![]() ![]() The result was the kinetic Full House, which featured strutting takes of First I Look At The Purse, Looking For A Love and Otis Rush’s Homework, alongside two-fisted originals Whammer Jammer and Hard Drivin’ Man. In April ’72 the band headed for Detroit, a favoured stronghold, and pitched up for two nights at The Cinderella Ballroom. Why don’t you just do a live record? Just capture what you’re doin’ on stage.’” “He came to see us play,” continues Wolf, “and said: ‘You’re a great live band, but I listened to your albums and I’m just not getting it. “They’d play ’em on the radio but nothing was really becoming a hit.”Įnter manager Dee Anthony, then overseeing rock heavyweights Humble Pie, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Joe Cocker. “We had what they used to call in the business ‘turntable hits’,” says Geils. Geils Band had yet to translate the power of their live shows onto vinyl. There was a kind of brotherhood between us.” So we became friendly with them even before we started playing together. The other got another guitar and played along. I remember the Geils Band were rehearsing in Dick and Danny’s apartment in Boston when all of a sudden these two guys walked in: ‘Yeah man, we’re musicians too.’ One of them picked up a guitar and started singing The Beatles’ Blackbird. “Phil Walden, who managed them at the time, always wanted to manage us too. “We must’ve done 50 or 60 shows with the Allmans,” says Wolf. By the time the band left for their hotel at four in the morning, the Allmans were still on the radio. It was a marathon evening, broadcast live by two New York stations. June 1971 also saw the Geils Band return to the Fillmore East for its final night, sharing a bill with Albert King, Edgar Winter, the Beach Boys, Mountain and headliners the Allman Brothers. It was almost like we were playing in a foreign language.” We were sitting there trying to get changed and they’re dragging all these kids in who’d taken too much or were OD’ing. Our dressing room was the infirmary where they’d put people if anybody got hurt, so they had all these cots. It was a dirt floor and you could smell the manure. The first place we played was in St Louis, in an old cattle stockyard. “We were coming off as this R&B band playing with tiny, funky, beat-up Fenders. “It really was apples and oranges,” Wolf recalls. Still, it was hardly a breakthrough.Īside from debuting at the Fillmore East, 1971 also found them supporting Black Sabbath across the US – the result of both bands being signed to the same Premier Talent agency. The follow-up, 1971’s The Morning After, fared slightly better, yielding a minor hit with a version of The Valentinos’ Looking For A Love. A cover of The Contours’ R&B ass-shaker First I Look At The Purse was released as a single, but business was hardly brisk. Geils Band album was cut in 18 hours, the band bringing their road-tested tunes to the studio. It was my job to entertain, to make people get up and dance.” The show was an important aspect of what we did. We had 20-foot guitar chords and we’d jump into the audience. “The Hallucinations did blues and R&B and were like neo-punks. “It was a fusion between a straight blues band and mine,” Wolf recalls. With the addition of student and piano player Seth Justman, the J. ![]() In need of a new drummer and singer, Geils drafted the duo in. The Hallucinations were another young outfit making local waves, who counted Bladd and Wolf among their number. “We ended up being the house band at the Unicorn coffee shop downtown.” “We were pretty much modelling ourselves after the Junior Wells-Buddy Guy quartet,” Geils says. By the spring of 1967, they’d dropped out of college and moved to Boston. Studying the songwriting credits on the latter’s first album led to the discovery of Little Walter and Muddy Waters. There he met Dick and Klein and set about forming “a bluesy, folky jug band”, influenced by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Geils, another New Yorker, had arrived at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as a student in the mid-60s. And you really believed it it was total credibility.” They’d tear their jacket off, get down on their knees. If someone was singing a love song, it was like high opera. They were almost preaching to the audience. “It was an incredible learning experience of how the artist made himself connect with the audience,” he says. It was there, watching James Brown, Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson, that he’d witnessed the art of stagecraft up close. ![]() As a child, his older sisters would regularly take him to The Apollo, the venerated soul and R&B venue in Harlem. Peter Wolf was born and raised in New York, but by the mid-60s he’d headed up the coast to Boston. ![]()
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