JUKE JOINT JIMMY IN MIDLIFE CRISIS

Don’t ask me where we were going, as I can’t remember now, but I know it was the Saturday morning before the Sunday evening J. Geils concert, and I was chauffering a whole carload of kin-folk and-fauna somewhere or other.

Cozy in the confines of our VW Rabbit, we’re carrying not only that nuclear family beloved by sociologists—me, my wife, and our daughter—but also my wife’s sister, and her kid, and her dog, a large, amiable collieshepherd bitch who happens to be named “Love,” because she was whelped or whatever these dog fanciers call it around the time of the Summer of Love, and my sisterin-law was contemplating going quasi-hippie at the time, and one thing led to another.

Anyway, we’re rolling along nicely, but it’s cold outside, and the car heater is begin -ing to circulate this vague, but fetid meatyfarty odor. Everybody suspects baby Willie f right away, since he’s not yet into sphincter control like the rest of us civilized types, but an examination of his diaper proves negative . I turn up the radio, to catch the J. Geils Band blasting out their current hit single, but the odor persists throughout Seth Justman’s tarty synthesizer squiggles.

Then Peter Wolf hits the chorus— “boom-boom, LOVE STINKS!”—and a light bulb goes on over my sister-in-law’s head: “Yeah,” she says, “that’s what it is. Love stinks. She’s been eating that cheap Vets food again.” I turn and sniff Love’s pointy snout, and sure enough, she’s emitting enough dogbreath particulates to decompose a Milk-Bone at 20 feet. (True story.)

It’s a little over 24 hours Gntil the J. Geils Band will be mounting the stage at Dayton , Ohio’s Hara Arena, and I still don’t have a go-ahead from EMI Records to do an interview with ’em, or even just to be allowed to stare deep into Peter Wolfs inscrutable shades for two minutes. I’ve been on the phone with the EMI lady in New York all week, and she can’t seem to get an okay from the. manically-touring Geils guys themselves, who are barnstorming some Midwestern frontier outpost or other every night this week.

The last time I queried the EMI promo person about the interview, she asked, “Are you sure Peter Wolf wants to talk to you?” Seems that there had. been some consternation within the Geils entourage as to whether my review of Love Stinks in the May CREEM was “positive” or not. She and the road manager had voted that it was positive, but apparently somebody in the band felt a bit insecure over the patented CREEM dada expended on their latest & dearest creation.

I assure her that my Love Stinks review was indeed positive, and that I can produce •tearsheets dating back to 1973, verifying my even more forthright recommendations of various earlier editions of J. Geils product. In fact, when I reviewed their Hotline for CREEM in 1975 (i.e., pre-Ramones era), I really went out on a limb and called ’em “our best rock ’n’ roll band. ”

“Positive.” Jeez! You’re telling me that all these internationally-celebrated, premillionaire, grown men, who are famous enough to ride in groupies or to be blown by limousines, any time they want, just by snapping their fingers, actually care . what some petit bourgeois with a wife and a

* kid and a mortgage pounds out about ’em on a 25-year-old typewriter, in a freezing garret, no less (fact, our furnace blew out ^ somewhere in the second paragraph of my Love Stinks review, do believe that chilliness got into my subsequent prose), all for a whopping 35 bucks?!?! Jeez! Maybe there is some parity to this rock writing biz after all, maybe “Power of the Press” really is something more than just that bathroom-mirror inscription Jann Wenner brushes his teeth to every morning.

What would John T. “dress-for-success” Molloy do in a situation like this? I wonder. Why, convert power into intimidation into working capital, of course! I answer. So I [ ring up the local EMI guy and tell him how much CREEM want to do right by their old pals in J. Geils, maybe even a cover story etc. etc., and he tells me he’s in the same boat, he’s been leaving phone messages for the band all over the country this week, but they never return his calls, and he’s got a whole gang of local “radio people” breathing down his neck for passes.

Hmmm. This may be getting serious. I take comfort in knowing that even if I don’t get my chance to ask Peter Wolf for the J: Geils Band’s official, 100-words-or-less policy statement on the Iranian Crisis, that maybe certain uniformly-new-leather-jacket-and-trim-bearded DJ types won’t get their opportunities, either. Besides, those honey-liberal-voiced clothes horses don’t have high intellectual purposes like me, only reason they want in the Geils dressing room is to ogle the rock superstar who once did this, that, & the other with a renowned motion picture actress in the privacy of their own home. Such privilege-voyeurism is “ irresistibly titillating to your average People mag-brained FM deejay.

I put aside the Geils Band for the moment, and concentrate on other writing. By the time the EMI lady calls me again, on Sunday morning, I’ve almost forgotten that I ever volunteered for this story. She tells me that the interview is on—sort of. First she has to phone the Geils road manager and make sure everything’s hunky-dory, and is it okay if I talk just to Peter Wolf, or do I need the other guys too? Sure, sure, I agree. I’m an adaptable guy. Later in the afternoon both the promo lady and the road manager phone me, each to explain that I the band have played five straight onenighters, are approaching terminal exhausttion, and how much time do I think I’d really |l need with ’em to do my story? Well, maybe U if I could just shake hands (spade style) with J the Woofer Goofer after the show... f EMI assures me that the Hara box office If will have two tickets waiting for me in any || case, so Teresa and I begin duding our| selves up in preparation for “The World’s ¶ Largest Houseparty,” as I had heard the concert exuberantly advertised earlier in the week.

We get to Hara late, find the show sold out, and the parking lot jammed with truebeliever Geils fans rushing desperately about in the icy rain, shouting and clawing at incoming cars in hopes of purchasing additional tickets. There’s something heartwarmingly melting-pot about this American scene, about this parking-lot panorama pf thousands of Midwestern WASP kids rabid | to see a bunch of Boston Jews imitate aged Chicago Negroes; the eternal BOOGIE cuts across all ethnic groups .

By the time we get inside Hara Arena, opening act 3-D are well into their act, and even in the dark we can see that all the seats are filled; the only vacant spaces are at the back of the “festival”-SRO hockey floor. We stolidly take up our positions, leaning against the wall hallowed by generations of sweaty hockey players being body-checked into it. We’re contemplating getting through the next few hours sound of mind and limb, a prospect by no means certain. Sorry, I know we got in free, I didn’t expect box seats in Magic Dick’s afro, after all, but at the same time, I didn’t go to Woodstock or Altamont, I didn’t believe in all that communal malarkey even in its heyday, and I’m not overly thrilled to be re-entering the Teenage Wasteland tonight.

Our own Cincinnati has rigidly clamped down on rock-concert crowd behavior since the deaths at the Who show, and the police waded right into the concertgoers at the last couple big Riverfront Coliseum events, arresting toke monsters right and left for drugs, drunkeness, lighter-torches, and all the other anti-social externals that so many sons and daughters of Woodstock regard as essential to rock ’n’ roll good times. We saw TV interviews with a number of disgruntled Riverfront patrons after the big busts; several mentioned that if they couldn’t have any fun at Cincinnati concerts anymore, they'd just go on up the road to Dayton and its (so far) laissez-faire Hara Arena for their rock.

Firecrackers pop above our heads through 3-D’s set (I immediately suspect those grimly-determined fun-bunchers from my own Queen City), and we watch several walking-wounded drug cases being dragged toward the exits by their solicitous buddies, When the lights come on after 3-D, the arena-floor mise en scene suggests the Auschwitz death camp as retold on a 2-hour Hogan's Heroes special. Down here at Ground Zero the murk and the wan light make everyone seem grotesque, cadaverous, deformed, in their identical bluedenim prison uniforms. Why are there so many teeny-bopping dwarves scurrying around us?

All of which fanatic impressions probably derive from our own paranoia at being so dressed up—we’re meeting royalty later tonight, you see—amid these resettled boat people. Every kid who ambles by stares curiously at my “unconstructed” sport jacket, at my narrow mohair (fer crissake!) tie, at my very strange habit of writing things down in a little notebook. Are they thinking that maybe I’m some kind of flamboyant new doublethink narc, who fools and entraps kids by dressing up as exactly what he really is, rather than by trying to pass in a cheap hippie wig and a fake-leather vinyl jacket? Two guys—they introduce themselves as Marc Pendel and “Blue Tip” (K.D.)—actually do make bold to inquire whether I’m conducting a “survey.” When I explain my mission, their eyes light up like open Bics at the mention of CREEM. The Power of the Press strikes again!

The J. Geils Band take the Hara stage after suitably protracted preparations by their crew, and launch right into thgir remake of the Strangeloves’ “Night Time,” with a ferocious energy that would seem to belie their I-have-it-on-good-authority road-fatigue. Followed at once by “Just Can’t Wait” and “Come Back Baby,” two other prime cuts from Love Stinks/ hotcha songs for both the median-age-17 crowd and your anachronistic reporter, thanks to their massive radio exposure in recent weeks.

It really is the J. Geils Band somewhere up above all those shaggy heads and waving arms my diminutive Teresa can’t begin to see over. Yep, I can remember staring at each of those mythical bluesmen on the jacket of my copy of Full House, back in my own young & metallic days. Five of the six Geilsers look unchanged from those ’72 glory times, as a matter of fact: Magic Dick’s still blowing his face out beneath that destroy Rob Tyner ’do, Stephen Jo Bladd’s still the natty Tony Curtis of rock, Danny Klein still appears to be a ghetto furniture dealer dressed in s/iuartze-pimp drag, J. Geils hisself is all rock ’n’ roll archetype in his black leather and flying-V guitar, bareshouldered Seth Justman’s still that appealing plant-a-tree-in-Israel poster child.

Lead singer Peter Wolf looks a bit different, of course. I nearly fell out of my chair and rolled on the floor in a grand-mal seizure, when Wolf pranced out on the Saturday Night Live stage sans trademark beard and shades, several weeks back. The Wolf looked so youthful and so vulnerable and— let’s face it—so new wave without his enshrined spade-jive props that I got interests ed all over again in a band I thought I was all finished with. And I took this story partly in hopes of finding other promisingly new moves within the good ol’ Geils Band.

Without the beard and glasses, Wolf’s nose looms bigger, and his body somehow looks wirier—perhaps because of concurrent wardrobe makeovers—a physical conjunction that makes Wolf bizarrely enough resemble another frantically-retrenching early-70’s-superstar, Alice Cooper, way up there on the Hara stage. Besides Wolf’s cosmetic changes, I’ve become hooked on the J. Geils Band’s slightly altered musical identity, particularly Seth Justman’s totally trendy 1980 synthesizer breaks on Love Stinks. Little things, of course, hardly so earthshaking as slitting the shrinkwrap on a new Elvis Costello LP and finding out what that ornery anti-King’s thought of this time, but maybe just enough to justify cakewalking into a new decade with the J. Geils Band.

As a matter of fact, the Geils Boys are sounding great on this newer Sanctuary and Love Stinks material at Hara, and Teresa and I are eating it up right along with the pubescent hordes. We feel far more mellowed into the raggedy arena ambience than we did a few minutes ago, and this corny “houseparty” business almost seems for real. I’d gladly lift my feet and jump and shout, if my shoes weren’t long since glued to the floor with spilled beer, pop, and pillbottle debris.

But then Peter Wolf shatters his streamlined-mod image by reverting to type, by lapsing into the disc-jockey patois that brought him to notice in the first place; his chin’s clean-shaven now, but his mouth’s still emitting that tired old fake-spade jive talk, in a Steve Martin-reject routine about how “Some people like to go up in a skyscraper to get high,” etc., etc... Synthetichipster talk like that may once have represented real liberation for us sheltered white kids, via another such disc jockey, on those moonless nights back in ’64 when we got lucky and picked up Wolfman Jack’s frantic Negro-Mexican posturings amid the crackling static of our ancient car radios. But Wolfman Jack’s long since become a totaj = huckster, a commercial sellout who wraps | that selfsame jive around every useless £ product he can apply his tongue to, and I | don’t like hearing Peter Wolf tar-baby himself with that same antique brush.

The body of the Geils Band Hara show continues this jolting alternation, with Peter starkly impressive as a lean-Wolf/loneWolf vocalist in the context of the band’s tight, funky R&B standards, but embarrassingly self-indulgent as the lost-in-the-70’s jiveass in his between-songs raps. Actually it was all the British Invasion vocalists like Jagger and Burdon who mastered that linguistic schizophrenia of singing like Bo Diddley but living to converse in Winston Churchillese immediately afterward, yet I was hoping for a bit more progressivism from my countryman tonight.

Still, the J. Geils Band are really cooking, and their instantaneous rush from the cynicism of “Love Stinks” into the exuberant hope of “Looking For a Love” is true rock ’n’ roll rebirth thesis/antithesis whammerjamming. Peter Wolf is leaping high off the stage in best crazed-Wolfster fashion. The band signs off with the “House Party” theme, and the kids demand their obligatory encore, and the band’s right back with the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” Peter now garbed in a punky turquoise art shirt. Band goes off, the kids scream and flick their Bics, and bingo, the band’s back for their second encore, Peter Wolf now attired in a red & black art shirt. “You get crazy, we’ll get twice as crazy!” he screams. Couple more songs and off. Bingo, band’s back for third encore, Peter now in stripes.

The J. Geils Band end up playing an incredible six encores at Hara Arena, churning out a good three hours of rock ’n’ roll altogether, The encores and Wolfs sleight-ofhand shirt changes seem like fun at first, but by about the fourth repeat, even the normally-greedy audience are getting surfeited. Droves depart the arena with each apparent finale, only to turn and crush back through .the exits when the word spreads like wildfire that the J. Geils Band are TURN TO PAGE 61 Fatigue is beginning to wilt the band members, despite their good intentions at giving the kids their $8.50 worth. Each encore is a bit less energetic, a bit more turgid, than the one before. Instrumental solos rear their ugly egos, a la ’68. Peter Wolfs jive rputines are degenerating from obsolete self-parody into virtual wino babbling. “Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he claims, but this 900th Reputahthe-Beautah anecdote seems like it’ll never end, he might as well be playing Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” at 162/3 for us. “C’mon!” shouts the perceptive wiseacre in front of me, “People are waiting!”.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29

mounting the stage one fugging more time!

While Wolf fondles a well-endowed bra someone threw on stage, the band are trying to get it up one more time, but it’s clear that endless boogie’s just not enough anymore (maybe it never was). I can’t bear to see my old idols go limp and flaccid right before orgasm, so we bolt from the arena somewhere around the fifth encore, and begin our impatient vigil at the backstage gate, as cocky-masochistic as any other pair of groupies.

It’s many minutes before the J. Geils Band at last leave the Hara stage for good, and that just means that much longer we’ll have to wait before they’re sufficiently regenerated and composed to face the barrage of my interrogation. A Geils roadie admits us backstage, instructs us where to await our audience, “with the other press people,” but we keep getting dispersed by flying forklifts and careening amp carts. The big overhead door’s been opened so that the Geils Band semi trailer can be backed up to the stage area, and all of us are freezing in April’s cruelest weather in years.

We wait some more. No sign of the band, except for bassist Danny Klein, still comfy in his stage persona. He walks determinedly from one end of the backstage area to the other, and back again„ as though he’s Groucho Marx measuring it for something nice in a linoleum rug. Maybe I can’t face Wolf after all, suppose he asks me how I liked the encore-overkill of tonight’s show, and my positivism could be on the line real fast, once again.

More waiting. The groupies and radio personalities seem as weary and bored as we are. It’s past midnight, which means we won’t get back to Cincinnati until at least after one, Woofer-Goofer philosophical diatribes or no, and I gotta get up at 6 A.M. in any case, just so I can start writing this very story and publicizing these jokers, among other urgent duties. As the minutes tick by, I realize that I have fewer and fewer pressing queries for the well-known Peter Wolf.

One thing the Wolfs taught me tonight, for sure, is that real superstars make their hours, so right there in that drafty Hara Arena backstage, somewhere beyond midnight, I choose stardom for my own humble rockwriter carcass by walking out on the still-sequestered J. Geils Band.

We hop into out car, drive the 6Q miles home through a blinding rainstorm, and still get back before 1:30. Somewhere along 1-75 South, we hear Geils’ “Love Stinks” on the car radio, and it sounds damn good, one more time.