The Last Bass Outpost
Main Forums => The Outpost Cafe => Topic started by: nofi on April 17, 2017, 09:42:30 PM
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Geils
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Great band. RIP J.
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The J. Geils Band was to me one of the quintessential East Coast Yank bands with one of the greatest front men: Peter Wolf. I understand that they had been touring without their name giver for quite some time, J. Geils to the J. Geils Band was a bit like Spencer Davis to the Spencer Davis Group: Not really the most important member, neither in the songwriting department (Justman and Wolf did the writing, I'm not aware of J. Geils himself ever having written anything), nor instrumentally (Justman's keyboards amd Magic Dick's harp dominated the sound). But it says a lot for him that he gave Wolf, Magic Dick and Justman the foil to do their thing, he was a very band-serving lead guitarist. Have fun in your new sanctuary which in J. Geils' case will probably be a garage with classic cars!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOjnI_jG8h0
I have very fond memories of the band around 1980 in a club in Germany - pre-Centerfold they had a strong live reputation in Germany due to the Rockpalast show linked above, but didn't sell a lot of records - and they really cooked: four encores! The last one even after the house lights went up and people began to reluctantly leave, Wolf storming the stage with a towel, grabbing the mike stand James Brown style while falling to his knees and yelling "Wamma jamma!!!" one more time before tearing into yet another one of their turbo-charged rhythm 'n' blues songs.
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To give J himself some due props apart from the band: He played some great classic riffs. "Houseparty" springs to mind. As does the incredibly simple but incredibly effective intro to "Love Stinks".
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He passed away at his home in Groton Massachusetts. This is the second time someone from a famous rock band died near where I live. Brad Delp the lead singer of Boston a few years back and also Stephen Tyler's dad passed away in an assisted living home in Nashua. The J. Geils band will always remain to be a New England institution and "Give it to Me" will always be one of the more fun to tunes to jam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYgZ3-h2E1g
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Hey now ... let's have a live version of that early reggae by a white band ... with a nice terse solo of J. (of German descent, no less!) around the 3:35 mark, one of his more rare lengthy ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzgkY6V1EG4
I always wonder why they weren't huge, Peter Wolf was such a cool frontman, the band shit-tight, their music infectuous without being bludgeoning. Wikipedia says that their success was allegedly limited by being "too white for the black kids and too black for the whites", I never thought about it like that, it would give them the same fate as Mothers Finest then.
"Teresa" was a lovely ballad of theirs, why that never had more airplay is beyond me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTE7ZsqVwL0
And when Freeze Frame (the album) and Centerfold (the song) elevated them in popularity late in their career, with Peter Wolf looking suitably MTV-photogenic (plus Seth Justman's pretty boy curly hair-rockstar looks) and a tour with the Rolling Stones taking them around the world to huge audiences, they broke up! :o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4YhOCnxADw
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We've been doing this one live for the past year or two... so fun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4e7a0_gQKA
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I always loved Wolf's lanky moves.
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One of my favorite shows of all time was getting to sit on the lawn at Merriweather Post Pavilion and see J. Geils Band open for the Talking Heads.
J. Geils joined them onstage for the encore and it was amazing.
I was introduced to J. Geils when Bloodshoot appeared and probably still have that 8-track somewhere in a box. They were a cool band.