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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Jay Geils gets jazzed about New Guitar Summit
By steve newton
Publish Date: 27-Apr-2006
straight.com
There’s a hilarious Family Guy episode from 2002 where Peter and Lois Griffin meet Kiss, and Lois reveals that she’s had intimate relations with the band. Rather than being jealous, Peter’s hugely impressed. “You are the coolest girl in the world!” he raves. “My wife did Kiss!” Then Lois quickly adds, under her breath, “And J. Geils.”
While he’s heard about that split-second reference to his old group, Jay Geils has never actually seen Family Guy. He’s been way too busy laying down mellow swing-jazz in the New Guitar Summit, which includes fellow American guitarists Duke Robillard and Gerry Beaudoin. Best known as the founder of the Boston-based band that spawned the early ’80s hits “Freeze Frame” and “Centerfold”, Geils’s real passion is jazz. The 60-year-old picker still recalls how, when he was a 12-year-old Manhattanite, his dad took him to see Louis Armstrong play at a high school in New Jersey.
“It was a big deal at the time because jazz acts routinely had been in questionable nightclubs since the ’30s,” says Geils, on the line from his home in Groton, Massachusetts. “But they were starting to break out into concerts for young people, and it was Louis Armstrong and the Allstars. I remember we sat pretty near the front, and I was just in awe. It was like, ‘Oh man, that’s what I want to do, right there.’ ”
Geils was a trumpet player himself when he saw Satchmo in the flesh. “I wanted to be the white Miles Davis, but I had no chops,” he recalls with a chuckle. He was also a big Charlie Christian fan, though he didn’t start playing guitar till college. In the late ’60s he formed the J. Geils Band, the Peter Wolf–fronted blues/R?&?B party band noted for its killer live shows that featured energized covers of the Contours’ “First I Look at the Purse” and Otis Rush’s “Homework”. Seventies albums like Bloodshot and Live: Full House led to a growing fanbase, and the timely arrival of MTV in ’81 helped “Centerfold” hold the number-one spot on the Billboard singles chart for six weeks. This was no doubt around the time that Lois Griffin “did” J. Geils.
Nowadays, however, it’s all about the jazz trio for Geils. On New Guitar Summit the threesome tackles a mix of Beaudoin originals and tunes by Benny Goodman, George and Ira Gershwin, and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. They take turns soloing on every track. “Duke is a little more accomplished than I am,” notes Geils, “but we both come from that blues/B.?B. King background on the guitar. Duke and I are both completely self-taught, and Gerry actually went to school and everything, so we kid him all the time that he knows more chords than me and Duke put together—and he actually knows the names of ’em!”
Although classic-rock die-hards like the Griffins would no doubt love to see the J. Geils Band reform and tour again, Geils says he’s having too much of a ball with New Guitar Summit, which plays the Yale on Wednesday (May 3). “There’s a jillion jazz-guitar players,” he relates, “but it’s nice to have the three of us on the same wavelength; we really like those three-part harmony things that you can’t do by yourself—unless you’ve got 12 fingers on each hand. It’s like, ‘Hey, this is what we’d do if we were sittin’ at home together, so come on in the living room and let’s have some fun.’ ”
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