![]() It was a time when majority-bearded warhorse Texas boogie-rock trios woke up one morning to find themselves video stars. new-wave bands and MTV's insatiable need to obtain more grist for the mill, bringing us Flock of Seagulls, The Human League, and other exponents of severe haircuts. And a second British Invasion was underway, prompted by a glut of available videos by U.K. Like the year's top pop songs, the MTV of 1981 was heavily populated by artists warily leaning into the fourth and final turn of their career - Cliff Richard, Rupert Hines, April Wine - but lightly peppered with burgeoning new-wave artists like The Cars and Robin Lane.īy the end of '82, all eyes (at least in cities where MTV was available) had turned to music videos, which had very quickly become a requisite to pop success. ![]() Music videos were not yet commonplace in the U.S., as they were in Europe, and MTV's most-played videos from its debut year shows a list clearly influenced by availability more than popularity. The bad news was they had 24 hours of airtime to fill and little to fill it with.įresh Air Peter Wolf: From J. The good news for the fledgling network's founders was that they'd convinced enough local cable operators to carry the channel to launch. Ironically, but perhaps inevitably, the band's breakthrough hit was the one that sounded the least like its legendary live show.ġ981 was also, of course, the year that MTV launched, just two months before the release of Freeze Frame. And, unlike the road-tested '70s catalog, "Centerfold" appeared to be a studio concoction, completely absent from their live sets until after the release of Freeze Frame. Geils song, but the famously nimble guitar playing of the band's namesake, which breezily traversed from blues to jazz to funk, had been reduced to power-riffing over the chorus. ![]() Peter Wolf's unmistakable Bronx-accented Motown rasp left no doubt that "Centerfold" was a J. Richard 'Magic Dick' Salwitz onstage at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California on October 17, 1981. As a result, the album was as off-putting to old fans as it was rapturously received by what must have been a startling magnitude of new ones.īeyond possessing the requisite synth and drum excess, "Centerfold" perfectly encapsulated the moment by crashing the new decade's charts with one tentative foot in '80s pop and one tenuously, but still credibly, lodged in their R&B roots, in the fleeting moments before heritage bands would be displaced by Men Without Hats. It was the first of two huge crossover pop hits from the group's 1981 album Freeze Frame, which marked the band's first foray into the poppy, new-wavey songcraft and slick production style that '80s hits demanded. "Centerfold" was unique on many levels - not the least of which being its distinction as the first chart-topping single about softcore pornography to be released by a band that counts someone named Magic Dick among its members. Just when it seemed that history would brand it as nothing more than an above-par Animal House-style party band following the disappointing chart stall of 1980's "Love Stinks" at No. Geils Band made its name as a live act, but made history a little later.
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