MTV launched on 01 August 1981, and changed how we experienced music forever. No longer just an aural medium, bands now used video to add a visual dimension to their music and lyrics. As goofy and cornball as those first generation videos were, you could still sit mesmerized for hours watching rather than just listening to your favorite groups.
However, Mom and Dad didn't add the channel to our cable subscription so if I wanted to catch the latest hot videos everyone was talking about in school, I had to trudge over to friends' houses or stay up really late on Fridays to watch TBS's "Night Tracks", Ted Turner's poor caricature of MTV. First world problems, right?
For as groundbreaking a concept as music videos were, they still shared a common annoyance with their old fashioned radio counterparts. If you wanted to see a specific one, you still had to wait for the veejay to play it. Today's kids with access to the Internet and YouTube will never know the struggle of waiting for what seemed like an eternity with fingers at the ready on the record button of a tape deck or VCR hoping our phoned in request would get air time.
One of the videos that proved particularly elusive for me was "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band. The closest I came to seeing it was after my buddy Mike and I came in from horsing around out in the backyard. We turned on the TV and the very tail end of the video was playing. Well before the days of Tivo, there was no rewinding to catch it from the beginning. I never saw "Centerfold" back in the day. Amusingly, as I write this, I've got the video playing on a loop on YouTube.
In Junior and Senior High School, I was a band geek, and "Centerfold" was perennially part of the band's repertoire at Friday night football games and hometown parades. Usually, after parades down Jeff Davis Avenue, Long Beach's main drag, a group of my friends and I would just walk home. On the way we'd treat the residents in the neighborhoods we walked through to our little quartet rendition of the song. It was an odd sight, a small troupe of band geeks in full uniform - a trio of trumpets and a tuba - walking down the street blaring a song about a photo spread in a "girlie magazine."
The man who gave his name to the band that released our favorite neighborhood serenade was born John Warren Geils Jr. on 20 February 1946 in New York City. His namesake band was originally called Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels. After a few changes in their lineup, the group gelled as the J. Geils Blues Band. "Blues" was eventually dropped, and the J. Geils Band released their self titled debut album in 1970. Ten more studio albums followed along with 19 released singles of which "Centerfold" was their biggest hit. Nominated twice for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they have yet to clinch that honor. On April 11th of this year, police were called out to Geils's home in Groton, Massachusetts, to do a "wellness check." Unfortunately, when they found him, he was unresponsive and was pronounced dead at the age of 71.
I'll always be thankful to the man and his band for providing a litany of songs that were part of the soundtrack of my youth, and giving me and some rapscallion friends the means of literally playing part of that soundtrack.
No comments:
Post a Comment