50 Years Later: Revisiting J. Geils Band’s Rhythmic & Unrelenting ‘Bloodshot’

By the now fifty-year-old release of the J. Geils Band’s fourth overall LP, Bloodshot, both the band and its fanbase were becoming frustrated with the state of their career. Even after issuing two solid studio efforts, the eponymous debut and The Morning After, plus a ferocious live album Full House, the Boston-based band still had not attained wide commercial success. Wowing concert audiences were apparently little more helpful than garnering critical praise.

With the retrospect of five decades, however, the mainstream breakthrough of Geils was no more compromised than it was inevitable. Bloodshot sounded then as it sounds now, a streamlined, all-together natural extension of their previous work, this one completed under the auspices of producer/engineer Bill Szymczyk (who also produced such diverse artists as B.B. King, The Who, Joe Walsh, and Elvin Bishop).

The result of the combined effort is a fine balance of the sextet’s musicianship, finely honed from the relentless roadwork, and the original material to which it was devoted, courtesy of the in-house writing partnership of lead vocalist Peter Wolf and keyboardist Seth Justman. The duo composed all but two of the nine tracks on the record and the originals evince not one iota of anything derivative of roots tunes here such as  “Hold Your Loving” and the rambunctious opening “(Ain’t Nothin’ But A) House Party”. 

Thus, the collective surety in grasping the rhythmic likes of “Back to Get Ya” is as laudable as the soulful infectious pop catchiness of “Make Up Your Mind.” And, not surprisingly, the prevailing hit upon which this album’s success is based, “Give It To Me,” is a combination of those two main virtues: not all that surprisingly, that halcyon number is almost equally effective in its truncated single version and the six and a half minute-plus extended take.

Predating by some weeks The Wailer’s US LP debut Catch A Fire (and over a year before Eric Clapton’s watered-down hit of Bob Marley’s “I Shot The Sheriff), the reggae-influenced main structure of the song complements the extended instrumental break: beginning with the percussion interlude, its heavily-syncopated bedrock beat becomes relentless in short order.

The J. Geils Band refused to abandon their r&b and blues influences in formulating this extremely well-paced thirty-six and a half minutes. Wolf and Justman’s devotion to style is overt in just the title alone of “Southside Shuffle,” but then there’s the braggadocio the band displays in actually enacting such a genre piece in the form of “Struttin’ with My Baby.” 

And it’s hardly a coincidence the two main soloists of this group shine brightest on the latter track. The namesake guitarist and his equally facile harp counterpart, Magic Dick, intersect and counterpoint each other with their respective instruments; in so doing, both display the terse approach that renders powerful all such intervals. 

And the momentum the duo generates never flags, but escalates instead. A constant push to that end comes from the rhythm section of bassist Daniel Klein and drummer Stephen Jo Bladd: theirs is the kind of technical versatility that earmarked the Boston-based band from its very inception, a range of skills frontman Peter Wolf also embodies as the lead singer. 

Equally credible in crooning the balladry of “Start All Over Again” and the bawdy yelping of “Don’t Try to Hide,” the one-time late-night disc jockey at WBCN acts as the lightning rod through which the J. Geils Band’s energy courses. His endlessly entertaining intensity encapsulates the consistency of Bloodshot,  a great virtue that also permeates the three studio LPs that arrived in its wake. 

Ladies Invited, Nightmares…and Other Tales from the Vinyl Jungle (with its own smash in the form of “Must Of Got Lost”) and Hotline are arguably comparable to this record, so much so that  the sextet’s bid for even more artistic respectability, 1977’s Monkey Island, seems even more strained in the hindsight of a half-century.

The record credited to simply ‘Geils’  might better have been supplanted by Blow Your Face Out. In that scenario, the definitive live set issued the year prior would then stand as an ideal setup for Sanctuary, the 1978 debut on the EMI-America label, where J. Geils would ultimately find even greater widespread acclaim even as the substance lessened on their LPs. 

Indeed, the arrival of Bloodshot fifty years ago signaled the J. Geils Band’s time and this first of two (!) 1973 albums on Atlantic Records remains one in a string of their most enduring efforts.