The J. Geils Band – “Freeze-Frame” (1981)
David Fricke wrote this review for Rolling Stone, dated Jan. 21, 1982. This was the band’s last album made with frontman Peter Wolf and was also their biggest. Their sound had changed quite a bit over the years, as they left behind their early blues roots and started to incorporate new wave elements into their sound (which began with the previous album Love Stinks). No matter what style of music they played (rock, R&B, blues, reggae, ballads), they always played it with conviction & panache…
Ever since their early greaser days, when they were spitting out hard-boiled cover versions of tunes by the Miracles and John Lee Hooker, the J. Geils Band were also creating incendiary originals based on the lessons of Motown soul and electric Chicago blues. Such songs were ignited by the group’s adventurous spirit and wild-party enthusiasm. Singer Peter Wolf’s mighty mouth, guitarist J. Geils’ bull’s-eye licks and the wicked Wyman-and-Watts-style kick of bassist Stephen Bladd and drummer Daniel Klein may be the main reasons why the group was once knighted the American Rolling Stones. Indeed, few bands today could serve up a tasty Memphis stew like “Cry One More Time” (from 1971’s The Morning After) with such down-home panache and commercial cool or go Top Forty with reggaecum-Rascals-type R&B as in their 1973 hit, “Give It to Me.”
Even fewer groups stand a chance of matching the J. Geils Band’s thirteenth album, Freeze-Frame, for imagination, studio ingenuity and basic raunch-and-roll drive. This is maximum R&B with all the trimmings–a major-league helping of Stax-meets-the Stones, spiced heavily with pop exotica like cocktail strings, hot punk-funk rhythms and fractured jazz. Spurred on by triple-threat Seth Justman (keyboards, production, the lion’s share of songwriting), the J. Geils Band dare to go where most of their peers fear to tread, parading their uptown boogie with flamboyant gestures rooted mostly in New Wave cosmopolitanism: synthesizer future-pop, Third World inflections, rockabilly twang. Whereas such an ambitious midcareer failure as 1977’s Monkey Island suffered from indecision and overreach and 1980’s Love Stinks was a bit heavy on the emotional bile, Freeze-Frame is bold, even reckless at times, but always buoyant — a frenzied living monument to the art of partying.
These guys have certainly learned how to have fun with extremes. “Do You Remember When,” an exhilarating Wolf-Justman number that’s two-thirds classic O’Jays and one-third Las Vegas MOR, gets a wide-screen disco treatment, with galloping percussion and champagne strings (not to mention a short guitar-harmonics coda that imitates Chinese wind chimes). Seth Justman opens the six-minute “River Blindness” with a serpentine be-bop keyboard line over a rhythm machine. Harp man Magic Dick blows a resonant staccato riff, while Wolf leads the way through a dense, apocalyptic jungle chant that’s highlighted by an amp-eating Geils guitar solo. Just a few seconds later, the howlin’ Wolf eases into a bittersweet, Bruce Springsteen-style weeper called “Angel in Blue,” crying in his beer with hoarse gentility.
There’s purpose, of course, in all this playacting. The angular slash of J. Geils’ guitar and the jerky, psycho-James Brown pace of “Insane, Insane Again” project the madhouse anxiety of the tune’s title better than Justman’s wordy, strait-jacket lyrics. Even in a comparatively direct Geils smoker like “Rage in the Cage,” Magic Dick provides a police-siren wail and the group does a middle four that sounds like a chain gang breaking rocks. The song itself is about a teenage renegade running from the suburban thought police.
The J. Geils Band couldn’t pull off musicalcharades on this scale if they weren’t in peak playing form. Peter Wolf is much more a singer than a shouter these days. Magic Dick does things with a harmonica that sound like a sax section one minute and a guitar army the next. And the whole group cooks like six chefs on Bourbon Street. Seth Justman, to his credit, holds the show together with his astute arrangements and uncanny scoring of horns and strings.
But, more important, the J. Geils Band — whose world view is best summed up in the flippant and cynical “Piss on the Wall” (“Some folks say the world ain’t what it is/All I know is I just got to take a wiz”) — spell relief from life’s ills P-A-R-T-Y, and Freeze-Frame is, above all else, championship, nobullshit rock & roll. Like the young outlaw says in “Rage in the Cage”: “I’m nauseous — my transistor’s ’bout the only antidote to keep my temperature from runnin’ wild/Let me hear that radio!” When you hear this album come roaring out of your Panasonic ghetto blaster, you’ll know what he means.
David Fricke
The Beat Patrol 
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