The J. Geils Band: Funky, Frenetic and Back on Top
“Früt!” shouts bassist Danny Klein. Instantly, a chorus of hoots rises up from the other five members of the J. Geils Band, who, a week before embarking on their latest tour, are scattered like a handful of loose guitar picks around the office of their homey Boston rehearsal loft.
“Früt, yeah, there was a group,” Klein chortles, referring to a now-defunct Detroit band (pronounced fruit). “Started off in white tuxes and ended up in Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear. A band before its time.” “
And abandoned before its time,” cracks lead singer Peter Wolf, slouching on a sofa next to Klein, his ever-present black beret tugged so low over his forehead it almost touches the rims of his impenetrable black aviator shades. Wolf is trying to recall some of the more memorable acts that have opened for the J. Geils Band over the years. They weren’t all Früts: Bob Seger, the Eagles, the Cars, Billy Joel. Name a major band and Geils has probably headlined over it at one point or another during the past decade.
It’s a source of some irritation, actually, because the J. Geils Band has always seemed tipped for the top ranks of a rock stardom that never quite arrived. Ten years after its debut album, which had critics hailing the group as America’s answer to the Rolling Stones, Geils is still waiting for the big payoff. Ironically, as the wheel of musical fashion comes full circle, it may now be at hand.
Whereas the Stones used their blues and R&B roots as a launching pad, Geils has remained stubbornly committed to its original idiom, resisting the commercial blandishments of discomania in the late Seventies as firmly as the band rejected any connection with the ill-starred “Bosstown Sound” of 1967 or the mindless stomp-and-spit boogie bands of the early Seventies. “There were a lot of temptations to cash in,” Wolf admits. “I could have put on a three-piece suit and we could’ve gone disco, and maybe have been incredibly successful. It just didn’t feel right. We’ve committed ourselves to doin’ what we’re doin’— you know, three chords and unh! We are not prisoners of rock & roll. We are volunteers.”
And so, by maintaining a generally steady commitment to tough, flashy, R&B-tinged rock, the J. Geils Band finds itself right at home in the era of New Wave. Love Stinks, the group’s eleventh album, has made more noise right out of the box than any other Geils LP in years, and ‘Come Back,” the album’s single, is making a quick rise up the chart. Powered by the hard-nosed title tune — a loving evocation of every three-chord junk-rock basher from “Louie Louie” to “Sweet Jane”—and a raw, pounding cover of the Strange-loves’ 1966 classic, “Night Time,” Love Stinks cops the perfect attitude for the nascent Eighties without even trying.
“There’s a fascination now with a lot of the music that we all grew up with,” says Wolf. “And we’re basically not any different from some young cats gettin’ together right now in a garage, you know? That’s how we started and we’ve never really let up since that fuckin’ day. If we got super big now, we’d be able to do so much more with the show, with the music, with where and how we can record. That’s why success is important, it gives you some breathin’ room. I ain’t had a breath in years, boy. I don’t know what would happen if I took one.”
Asked why the new album has such an angry, aggressive edge to it. Wolf shifts into his patented, posthipster patois. “Well how would you feel man, if a fuckin’ dude came over to your house to put aluminum siding on your Samsonite suitcase and fucked it all up? I mean, it’s got to reflect itself in the recording studio.”
One of the true originals of latter-day rock & roll. Wolf started developing his breathless jive-talking style as a teenager in the Bronx in the late Fifties. His father was a vaudeville dancer, then a record retailer; his uncle was a theatrical manager whose clients included a gorilla, a wrestler and “the world’s fastest baton twirler.” Wolf lived in the same neighborhood that spawned Dion and the Belmonts, Phil Spector and Bobby Darin; he can still remember the raps of classic New York DJs like Alan Freed, Jocko Henderson and the Magnificent Montague, and crowding into the Bronx’ Valentine Theatre to catch Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and the Chantels. “It was incredible,” Wolf says. “Rock just wiped me out.”
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