Geils Band The Morning After Mobile Fidelity Numbered Limited Edition 180g LPĥ. On Tuesday, John Warren Geils was found dead in his home in Groton, MA. They have been nominated for inclusion in Wennerland, but not yet elected, and that's as serious an indictment of that joint as can be found anywhere. For my money, they were as close to being an American Rolling Stones as any other band ever was. They were beloved by fans and by musicians alike, and they became a virtual house band at Bill Graham's Fillmore East. They were steeped in the deep Chicago blues their epic cover of John Lee Hooker's "Serves You Right To Suffer" was downright goddamn cataclysmic. Whether playing straight lead, or slide, for which he occasionally used a sparkplug, he was the connecting tissue between the blues and rock and roll that made the Geils band one of the best live acts of their era. While Wolf was a compelling frontman, all gold shoes and lightning patter, and while Magic Dick stands with Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite as far as Caucasian blues harp players are concerned, it was Geils himself on guitar who held things together. Not your run-of-the-mill campy sequined theatricality of miscellaneous gender, but instead slippin' and slidin' and raunchy madman jiving which makes watching as good as hearing. The Geils Band is one of my favorite performing groups - not only do they play a tight and tough no-bullshit mixture of blues and rock, but they know and groove on the value of giving folks a show. Their studio records are vastly underrated- "Floyd's Hotel" from The Morning After, with its hapless narrator and a cast of characters straight out of Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle," never got anywhere near enough airplay-but the real thing was the live show, captured most brilliantly on Full House, which contains the definitive version of Magic Dick's perennial showstopper, "Whammer Jammer." Their end-of-the-trail pop hits-"Centerfold," "Love Stinks," and the rest-were a nice reward they deserved for all the woodshedding they did, but never did define the best of them. They opened for everyone from the original Allman Brothers to B.B. It was a bigger mismatch than Holmes-Cooney. Everything IABD tried to play, the crowd booed and the Geils band had to come back out and play to settle down the mob. I was a freshman in college then, and I told everybody that we had to get there early to see this J Geils Band because, if my suspicions were correct, they might burn the joint down before IABD ever took the stage. Somebody who was either 90 years old or extremely high booked the Geils band on the bill with It's A Beautiful Day, a band that probably was the living embodiment of twee hippie irrelevance. One of them occurred on Octo(Yeah, I looked it up.) at the Performing Arts Center in Milwaukee. Radio used to be great, kidz.) What emerged was the J Geils Band, and what I can tell you is this: Of the 10 best rock shows I ever saw, the Geils Band owns three of the slots. (Occasionally, Wolf would be joined on air by a temporary resident of Cambridge named Van Morrison. Ultimately, they merged with a Boston-based band called The Hallucinations, which was fronted by one Peter Wolf, an energetic guy who was formerly a late-night DJ at Boston's "underground" radio station, WBCN. Once, gigging in clubs in and around Worcester Polytechnic Institute, there was a terrific blues band led by a guitarist named John Warren Geils and a virtuoso harp player named Magic Dick, because Richard Salwitz is not the name for a great harp player in any universe. My de facto hometown of Worcester has only one great claim to rock and roll fame.
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