Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Tuesday Tuneage
The J. Geils Band - "Angel In Blue"
1981

The other night while listening to random iTunes tracks under headphones, "Main Street" came on and I tweeted: Only Bob Seger could write a great, poignant song about a stripper. Top that, Jackson Browne. Not so sure why I was being so snarky on Browne, I must have grabbed whatever iconic singer/songwriter popped into my head. Seger is as worthy as any of the highly hailed Songwriters, why not just tweet that?

The next day I slapped the J. Geils Band's Freeze-Frame LP on my turntable for a spin. What's lost with time and their mass success with Freeze-Frame is that in the seventies they were a contender for the never-crowned American Rolling Stones, as Dave Marsh once wrote: "(They) came closest to the Stones' synthesis of rhythm & blues, bravado and strong sense of outrage." Also lost is the mastery of some of their finest songwriting, like the incredible "Cry One More Time" and the stunning "Teresa." On side two of  Freeze-Frame is "Angel In Blue", a song I had loved in high school. It's great, poignant (nice writerly word Tuomala, "poignant") and is about a stripper. So in that one tweet I needlessly cheapshotted the man who wrote "Doctor My Eyes" and my initial assertion was wrong anyway. The lesson here is to not drink and tweet, kids. (Drink, then tweet the next morning with coffee.) And oh yeah - check out the J. Geils Band catalog. Better than Elvis Costello!