “Waiting on the Moon” as the singer recounts his assorted adventures. The book also contains his most revealing remembrances of his five-year marriage to Faye Dunaway, which Wolf says he initially didn’t want to write about, but was persuaded to by the book’s publisher and friends.

“I didn’t talk about it (before) because I would talk about my music, talk about the records, and all the other stuff was private,” Wolf, whose last metro area performance was July 18, 2017 opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the DTE Energy Music Theatre, explains now. “Faye was this very determined, talented person, and we loved each other. I was writing about the adventures in my life, and certainly she and I shared many of them.

“Of course there’s regrets; one has regrets and wishes they could do things differently, and I think I’ve expressed that in all the chapters. Some were silly, stupidities that I’ve made, and I don’t try to disguise those. It all kind of flowed through naturally once I got into the crux of it.”

The book also recounts meetings with Alfred Hitchcock — “Several times, actually … something that really had a profound impact,” Wolf says — and being asked to audition for the Martin Scorsese film “The Last Temptation of Christ.” There’s a chapter about his adventures with the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, as well as studio encounters with Sly Stone.

“I just know so many people who are artists — writers, painters and, of course, musicians, actors who have achieved a lot more notoriety and fame than I,” Wolf says. “It was not me that I was really wanting to write about, it was the characters that I happened to be fortunate enough to meet and spend time with. And so much of it happened serendipitously. I wasn’t like, ‘Hey, I want to get to know these interesting people.’ It just happened.

“I didn’t seek out Van Morrison; I didn’t know he was going to come in the club I was working in looking for gigs that day. I didn’t seek out hanging out with Muddy Waters, or to encounter Alfred Hitchcock, or Sly Stone. Most of it was by chance, and I consider myself fortunate for that. Even with Faye; I didn’t say, ‘I want to meet Faye Dunaway.’ A friend brought her to a show and the relationships derived out of that experience.”

Wolf has recorded an audiobook version of “Waiting on the Moon” and has made a few author appearances to support it. But he’s also pushing forward on a new solo album — his ninth overall and first since “A Cure For Loneliness” in 2016. He says he’s “about 80 percent” finished and hopes that the book can both raise his profile and also provide some creative impetus.

“It occurred to me that a lot of my solo recordings went unnoticed,” Wolf explains. “and I realized that if I put this out with the way things are these days, it can turn to vapor quite easily and be another lost solo effort. I think if the book connects with people it would even put the wind beneath my wings to finish the record and put it out.”