![]() Geils Band’s one and only #1 hit, is a psychological tangle of a song. “Shake It Up” is a 9.) Freeze-Frame took the band away from blues-rock, and it made them stars. Geils Band, came from the Boston club scene, and their single “ Shake It Up” peaked at #4 while “Centerfold” was at #1. But on Freeze-Frame, the band latched onto the twitchy, bleepy aesthetic of new-wave rockers like the Cars and married it to the whole good-time sound that they’d already developed. Geils Band’s producer and primary songwriter, says that the band never used synths before their 1981 album just because they couldn’t afford them they always owed too much to the labels. Geils Band dynamic reminds me a lot of Van Halen, one more band that’ll eventually be in this column.) Wolf was charismatic enough that he spent most of the ’70s married to Faye Dunaway, but his band remained stuck on the B-list. That must’ve been a tough thing for Peter Wolf, a charismatic and larger-than-life frontman in a band that wasn’t named after him. But then their fellow Boston club-scene act Aerosmith, a band that’ll eventually end up in this column, came along and stole that title away from them. Geils Band had a decent shot at becoming the American Stones. (“ Love Stinks,” a 1980 anthem that eventually became a party-band standard, stalled out at #38.)Įarly on, the J. One, the 1974 rave-up “ Must Of Got Lost,” climbed all the way up to #12. A few of those singles made the lower reaches of the top 40. They banged out a steady stream of singles, most of which missed the Hot 100 entirely. Geils Band did just fine for themselves, touring and recording constantly and developing a big cult following, especially in party-rock hotbeds like Boston and Detroit. They didn’t like the idea of all that mud. Wolf has claimed that this mindset - “very black-oriented,” he says - is what led the band to turn down an offer to play Woodstock. Most or all of the band members were Jewish, but they covered R&B songs and adapted R&B poses whenever they could. Their sound was good-times blues-rock, and Magic Dick’s harmonica was usually their lead instrument. Geils Band signed to Atlantic in 1969 and released their debut album a year later, and then they spent the next decade grinding it out in the trenches. He’ll eventually end up in this column, too.) (That’s the same arc that former Atlanta radio DJ Ludacris would follow decades later. Geils Band, he found that his persona translated just fine to the stage. On the radio, Wolf developed a persona as rambling, cartoonish, fast-talking hipster. ![]() ![]() Wolf and Lynch have not had any detectable influence on each other’s artistic lives.) Wolf had spent a little while fronting a Boston band called the Hallucinations, and he’d landed a job as the overnight DJ on the local rock station WBCN. (His freshman-year roommate was David Lynch. Wolf - real name Peter Blankenfield - was a Bronx native who’d moved up to Boston for art school. After a little while, they decided to go electric, bringing in drummer Stephen Bladd and a ringer of a frontman known as Peter Wolf. Originally, they were an acoustic blues trio - Geils on guitar and Danny Klein on bass, along with a harmonica player who still calls himself Magic Dick. ![]() put together the first iteration of his band when he was at college in Worcester, Massachusetts in the late ’60s. Naturally, the song that pushed them over the top was a horny and conflicted na na na singalong about seeing a high-school crush naked in a porno mag. But they’d never been anything more than a party band - at least not until they finally harnessed the twin forces of MTV and new wave, briefly becoming bona fide stars before splintering. They’d developed a rep as one of the most purely fun live bands in America, a distinction that’d landed them spots opening for bigger stars like the Rolling Stones and Peter Frampton. Geils Band, perhaps America’s ultimate party band, had been together for more than a decade. Every once in a long while, the party band wins.īy the beginning of the ’80s, the J. But every once in a long while, you will find a party band that takes off while still remaining a party band. If that’s what they’d wanted to be, they would’ve stopped being a party band. The party band isn’t supposed to become a significant artistic or commercial force. If they’re really good, maybe they’ll sign to a label, put out a couple of records, open for a bigger band on tour. If they’re good enough, maybe they’ll eventually hit the local club circuit. The party band’s story usually goes something like this: A bunch of college buddies get together to play fun, uptempo R&B covers at local frats and dive bars. The party band is a rich and noble tradition. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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