This opening line precedes Pack Fair And Square, a fast little boogie showcasing Magic Dick and his blues harp deluxe. "Take out your false teeth, mama, I wanna suck on your gums" must be one of the funniest and weirdest things ever said on a rock'n'roll by a White boy, even if that jiving White boy is Peter Wolf, who was probably born black but just did not know it and so he settled for being a Jewish motormouth with a ghetto slang all his own. Perhaps my own choices are not as radical or interesting as I might fondly believe. Some of Hornby's choices seem a tad strange given my own preferences and predilections, but I guess that is what a personal selection is all about. I could just see the crowd instantly up on their feet at the first notes.Īs a quick aside I must mention that in 2004 I bought Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs, because he discussed influential tunes in his life, but mostly because First I Look At The Purse was one of those songs and I figured that a book featuring this song, and the album, as a personal top favourite could not be too shabby a read. This was high energy the way it ought to be.įirst I Look At The Purse opens the album, and if one ignores the chauvinistic lyric – the man cares not for his woman's looks if she has a lot of bank – it is one of the great set openers of all time, soon followed by an equally intense and frantic Homework. The Geils boys came from Boston, and the album was recorded in Detroit, at the time the hard rock capital of the USA, but they sure did rock the house with the Boston Monkey vibe, Peter Wolf's jive and the incredible talent of Magic Dick who was the blues harp maestro of the band. Suffice to say, " Live" Full House immediately became one of my top albums of all time, a frequent guest on my tape deck (once I'd taped the album to preserve the integrity of the vinyl) and a dead cert for inclusion on my desert island disc LP's along with Dr Feelgood's Malpractice, as two examples, from different sided of the Atlantic no less, of how white boys can play the R & B card with energy, commitment and a sense of humour. I believe I listened to the first couple of tracks at the counter top turntable, as one was still able to do in those days, and was immediately blown away, and bought the album right there and then for something like R1,99, which turned out to be one of the great record bargains of my life. It was a live recording released in 1972, it featured a version of John Lee Hooker's Serves You Right To Suffer (at the time I was listening to a Greatest Hits album of his and was very interested in anything else featur4ing his composer credit) and band members featured on the photographs on the back cover looked weird and mean at the same time, especially the wonderfully named Magic Dick whose hair was a band member all of its own. Round about 1979 I was at Stellenbosch record bar (I think it might have been Sigma Records) one day when there was a whole bunch of albums in the "sale" bin and one of them was the " Live" Full House album by the very selfsame J Geils Band. In between there was a long, dry spell when J Geils simply did not feature on the South African airwaves. ![]() Unfortunately the J Geils Band never made it back onto the Radio 5 playlist until the release of Freeze Frame in the early Eighties, kind of their commercial peak, but not the best of the band by a long chalk. The Seventies tunes that aren't bubblegum, boogie, glam, disco or Abba. I Must Of Got Lost ranks up there for me as one of the great Seventies tunes. It had a sing-a-long chorus and a great lyric about how easy it is to lose your love: you never see it coming but you always see it going. Not ever seeing the song title in print and not being au fait with America slang, I thought the song must be called I Must Have Got Lost, as that was the proper English, and for all I knew the artists were the Jay Giles Band. ![]() In 1974 one of the stranger and more interesting songs on the Radio 5 playlist was a soul style rock tune called I Must Of Got Lost by the weirdly named J Geils Band.
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