Jay Geils later put together a band with Magic Dick and then a more traditional, more low-key blues and jazz band. My daughter was part of the Boston University marching band and played “Centerfold” from out in the bleachers. We saw them a couple of times over the years: at an outdoor amphitheater in the Boston area and at Fenway Park (2010) with Aerosmith, a once-in-a-lifetime show that I mentioned in Part 3 of my Aerosmith series. Every now and again the band still got together and played. The band put out one more album but the house party was, for all intents and purposes, over.Ĭoda: Sort of over. You know how it is with bands, they run their course. Near as I can tell, they had a creative split. Tough to make a living in music much less doing it playing the blues, a genre that approximately a hundred thirty-seven people (counting me) seem to even like.īut alas, those Eighties tunes were, I think, the seeds of their demise. I give credit to the band for hanging in there and changing with the times. Those weren’t bad songs just not my neighborhood. That album was recorded in a town that is so rock n’ roll frenzied, so crazed, so out of control, of it, Mick Jagger once said, “We never really got it on till Detroit:”Īs mentioned, the band hit the heights in the ’80’s with the tunes I noted at the top.
#J GEILS BAND WHAMMER JAMMER LIVE FULL#
The YouTube video is from Winterland 1977 the Spotify song from their 1972 album, Full House. This wasn’t “Freeze Frame.” This was madness in the form of songs like “Homework,” an Otis Rush tune dialed up to 11. We didn’t know much but we did know this – if you buy a six-pack of Colt 45 and drink it down really fast you get pretty buzzed. (We were all good Catholic boys and so a taste of the dark side was mighty, mighty tempting.) But boy did we dig the Geils band. Now, folks, I can be honest here and say that my tribe was way more of a Sabbath-oriented group than some sort of local blues aficionado society. This concert is so legendary that Bill Graham actually mentions it in his autobio.) They’re a hot band outta Boston.” (The opening act was some turkey named Sir Lord Baltimore. So we decided to go to the Fillmore East one cold February night in 1971 to see… Black Sabbath! But one of the guys in my crowd said (I can still remember this like it was yesterday), “A group called the J. And EVERYBODY plays in New York, nobody skips it. I was heavily dependent on my friends to recommend bands and concerts and they never, or rarely, let me down. I wasn’t living in the Boston area at the time, I was in NYC. The group signed to Atlantic Records in 1970. Geils Blues Band, later dropping the word “Blues.” The same year, former fan Seth Justman joined on keyboards and the band started to earn a sizable local following in the Boston area. In 1968, the band switched focus, starting to play electric guitar and bass and recruiting two fellow musicians from a local Boston band called The Hallucinations, drummer Stephen Bladd and Peter Wolf, who was the fast-talking former FM WBCN DJ.” (And the wooba gooba with the green teeth.) Funk) and harmonica player Richard Salwitz, (stage name Magic Dick.) I can do no better than to here quote Wikipedia: “The band started as an acoustic blues trio in the mid-1960s, with guitarist John Geils, bassist Danny Klein (Dr. I’m just saying these guys were not some pop confection dressed up for mass consumption.They were a blues/rock band and when say blues I mean Blooze, baby. Maybe that amounts to the same thing, I don’t know. “My” Geils band was the stuff of the boozy, smoky beerhall, the kind of shithole where they’d just as soon throw you through a plate glass window as pour you a shot of Johnny Walker Red. But I am here to tell you this – that was not my J.
I was happy for them because those were pretty big hits and it’s tough to have a career in music long-term without a few of those. In the early 80’s, with songs like “Love Stnks,” “Freeze Frame,” and “Centerfold,” the J.Geils Band were a staple of MTV. John “Jay” Geils passed away of natural causes at his home in Groton, MA on April 11, 2017.
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