Tucson’s got McDonald’s and bars and Sears and Taco Bells, but there any resemblance to life as we know it stops. It’s hot as a hairdryer, dusty and abandoned as my Styx collection, and everywhere you look there’s a cactus. Tall and thin or small and scrawny green prickly things. Everywhere.

Even, it occurred to me, backstage at the arena where somewhat green and prickly Peter Wolf and Seth Justman are definitely the worse for wear. The long lean man in black with the intense eyes behind the shades, the Keith Richards rockstar-thin legs in leather and the zebra shoes has put the rap on hold while he’s digging around in a crockpot for some congealed spaghetti; the small, Bolan-haired, ear-ringed elf-man is pouring himself a drink and staring middle-distance. Last night up in San Francisco they saw a local band, went to a looong party, forgot to go to bed and journeyed straight down here to Arizona where they just played a lethal, lengthy show. You spend 2V2 hours bounding in the air like a frog, tossing yourself around the stage like an r&b pancake, shaking more hands than Jerry Brown on his last Presidential bash and falling to your leathered knees doing hey-hon’-give-it-todaddy spiels and see if you’d rather get your arms around a bottle and some spandex when you’ve finished, or just sit in a room full of wilting roast beef slices and turkey turning at the corners with your CREEM correspondent. The price of fame.

Ever since Freeze Frame—an imaginative and raunchy piece of plastic in which the band who did for r&b what Ronnie did for jellybeans tackle new wave, jazz, funk, Third World riddims, more new wave, boogie, ballads and classic Geils rock ’n’ roll (i.e. it’s one of the rare good records you hear on FM radio)—shot up the charts and proved that yes indeed, Geils’s time had come and no indeed, “Love Stinks” wasn’t a one-off stroke of luck, the “bad boys from Boston” (as their bio reminds me they used to be called) are being pumped for clever quotes and pertinent information by the Press. Even got the cover of Rolling Stone (albeit with “Why Sex Isn’t Fun Anymore. Herpes. The Pill \ID” slashed across Peter Wolfs left shoulder). Not bad for what’s essentially a 15-year-old American garage band who’ve been slogging for the past few years to pay off a half a million dollar debt. As Peter Wolf says: “rock ’n’ roll is a powerful force.”

And—give the man his due—instead of becoming a limo slob and letting success go to his head and his crotch, Wolf—and the rest of the band—is doing his best to use success to (people allergic to the 60’s should stop here) Change The World. All the recent stories on the band pass on tales of on-the-road debauchery (of which here’s been much, you can bet, in 15 rears together) and off-the-road parties in avor of thoughtful, political comment from eterand Seth. Even onstage, where Wolf oes that finger-popping, cool, superhip /e-talk bit, words tumbling out in Wolfan patois, spitting exclamation points, stead of merely coke-and-whisky nameopping we get spiels about the draft, the Moral Majority, unemployment, stuff about how the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, high-speed and effective.

There's nothing we've done we're embarrassed about, and in 14 years we feel proud of that. --Peter Wolf

“Times,” muses Peter, taking off his shades and rubbing those black eyes that stand out so much more in the gaunt white face since the facial hair was removed, “are just a little bit more politically serious now than they have been. There are a lot of people hurting. There’s a few that have and a lot that have not—more so now. So it’s kind of hard to avoid it really if you really care about the people you’re playing for and to.

“We don’t consider ourselves a political band by any means. We consider ourselves entertainers. But we still feel we can have content and entertain.”

So, I hear you thinking; with a couple of massive albums under their belt, this bunch are among the few that have, n’est-ce pas?

Well, says Wolf, ‘we ve been working for a real long time to gain certain placements insofar as musical development—and sure, right now we do feel we have a certain priviledged situation. And I feel we have a responsibility now that I don’t feel we’re going to abuse, and use it very constru cti vely.

“Success is really what you think about it and what you do with it. Some people can buy cars and go to Maui and get high, and some people can do a lot of artistic things with it. For instance, the reason success has really been a positive thing for us is that it’s enabled us to put more into our art, enabled us to take more time in the studio (the best part of a year for Freeze Frame) and do more things on the road. So basically we just turn everything back into what we do. That’s doing something, for one. I think just the content and the quality of the music—you can do a lot with it.

“I’m not saying we can change the world. We’re not standing on a soapbox preaching this or that. I just feel that if we’re aware and have a conscious feeling and are concerned about what’s going on...”

Seth cuts in as Peter’s voice drifts off. “You do what you can do. Otherwise you’re paralyzed and you don’t do anything.”

It’s one of life’s ironies really that a group like J.Geils, one of America’s most genuine bunch of musicians, start getting successful at a time when the music industry is at its least genuine. Talking to aging rock ’n’ rollers that top the charts these days you’re more likely to find them in the room with their lawyers and accountants than with friends who want to party.

“What attracted us to music,” Peter protests, “was to learn music, not to learn accounting. Our past history is our credibility. We’ve never done a cheap shot, we’ve never done a commercial thing, all our albums we feel strongly about, we feel we’ve committed ourselves to every show we do, we work real hard, there’s nothing we’ve done we’re embarrassed about, and in 14 years we feel real proud of that, that there’s no moment in our history that we feel embarrassed by or apologetic for. We really dedicated ourselves.”

The last couple of albums have been different from the J.Geils of old. OK, nothing so drastic as Rod going disco or Elvis going country, but there were all those cute little synthesizer bits all of a sudden, touches that made them perfect for 1982 radio.

“It’s not a preconceived thing of ‘let’s get something on the radio,’ ” answers Justman, the lethal combination of keyboardist, producer, arranger and hit songwriter. “I mean, what we’re trying to do is grow,” a word he repeats often in case I doubt him. “The reason you didn’t hear too much synthesizer before is because we couldn’t afford them.

“If people knew how to make successful records, then they’d go in and make successful records. We always go in to make a record that gets us off. If it gets us off we put it out, hopefully other people will get off on it. And a lot of times they haven’t gotten off on it.” To the tune of half a million bucks.

“We’d rather be successful than unsuccessful—the success gives you some financial stability, a means of putting more money into what you’re doing, into concentrating on it. If you want to abuse it then you abuse it and become an asshole. The main thing is to be able to continue to grow as musicians and as people. To grow. Just grow.”

Bankruptcy definitely stunts your growth. “We used to have to work and work and work just to stay afloat,” says Wolf, and every time they stopped touring to make an album it got them even more in debt—to their then record company, Atlantic, to studios, to the butcher and baker down the road. “We never made any money off our records (12 in all; they didn’t get their first gold till they signed with EMI in ’78). In fact we’d finish them and owe money, so we had tovtour for a long time. The only way we were able to make money to buy equipment and stuff was to keep on touring keep on touring keep on touring. And we didn’t want to rush any album. We were concerned more about making a quality album and developing as musicians, so that all cost time and time cost money and we ended owing a lot of dough-ray-me.”

.“We’re just now emerging from that debt,” says Seth, putting paid to the idea that they’re in Easy Street.

“It was a difficult time, but I think it was that difficulty that bonded everyone together and I think that’s why we’ve been together for so long because it’s like— what’s that expression, Seth?—when the going gets tough the tough get going, oh don’t you know! It made us care even more. See, we never wanted to give up. Our goal was to make music that people would dig and we would respect, and not to sit around in tight satin pants eating Mandies and saying ‘hey bird howsabout coming to my room and having a tripledecker pizza’. We were really into—still are—all these jazz people and people like B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Thelonious Monk, Elvis Presley...” the list continues. “We dig all of that stuff, and we wanted to try and do something that could be—” he pauses for a handful of cashew nuts, “See we still feel we’re students in the college of musical knowledge. Right now we’ve got our masters but we’re hoping to get our doctorate in the college of musical knowledge not to be confused with the university of perversity which will lead you”—in his famous Bible-thumping jivesermon rap—“down that dark path where there’s only a one way ticket...”

Time for another question. The J.Geils band with a couple of exceptions has got a new wave look. New wave clothes. New wave videos. New wave synthesizers. Has—gulp—the J.Geils Band gone New Wave?

“I define New Wave,” Wolf defines, “as new bands that come up with a little more contemporary approach to doing things that have been done in the past, and we’re definitely into trying to be as contemporary as possible. But I do not feel, ‘hey let’s dress this way because hey man it looks new wave.’ It’s not like what you used to see cats doing when the Beatles came out, all of a sudden growing Beatles hair and wearing Mersey suit.”

“Categorizing music like that is stupid,” reckons Justman. “Once you bag something you expect something from a band. To me, what music is is just music. And if someone puts out one kind of record then puts out a different kind of record, it maybe just shows growth or an openess that can be fresh and great. I don’t think that we’re new wave anymore than we’re classical or anymore that we’re a blues band. If it’s food and it gets you off, then it’s food and it gets you off, and that’s it.”

Still music fans (they swap Bow Wow Wow and new tapes' in the tour bus; they stop off to catch local talent at clubs along the tour, they buy records, have seen the Pistols, play the radio in the car. Their taste is varied. U2 opened on this tour.), the first music that got Justman off was Ray Charles, James Brown, early Motown, Stax. Little Seth had been playing classical piano since seven. “I enjoyed it. I enjoyed rock ’n’ roll more once I heard it and got into it.” (Peter confirms the awful truth that Seth was an acid-head by the age of nine).,

Wolf “got the buzz—it was all within a couple of days. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or ‘Long Tall Sally’ by Little Richard or ‘Schooldays’ by Chuck Berry—they made me an addict. See, my dad was in showbusiness—a singer—and I would go down and see different shows, kind of dancehall, vaudeville stuff, like ‘The Entertainer’, characters like that.

“When rock ’n’ roll hit on the scene, I couldn’t believe it. It was beyond sexual. There was Elvis and then there was Little Richard arid then came Jerry Lee Lewis and them came the duckwalk by Chuck Berry—and it never stopped! Then when I was about 12 years old there was this guy who used to play basketball in the park,” around the Bronx where Peter hails from, “and he lived in Harlem and one day he took me to a midnight show at the Apollo theatre, a jazz show, and that just blew my mind. Because on that one show I saw John Coltrane, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Jimmy Smith, Ray Charles, Betty Carter. I went to all the rock ’n’ roll shows. And the radio—in New York City there was guys like Alan Freed who broke a lot of important people and then Jocko Henderson’s Rocket Ship ‘fasten-yourseatbeltsgetreadyforcountdown10whee’ and Jocko would come on ‘Oopapa doo How Do You Do!’ and he would just play these incredible hits. Then around midnight Symphony Sid would come on playing the greatest jazz live from Birdland, and then the Magnificent Montague who would start talking to ‘Lovers and Heartbreakers.’

“I’ve become a great insomniac I think because of that.”

Didn’t become a rock ’n’ roller though, not straight off. When he left home at 18 for Boston, it was with a scholarship to art school and paintbrushes in hand. ,

“I was real serious about painting.” Until...“One day a couple of people had this party in a loft, and we were all standing round and one guy forgot the words to this song and I happened to know them. The song was ‘there’s a man down there might be your man I don’t know.’ So I got started singing and I haven’t painted since and haven’t stopped singing. That was it,”

Wolf -joined the loft band—which included J.Geils’s drummer Stephen Bladd —which went by the name of the Hallucinations and played r&b. Meanwhile J (don’t call me Jerome) Geils was in the process of having his accoustic trio—made up of technical school classmates Magic Dick (Richard Salewitz, the only harp player who can sound like a horn section) and DK (bass player and band comic Danny Klein) —go electric.

“The band was playing in this small funky little club called the Catacombs, just underneath this pizza parlor which was just underneath the pool parlor. One day there was this hootenanny going on and everyone brought down their instruments who were going to play.

“I remember thinking, ‘well I’m about the meanest toughest damnest harp player in Boston’ and went down to blow my harp for a couple of minutes and the girls are going to go crazy, man, it’ll be my day. So there I am in the dressing room getting my harp ready and all. And all of a sudden there’s these two guys in the corner—J and Magic Dick—and .they’re working out what they’re going to do up there. DK had this little funky jazzed-out old bass and J had this real fine old Delta blues guitar with a bottleneck and Dick was playing his harmonica. Man, I hadn’t heard nobody play it that good other than little Walter! He was right up there. So that ruined my evening. But I figured, if you can’t beat them join and we ended up jamming together.

Without the audience, there would be no point in us doing it. ••Magic Dick

“And it was like the worst blizzard in 37 years when we went to this club. We played and drank all night, and I remember walking out of that club and we couldn’t even stand, the snow was up to here. I remember saying good-bye to Dick and,” he shouts, “‘We’ll meet tomorrow Dick’ and whaamm! we’d fall into a snowbank.

“The next night we met and we just kept meeting and meeting. And J was under contract with the manager, and when we got together he said ‘listen, if you guys, want to perform, you can’t unless it’s called the J.Geils Band.’ He was afraid some other manager would come. So we did that just for this year’s contract, but in that time we had such a strong following that we were more concerned about the music than the name.”

The J.Geils Blues Band as it was known —it dropped ‘blues’ two years later, the same time it adopted a quiet, talented keyboard player from Boston University who kept pestering them to let him jam, and at the same time it got a record contract with the label so many of its heroes were on—played seven gigs a night in Boston biker bars, dropping Peter off at the radio station to do his graveyard shift as a D.J.

“He was one of the original all-night DJs,“ says Magic. “He really did a great show—played lots of rhythm and blues and early rock ’n’ roll. Had a really incredible rap.” Woofa Goof a is what he called himself, bopping around the studio and going crazy the whole time his record collection went out on the air. Used to do interviews too—Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Roland Kirk, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, all would drop in for a couple of pints and the chance to hear good music when they passed through Boston. The rest would get in touch by phone.

“A lot of women listen to radio late at night and they phone in. I had some historical—and hysterical—calls. That’s what kept me going, the phone calls. One lady called every night. She called herself Honey Hush and she’d say ‘darling, you sound like you’re hungry. Whyn’t you come over to my house and I’ll cook you some scrambled eggs. As a matter of fact it ain’t the only thing I’m going to scramble.’ Of course I was so shy and conservative I’d never venture forth into those adventures,” Peter chuckles.

“I’ll never forget one night, it was the greatest. The phone rang, I picked it up and it said ‘Woofa’ and I said ‘what?’—he was whispering—he goes ‘Woofa I can’t talk loud, my parents will hear, can you play anything by Jimi Hendrix’ and this kid was like 11 ¥2 and he was up at 3:30 creeping downstairs to telephone to make a request. It reminds me of me.”

Despite the date—Summer of love etc, when the band started out—they didn’t own a kaftan between them. “We wore grease,” says Peter, “and we were playing the opposite of what a lot of the popular bands were playing. Hard funky stuff instead of saying ‘let’s put some flowers in our hair and go to Kansas City and have a root beer.’ ” Ahah—but they did live in a commune. “I wouldn’t say communal,” says Peter. “More like one big mess. We all lived in one of those old tenements. Upstairs was this old woman—the religious freak—and every now and then, we’d be sitting on the stoop talking about rehearsal or something, all of a sudden the window was wide open and,” shrieks, “God has talked to me this morning and told me you’re all sinners down there playing the Devil’s music. And she’d start pouring water over us. We’d go back, we’d start playing and”—“Magic Dick interrupts, “I’ve got pictures of all her signs and everything. She used to make millions of handlettered magic marker signs about God and the Devil and the Kennedys and rock ’n’ roll.”

They were in that loft about nine years. A bit less in another one famed for being the place where John Coltrane nearly got busted. Popped in to visit the band when the police came through the door with a sledgehammer, rounding them all up, Coltrane protesting that he’s gotta go, he’s late for a gig.

“They were looking for the people upstairs. There was this LSD ring up there and the cops saw all these white and black people together in our place and figured something must be wrong—this is a very racial place you know. We all got rounded up and then they realized that they had the wrong place. They went upstairs and did whatever they did and then came down and helped us with our equipment, because they were afraid we were going to bring charges against them and stuff.” So you’re all good boys with clean records. “Yes, ma’am,” in unison. “We’re good boys.” And the good guys (cf. John Wayne) do win out in the end. It’s nice when an almost heroic all-American band like the J.Geils outfit make it in to the top. It wasn’t easy) —the low voice intones as the credits roll up on the screen. There was the bankruptcy, the deleted records, 35-year-old Wolf s broken marriage, after four years, to Faye Dunaway (the pressures, he says, of both their work schedules) but they made it. The audience at the Tucson arena shrieks its appreciation. Even in a place the size of the Falkland Islands they stilj manage to pull off their “houseparty” bit. Not just the spotlights on the crowd bit as they launch into their oldies or tackle their new smashes for the youngsters. Wolf spends more energy than I use in an average month, leaning down into the audience and getting them to sing along in the mike, shake his hand or rub his calves. People even jump up and dance on the low stage. You’d think it was punk at Perkins Palace in L.A. instead of stadium rock ’n’ roll. And when they climb on each other’s backs for the notorious Pyramid and wave at the apeshit crowd, or come back on one of their million encores, they’re still working flat-out. “Without the audience,” as Magic Dick puts it, “there would be no point in us doing it. We don’t just get together to play like this every other day. This is our thing to do. ”

“We’re obsessed with it,” says Seth. “We enjoy it. We’re dedicated to it. We’re into it 24 hours a day. Once in a while we read a book or go to a movie or eat a great meal but our ambition is to continue to make good rock ’n’ roll. We care about what we’re doing and we want to keep on doing it.”

“We chose this,” adds his roommate and co-writer Wolf, “and we accept what goes with the territory. There’s been times, when it was difficult, but tonight—getting into Tucson and having people come out—in these hard times—and just rally around: there’s nothing like it. It’s the thing that keeps us going. It’s still exciting to us, and the more we keep, doing it the more we try to better the craft and the more exciting it keeps getting. Basically we don’t want to get repetitive. Like ‘Love Stinks’ doesn’t sound like ‘Sanctuary’. ‘Sanctuary’ doesn’t sound like ‘Freeze Frame.’ ”

“The music speaks for itself,” says Seth. “And we’re committed to making the best music we possibly can make.”

And does Peter have any aspirations to use their success to launch a painting career perhaps? “No. I don’t paint any more. It’s sort of like having two lovers—I don’t think it’s fair. You’ve got to have that one lover and give her all you’ve got. That’s music for me.” ^