THE J.GEILS BAND IN ACTION

We're gonna do it right, we ’re gonna start it off tonight!!!

For the little ladies of the night and all the ships out at sea, for the kid from Alabama keepin’ it all hid, for the Master-Blaster –

They’re master of the kick-ass and boogie school of rock and blues; they storm a stage like a fantasy out of a New Jersey midnight-radio-win e-drinking-alley-stalking kid’s dream of electric smoke, and proceed to beat the silence into all kinds Of kinetic frenzy.

Wolf is the singer (and sometimes the song too,) and eyes are nailed to him like a horny magnet as he struts, jumps, runs, hops, skips, twists, dances, zooms, circulates in a devious fashion, and generally comes off like a maniacal preacher with a message that only says, “Get it on mutha-fucka!” In the background the band ain’t just posing for fashion layouts in EVO, they’re flat wailing, a tight, heavy, raucous, knifeedged brand of Blues-R&B-Rock that comes from growing up inside a record player and loving the sound so much that they couldn’t not do it. Magic Dick is the harp-man, he blows fierce, sharp darts of sound that alternately build rhythm blocks (dig playin’ with electric toys?), or soar like neon lights flashin on the jagged edges of broken whiskey bottles in some weird midnight rain. Seth Justman does the keyboard shit; he lays blues and honky-tonk tinkles in the holes, and covers some spaces himself with Jerry Lee Lewis-like rippling riffs

– you could imagine him crazed over a 90’ pipe organ wailing in a cavern in any Mexican vampire movie, looking like the offspring of Dracula and Jjmi Hendrix. That’s Stephen Bladd on drums and vocal harmonies – he don’t pull none of that fancy ego-tripping bullshit, he just puts in periods, commas and plain WHAMS in the exact space needed, just laying a foundation sure and solid as bedrock. (Take the Geils band to bed with you, and see if they don’t scream at just about the right times. It helps if you ain’t alone. If you don’t dig people, try an acrobatic manta ray, or a medium-priced Chevrolet. Whatever you can get off in.) (Or on in, or out of, or whatever –).

The bass cat is Danny Klein and he pops off just fine, walking and stomping

– he tends to be a b^t invisible but ain't every bass player? When’s the last time you saw a bass player walking down the street – or in a mirror? But he’s there, and if he wasn’t you could feel the difference somewhere between your groin and solar plexus. Over on the other side of the stage is J. Geils himself, carving guitar chords clean as a diamond cutter, or else stringing along through the feedback mazes and watching it screech as though he expected it to run off without him – all glitter and flashing edges.

No shit friend, this band not only plays like a bunch of driven motherfuckers, they also jump around with all the real kinds of frenzy, just selfconscious enough not to get phony, just serious enough to convince you they .care about what they’re doing and aren’t just filling in times between plane flights and Holiday Inns. There’s something happening for your eyes as well as your ears and toes and other vital organs and that’s a nice change from all the seconal shit that passes for stage presence, these chemical days.

They put on a “show” and they are proud of it – they know the value of flash, and they respect the need for quality. (I’m just getting really dragged by the 437 lame-ass groups who come out covered with live octopuses and swallow cherry bombs while having an enema of lysol and try to pass that off as a musical act. In the olden days, back in Merrie Old England and other such faroff places, the noblemen and noblewomen [maybe noble children too – no mention has been found] used to get their kicks by hanging out in nuthouses and digging on the freaks as they went through their various traumas – nowdays the freaks put their routines on tour‘and get paid for it. Who’s laughing now? Which is okay by me, 1 dig necrophilia just as much as any other body, but don’t give me no shit about it being music. It’s just another kind of carnival that’s all.)

We could get into a whole riff about how Wolf personifies the struttin’ urge inherent in every punk who ever sang in the bathroom cause the echo was a groove, but that’s just more intellectual jerking off, and I’d rather get right into fucking.

II

The fucking Academy of Music is this big crummy old theatre which shows movies sometimes and has rock concerts, mostly on weekends. The sound system usually sucks dog shit (you could get roughly the same effect by shoving your head inside a running turbo-jet for an hour or so) and lots of times the audience is full of the kind of people that make you glad the Fillmore closed – but where else you gonna go hear rock and roll in New York town these days? (Answer – wherever you have to, if you’re hungry enough.)

The J. Geils band topped the bill there one Friday night in mid-February, coming off the crest of the Top 40 play of “Looking for Love,” a track from their second album – and though Captain Beefheart was also on the bill, the crowd was waiting for them.

Backstage, the halls are full of hairy freaks and freaky hares – walls are peal-

ing, and the ceilings look a bit nervous. The Geils band is hanging out in a room the size of two small closets, running down, riffs, trading raps, stoking up – it’s a long night, two shows, the second starting 'at W1.30. The hallways get weirder when the Captain arrives, followed by a chick resplendent in a girlscout uniform, wreathed in beatitude and beaming at who and whatever she crosses paths with. A chick with her urges hanging out, follows frantically a few minutes later, looking for the Captain’s road manager – she ends up trekking upstairs with a roadie to the winter roof. He comes down ten minutes later with his belt unbuckled, looking smug – she isn’t seen again. Hmmm.

One by one, the various band members are cornered by a tape recorder wearing a writer, and with the sounds of dripping water, howling winds, and occasional blasts from the stage somewhere down there as background, they lay down some of their individual stories. (Which are melted together here in some kind of alchemist attempt to achieve cohesive* clarity and narrative viability suitable to make it all hang together. And if it don’t hang together then it’ll hang separately. What the fuck.)

First came a group in Boston known as the Hallucinations. “It was just an outrageous, crazy group”, said Peter Wolf, all natural energy-charged and politer than you’d expect from On stage references. “We all met each other in different art schools in Boston.” Wolf was into painting, hanging out at the Appollo in high school. “The German expressionists was the people I really dug . . . One day a bunch of us cats had a party. Paul was like the leader of the group (Paul Shapiro, he’s back into painting now, a superfine painter) – Stephen was on drums, and I had a little harp down, no real control or anything. But I loved Jimmy Reed man, loved him! So we all got drunk and kicked off on that Dun-da-dun-dah, Dun-da-dundah riff of his and did every number we knew. We had such a good time, we just kept doing it. Every time there was a party we’d all drag along our little Silvertones – man, people couldn’t stop us from playing! All night, just play and play. Then everybody decided, ‘Hey man, this is it, this is what we’re gonna do” Cats had wives, a couple cats had kids – but everybody quit their jobs – we just got the fever. Everybody was into painting . . . but this group kind of expressiveness, nobody’d ever felt that before. It was like getting laid for the first time! Eventually we got our first gig – it was at a fraternity house . . . then gigs all over New England.

“The Hallucinations couldn’t really play that well, so we tned to create a show to compensate. Like I’d be wheeled out in a wheelchair; the lead guitar would have a 40 foot cord and he’d walk into the men’s room of the club and start playing from there, the other guitar player had capes, all the clothes were made with fringes, everybody was flash – like in 1965 if somebody played with no shirt on, that was a heavy thing. We had steps and everything, it was a show band – nothing that you wouldn’t see at the Apollo – except, of course, not as good.”

One night word got out that John Lee {looker was coming to Boston to play at a coffeehouse club. The show started at eight, but Wolf and Shapiro were there at six. “Holy shit man, the place is gonna be mobbed!” Wolf said. When the doors opened, Hooker came out – and Wolf and Paul were the only two people in the club. “I couldn’t believe it!” Wolf says, till incredulous, even now. “We’d go to see Little Junior Parker or Bobby Bland at Louie’s Lounge or some place in Roxburry, and the place would be cooking – Hooker’s stuff was big then, the Animals had just done “Boom, Boom” ... but this club was empty! So we talked to him. I said, ‘Shit man, this ain’t right! Let us back you up and together we could fill the joint.’ He said, .‘Allright, anything you want man, sure – So we spent the whole next day on the phone calling people up and saying ‘Look, if you don’t come down to see John Lee Hooker tonight we’re gonna kill you – we literally did that.” That night the Hallucinations opened the show, then backed Hooker on his set – and the place was packed. Then Broadside Magazine started writing about us, and when the Tea Party opened up, we were like the house band there.”

Meanwhile, in Worcester, (“really a bluesy town,” says J. Geils ironically) Dick, Danny, J., and another cat’had a country blues type band. “That’s when I got into blues first, around 1966,” J. says.

says. Dick had been learning from a book called Bluesharp, and buying records listed in it – which included Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, and other Chicago cats, as well as older harp blues masters. “I went thru the book and worked out all the diagrams,” Dick said. “And sat down and worked out how to play along with every cut on Walter and Sonny Boy albums.” J. said, “I just got turned on to playing all the backup guitar parts – Luther Tucker, Robert Lockwood Jnr. – I didn’t know who they were at the time, but I knew that’s what I had to play to back up Dick. Then one day I discovered B.B. King and pretty much freaked out.”

At first Danny was playing washtub bass, later he got into electric. He grew up in New Jersey “digging whatever was on the AM radio from New York” and first got into blues at school in Worcester. (Schools may be good for something.)

“We were into that stone Chicago thing,” J. says, “just really cooled out on stage.” Wolf added, “Like if they did, say, “Going Down To Louisiana” they could do it just perfect, note for note. Little Walter, early Bobby Bland? Perfect.” The Geils band used to play at a place called The Catacombs, “in a sub* sub-sub basement,* under a pool hall” and they developed a good local following. “The manager was this crazy old Greek cat who drank Vodka,” J. recalls. “We got to be pretty friendly with him and we got him to book James Cotton down there with us – and Billy Boy Arnold – the only time I’ve known him to play a gig. We’re pretty good friends now with Cotton, John Lee, Muddy – Dick and I play with all those cats every chance we get, we love to do it.”

Everybody in the band seems to have a strong taste for and respect of black music – whenever Muddy would be in town, Wolf would “live at the hotel.” And sometimes he’d put up band members at his house. “Cotton would say,

‘You sure you don’t mind?' ‘Mind?? Man, I’m yours – tell me to jump in front of a car and I’ll do it!’ James Cotton – he is incredible, man! One of the sweetest cats – he ran away from home when he was nine years old – he heard Sonny Boy Williamson on the radio and went to live with him –

The Hallucinations were developing a following around Boston as well – when Quicksilver or the Grateful Dead came to town, they’d usually open the bill. But problems developed in the band – the lead cat wanted to go back to painting, the bass player was into meditation – and Wolf was doing a radio show on WBCN. “The graveyard shift, midnight to 7 AM. I had the ‘Wolfa-goofa-mamatwofa-hoppa-Loofa’ show. (Subject to correct translation by someone from the Bronx.) ‘For the little ladies of the night and for all the ships out at sea, for the kid from Alabama keepin’ it all hid, for the master-blaster – We’re gonna do it right, we’re gonna start it off tonight!', then wham into Frank Motley and The Motley Crew or something crazy. Man, I used to get these phone calls; this one cat was always calling me up for John Lee Hooker – and he’d call back ten minutes later and two hours drunker and say ‘Well, how about Hooker?’ One night the Hallucinations were opening a bill with Van Morrison, and I was really knocked out, Van Morrison! And he said something to the bass player and 1 recognized the voice – I said, ‘Wait a minute – were you the guy who used to call up the radio and ask for Hodker all the time?’ He said ‘Yeah?’ and I said, ‘I’m him, I’m the radio cat.* He looked at me and shook his head – ‘No man, he said. ‘He’s black.’

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“Anyway, J. and Dick used to listen to the show, and one night at the Club 47 we started jamming together, I was just singing. So we decided to put the two bands together; Stephen on drums and me, and J., Dick,and Danny, it was the five of us.”

“It was kind of hard at first.,” J. says. “But we put the two elements together

– the show and the music. lake if we were doing a John Lee Hooker tune, and we put a little flash into it, maybe we could turn thy kids on to it. ‘Go out and buy their records’, you know? We try not to get tacky about it, but we’ll always give credit where credit is due.”

“It was an experiment,” Wolf says. “Nobody reajly thought it would work. But it was the combination – like the Hallucinations’ guitar player was funky, but he really couldn’t do the B.B. King thing, where J. could. I was playing harp, and I couldn’t do Junior Wells riff

– but Dick could.”

“A lot of people get confused by the name, J. Geils Band,” J. said. “It’s definitely not J. Geils and his band – it’s strictly a six way thing. At the time we all got together – myself, Dick, and Danny were under a management con-

tract so we had to keep the name. We started just jamming and it rolled along – so we kept the name, rather than changing it to the Chocolate Doorknob or something like that.”

Seth Justman joined after the group had been together awhile. He comes from Washington D.C., where he kicked around in a few bands – later he went to school in the Boston area. “Finally I heard the J. Geils band – and they knocked me out. I followed them around to all their gigs and eventually it

jelled.” He lists Otis Spann, Ray Charles and Ike Turner as some of his favorite keyboard cats.

The group was together some time before they cut their first album, which was done in three days. It has the taste and feel of early Stones and Butterfield sounds, mixed with a healthy dose of Chicago Blues and R&B. Half the album is originals, but they’re filled with the spirit of the singles that the band grew up on. “We want to capture the groove of those old records,” Dick says. “We all like those little records with the big holes,” Seth adds.

Most of the songwriting is done by Wolf and Seth — they play the number for the band and everybody makes suggestions and contributions. Wolf has a way of capturing the spirit of the Apollo and mixing it with the humor of the smoke-filled rooms we all know and wallow in — dig “Wait” on the first LP ("the bartender said you're disengaged”) and “Floyd’s Hotel” on the second LP.

“Everybody in the band is basically black music freaks,” J. says. We were teenagers buying Fats Domino, Chuck Berry — as opposed to Dion or whatever.”

But on their second album they have gone beyond merely recreating the spirit of blues and R&B — they’ve begun to create in their own way — witness the singles “I Don’t Need You No More” and “Looking For A Love”. “Cry One More Time” could be thought of as a tribute to Don Covay — and, in fact, he was there at thfe Fucking Academy that night, which neatly brings us to —

III

The first show is over, snow is coming down like big wet amoebas, the wind outside is whipping like some Andy WarhoJ fantasy and backstage the crowds are surging into the double closet. Everybody’s sweating, and Don Covay has fallen by to get the lyrics to one of their songs which he wants to put on an album he’s cutting in two days. The hall is a mixture of family, friends and hustlers. Wolf comes out to go to the can J[a yellow cement swamp) in a shaggy terry-cloth robe. His mother turns to his father and says “I know just what we can get him for a birthday present — a new thick robe.” His father hods.

A joint is passed — Seth refuses, and offers gum in return. “I’m a lush myself,” I say, copping another can of beer from the ice filled wastebasket. “I’m a nothing,” Seth replies, peeling the wrapper on some juicy fruit.

What about the hassles of doing onenighters and running from town to town? “We dig it,” Seth says. “We’re getting experience — this is the first band I’ve been in that’s traveled around. And I love it — that’s what the band is all about — we’re a traveling show.”

Wolf adds, “Every show we do, we do the best we can — we got a basic funky groove and we’re just trying to kick back our tastes on other people. I ain’t the greatest showman or singer, J. ain’t the greatest guitar, the drummer ain’t the greatest drummer — but together we can entertain. And if people

are entertained, we’re happy.”

It’s about time for the next set, the hall is roaring with N.Y. energy, and outside snow is falling with fury. As the Geils band gets it on, (and the audience off, one more time) I wander into the neon madness and wonder — whatever happened to the girl on the roof?