“Ain’t gonna hang up my rock and roll shoes,” Wolf sings here. And that their old style can’t be re-created without regaining the conviction, the spirit of fun, which is utterly absent here. This ignores the fact that their get-down jamming was what stalled them at second-level stardom in the first place. Instead, each of the succeeding albums Nightmares and now Hotline has attempted to regain their identity as the number one party band. Ladies Invited was an honest, surprisingly successful attempt at writing straight pop, nonboogie music its lack of sales apparently scared the group from continuing on that track. Even keyboardman Seth Justman, who became the dominant instrumental force with Ladies Invited, has retrenched from that album’s hints of pop power back to the same old good-time boogie. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for The J. Geils is a group that must transcend its limitations Hotline emphasizes them. Hotline is ranked 76993rd in the overall chart, 7097th in the 1970s, and 740th in the year. And Magic Dick’s harmonica, once abrasively savage, is now only predictably abrasive (as on “Orange Driver”). Geils, meanwhile, has become increasingly hackneyed (check “Be Careful”), his excesses bloating the simplest songs to the edge of endurance. Wolf panders with insensate falsity despite the programmed looseness of his stage patter, and his overestimation of his vocal prowess is no great help either singing Curtis Mayfield’s “Believe in Me” is not just vanity, but hubris. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for The J. The deterioration is individual as well as collective. They are a solid blues-rock/ gritty party band, and each member of the group tears it up in his respective corner of the outfit. If you do, grab it, its an excellent record. you are more likely to find this one at a yardsale. Dig HOTLINE along with a few other of the bands earlier records are very hard to find these days. Its slickly funky jacket holds an album whose best moments derive from soul and blues classics the obscure “Love-Itis,” which gives vocalist Peter Wolf an outlet for his usual ostentatious wino jive, Eddie Burns’s “Orange Driver” and John Brim’s “Be Careful (What You Do).” The originals are equally formularized: straight blues with soul insertions (the piano lead on “Fancy Footwork,” which is perhaps the best new song here, is lifted from the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” for instance). Geils Band Greatest Hits 10 CD Album Bundling. Hotline contains not a single track which would break the formula the band has mined since the beginning. Its chief distinction is as a chronicle of the further disintegration of a group which once promised to be counted among the finest white soul and rock groups. Geils’s seventh album, but it might as well be their second or their 11th.
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