Geils was the only axe man – white or black – that ever bested a John Lee Hooker song. “It gives me an opportunity to revisit material and a music that I helped create, and it was He still feels that energy today and is excited about revisiting the early material. “I just went into this kind of trance feeling,” he told me in 2011, “a very sexual kind of thing where you’re kind of just going, and there’s this orgasmic moment, shall we say, and you never know when that’s coming.” Wolf was the focal point for a band that many mistakenly assumed was on speed. They created a greasy R&B bar band that covered obscure songs by electric bluesmen like Albert Collins (“Sno-Cone”), Otis Rush (“Homework”) and John Lee Hooker (“Serves You Right to Suffer”), as well as previously hidden nuggets by rhythm and blues artists of the day including Holland, Dozier & Holland (“Where Did Our Love Go”), Don Covay (“The Usual Place”) and Curtis Mayfield (“Believe in Me”).īut it was the collaborations by Wolf and keyboardist Seth Justman on songs like “Southside Shuffle,” “Detroit Breakdown” and “Musta Got Lost” that put a spin on their sound, an edge to their delivery and a showcase for Wolf that caught the ear of a young audience ready for the Beantown equivalent to the southern rock of the Allman Brothers and Texas bur of ZZ Top. Geils Blues Band, the newly formed unit defied the popular underground rock convention of the day. Geils, a guitarist who had fronted the J. Geils Band?’ And that’s a story in itself we need not go into now.”įormed in 1967 by vocalist Peter Wolf, who had fronted a soul band called the Hallucinations made up of Boston Museum of Fine Arts students, and J. ![]() And I said, ‘I’m not J.’ ‘Well, who the hell are ya?’ I said, ‘I’m Peter Wolf.’ He said, ‘Well, why is it called the J. When Bill Graham first saw the band, he came running into the dressing room, put his arms around me and said, ‘J., you were great,’ after we had played the Fillmore. Geils is very confusing to people,” he told me in 2011, “ because still today I walk down the street, and people come up to me, ‘J., how ya doin,’ man?’ And so that causes great confusion. It has caused Wolf some problems over the years, however. The Allman Brothers were named after two brothers, Duane and Gregg. “ The Dave Clark Five or Paul Revere & the Raiders, I don’t know. Peter Wolf, however, takes it all in stride. And that the namesake founding member Jay Geils isn’t even in the band that opens for Bob Seger on Tuesday night (December 2) at the Times Union Center just adds to the confusion. That they haven’t produced a new song together in more than 30 years is not surprising. Geils Band is playing together at all in 2014 is a miracle. Maintaining such collaborations over several decades has been problematic for each. Geils Band, it’s the collaboration of two songwriting band members that makes it jell. Geils Band's status as one of the early-'70s great American rock bands.The front man in a rock band always gets the attention, but in the case of the Rolling Stones, the Everly Brothers, Aerosmith and the J. Ladies Invited, which arrived later that same year, didn't fare quite as well commercially, but still contained plenty of strong material, bolstering J. Their excellent third studio effort, Bloodshot (1973), would prove to be their most successful release to date, reaching number ten on the Billboard album charts. As good as those albums were, the band's natural home was on-stage and their live third album, Full House (1972), recorded at Detroit's Cinderella Ballroom, remains a career highlight. Geils Band (1970) and its follow-up, The Morning After (1971). ![]() Geils, they were the consummate hard-working bar band, delivering R&B-influenced good-time rock & roll on their first two studio albums, the self-titled J. Behind charismatic frontman Peter Wolf and ace guitarist J. While the band would later find major chart success in the early '80s, the swaggering, bluesy party rock of their early output made them a beloved American touring act as they packed arenas throughout the early '70s. Geils Band are collected here in Warner Bros. The first five albums by Boston rockers J.
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