J. Geils Band – Love Itis

One of America’s greatest bar bands tore through this on national TV one Halloween night — but the song wasn’t theirs, and the man who actually wrote it has been all but forgotten.

On October 31, 1975, the J. Geils Band kicked off their set on NBC’s late-night showcase The Midnight Special with a sweat-soaked rave-up called Love-Itis — Peter Wolf working the stage like a man possessed, Magic Dick’s harmonica cutting through the horn-driven groove. To most viewers it sounded like a J. Geils original, another slice of the Boston band’s high-octane party rock. It wasn’t. Love-Itis was already eight years old, written and first recorded by a Milwaukee soul singer most of America had never heard of.

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That was the whole J. Geils Band method. Formed in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1967 and signed to Atlantic — the great house of rhythm and blues — they made their name as the best bar band in America by raiding the obscure corners of Black R&B, soul, and doo-wop and slamming the songs back to life with Stonesy swagger and Wolf’s manic showmanship. Their first Top 40 hit was a cover of the Valentinos’ Lookin’ for a Love; their live shows were legend for the way they could take a forgotten soul nugget and detonate it. Love-Itis, recorded for their 1975 album Hotline, was exactly that kind of resurrection.

The man who really wrote it

The song belongs to Harvey Scales. A Milwaukee singer, guitarist, and bandleader, Scales cut Love-Itis with his group the Seven Sounds in 1967 for the small Magic Touch label, sharing the writing credit with Albert Vance. It was a gritty piece of Midwestern soul, and though it never became a national smash, it had the kind of irresistible, slightly unhinged hook that other musicians couldn’t leave alone. The garage-rock band The Sonics cut a version that same year; the Canadian group Mandala turned it into a single in 1968. Scales himself would go on to co-write a far more famous song — Johnnie Taylor’s massive 1976 hit Disco Lady — but Love-Itis remained his calling card among the musicians who knew where the good material was buried.

By the time the J. Geils Band got to it, they had spent years perfecting the art of the cover that sounds more alive than the original. Their Love-Itis is faster, louder, and built for a crowd — Wolf turning Scales’s come-on into a full-bore performance, the band swinging hard behind him. Atlantic released it as a single in October 1975, backed with Think It Over, just as the band was riding the success of their bigger hit Must of Got Lost. It was never a chart story; it was a stage story, the kind of song that existed to be played live in front of a roomful of people losing their minds.

Halloween on The Midnight Special

Which is what makes the Midnight Special footage such a perfect document. Taped for broadcast on Halloween 1975, the performance catches the J. Geils Band at the height of their powers as a live act, years before Centerfold and Freeze-Frame would make them MTV superstars and reframe them as a pop band. Here they’re still the greasy, joyous R&B machine that built its reputation one club at a time — Wolf vaulting around the microphone stand, Magic Dick blowing harp like his life depended on it, the whole band locked into a groove they’d borrowed and made their own. The next year they’d immortalize the song again on the live album Blow Your Face Out, recorded in front of hometown crowds in Boston and Detroit.

It’s a small, telling piece of rock history: a white Boston bar band, a forgotten Milwaukee soul man, and a song that found its widest audience only when it was handed off and turned up loud. The J. Geils Band never pretended the material was theirs — covering the right obscure record was the entire point. Love-Itis is what they did better than almost anyone: find the buried treasure, and make the whole room believe it had been written for that exact moment.