The backstage pass stuck on the inside cover of my J. They had hits on radio and MTV and they played everywhere, all the time. Geils Band were back as headliners less than a year later, playing the RPI Armory in September.įrom there, it was up, up, up. Geils Band guys, “How does it feel to blow the Allman Brothers off the stage?” He got a very nervous answer, denying that was what happened but most fans would have agreed with Don. 1977's Monkey Island is a stark, raving masterpiece, and the highest, finest, greatest achievement of the J.Geils Band.Don Wilcock, my editor at the time at Kite and now editor of national online magazines Blueswax and Folkwax, asked one of the J. It should have been their Dark Side of the Moon, but it only reached #51 on the Billboard charts and is today mostly forgotten and neglected, even by some of the band's hardcore fans.
It's simply outrageous that if the J.Geils Band is remembered at all these days, it's only for: a) their MTV-era hits, b) being an inspired live act, and c) being a "good time house party" band. In reality, these guys could BOTH play and write, and Monkey Island is hands down their best album by a wide margin. The album opens with (of all things) a duet: Peter Wolf and Cissy Houston belt out a "he said she said" r'n'b groover that establishes the intense mood of the entire album. What else needs to be said about the beautiful "You're the only one", other than it should have been a HUGE hit? "I do" did become a hit in a later live version, and is one of this album's more upbeat moments. "Somebody" out-Stones the Stones: one can easily imagine Jagger barking out this angry, gritty, guitar-driven treachery diatribe. Special recognition must now be given to the two greatest songs the J.Geils Band ever did. The plaintive, forlorn "I'm Falling" is one of rock's greatest alienation anthems, and features a blistering sax fade-out by Michael Brecker. "Monkey Island" is one of those musically adventurous, sprawling epics that used to be played late at night on FM stations, where the switchboard would light up with 100 people demanding, "WHAT IS THIS?" What does it mean? What is it all about? Who knows, but Seth Justman, J.Geils, and Magic Dick all have their greatest moments in a recording studio. How does a band follow up such a hallucinatory vision, but with a total change-of-pace? Remember "When I'm Sixty Four" following "Within You Without You"? The same effect applies with the offbeat cover version of Louis & Lil Armstrong's "I'm not rough". "So good" is yet another of those "should-have-been huge" underrated compositions that brings some light-heartedness to the proceedings. "Wreckage" takes a prophetic look at their contemporaries who would lose it all, and is even more significant when one considers that on the next three albums (and do let us forget 1984's You're Getting Even While I'm Getting Odd, shall we?) the band would always close with a silly, embarrassing "boys-will-be-boys" rave-up. If there's any one problem with Monkey Island, it's the immense shadow it casts over everything else the band ever did. Both earlier and later albums seem flippant and simplistic in comparison, although I do think they aimed very high with 1981's Freeze Frame ("Centerfold" and "Piss on the Wall" notwithstanding).
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