John Warren Geils Jr. (pronounced Gailz) (February 20, 1946 – April 11, 2017), known professionally as J. Geils or Jay Geils, was an American guitarist. He was known as the leader of the J. Geils Band.
John Warren Geils Jr. was born in New York City, and grew up in Morris Plains, New Jersey. He was of German ancestry. In 1959, his family moved to Old Farm Lane in Bedminster, New Jersey. He attended Bernards High School in nearby Bernardsville. Before he graduated in 1964 he was a member of the math club, the physics club, student council, car club, band club and the marching band. He also was a big fan of motorcycles. His father was an engineer at Bell Labs and a jazz fan.
From an early age, he heard his father's albums by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, and was escorted by his father to a Louis Armstrong concert. He learned to play Miles Davis music on the trumpet and drums, and he listened to blues singers Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters on the radio. In 1964, he began attending Northeastern University and was a trumpeter in the marching band. When he was drawn to folk musicians in Boston, he left Northeastern for Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he studied mechanical engineering.
Geils began playing jazz trumpet but eventually switched to blues guitar. He formed an acoustic blues trio, 'Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels', with bassist Danny Klein and harmonica player Richard "Magic Dick" Salwitz, while studying mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the mid-1960s. In late 1965 their line-up consisted of vocalist/saxophone player Peter Kraemer, guitarists Terry MacNeil and William "Truckaway" Sievers, bassist Martin Beard (born 1947, London), and drummer Norman Mayell. They soon moved to Boston, where they added new drummer Stephen Jo Bladd and lead vocalist Peter Wolf, who was a late-night DJ on WBCN.
Geils later formed the 'J. Geils Blues Band' with Klein, Salwitz, Bladd, and Wolf, with Seth Justman becoming the final member before the band released its debut album as the J. Geils Band in 1970, the first of 11 albums until 1985. Although they were influenced by soul music and rhythm and blues, their musical style was difficult to categorize. Their success was allegedly limited by being "too white for the black kids and too black for the whites". The band's sound moved toward pop and rock by the time the breakthrough album Love Stinks (EMI, 1980) came out. Their next album, Freeze Frame, produced the song "Centerfold", which sat at number one for six weeks, and the title track, which was a Billboard Top 10 hit.
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Tension and conflict arose among band members, and Wolf left to pursue a solo career. The band broke up in 1985. Geils took a break from music to concentrate on auto racing and restoration. In 2012 he filed a lawsuit against the other band members when they allegedly planned to tour without him while using the band's trademarked name. This prompted him to quit the group permanently. In 1992 he formed the band Bluestime and recorded two blues albums with Magic Dick, then played in a jazz trio with guitarists Duke Robillard and Gerry Beaudoin. He released his first solo album, Jay Geils Plays Jazz!, in 2005.
In addition to passing on an interest in jazz, Geils's father took him to auto races in Pennsylvania in the 1950s. Geils became fascinated with Italian sports cars. He drove in five races a year during the early 1980s, at the peak of the J. Geils Band's popularity. He opened KTR Motorsports, an automobile restoration shop in Ayer, Massachusetts to service and repair vintage sports cars such as Ferrari and Maserati. He sold the shop in 1996, though he continued to use the shop and participate in the company.
The J Geils Band reunited for a tour in 1999 and made sporadic subsequent appearances, including opening for Aerosmith at Fenway Park, Boston, in 2010. Geils was named to the Wall of Honor at his alma mater, Bernards High School, in Bernardsville, New Jersey. In September 2016, he was arrested and charged with drunk driving after allegedly rear-ending a car in Concord, Massachusetts.
On April 11, 2017, Groton Police conducted a well-being check on Geils and found him unresponsive at his home in Groton, Massachsetts. He was pronounced dead from natural causes at age 71. (Edited from Wikipedia)