Born on May 13th: Richard Salwitz, better known as Magic Dick. The following is from a 2009 interview. Magic Dick was drawn to music when he was barely out of the cradle. I was aware of it at a very early age, he says. When I was three years old, I had a pretty bad case of the flu. My mother bought me a Marine Band harmonica, which is the very same harp that I play today. The J. Geils Band was originally formed as an acoustic blues trio during the mid-60s with guitarist John J Geils and bassist Danny Klein. The three of us were studying to be engineers and scientists at Worchester Polytechnic Institute, which was a small college, says Magic Dick. I loved the subject matter of all that stuff, and to this day I use a lot of what I learned, but in a way that was different than what I was planning when I went to school. The J. Geils Band got its start by virtue of the fact that we serendipitously met at college, he says. We got so into the music thing that we neglected our studies, and after a year and a half we split school and moved to Boston. After about a year in Boston doing our own thing, we met up with Peter Wolf and Stephen Jo Bladd. They were in a different band that was breaking up, so they joined forces with us. During the early days of the J. Geils Band, they played behind such blues music legends as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. We used to jam with them when they came to town, during the late-1960s, remembers Magic Dick. A lot of great Chicago players, due to the efforts of a gentleman named Dick Waterman, he brought a lot of the Chicago blues greats to Boston and to Cambridge, and we had the opportunity to meet these guys and play with them. We were really just getting started, but they were wonderful people. They could tell how much we loved music, how dedicated we were to what we were doing, and they helped us out, says Magic Dick. The band even recorded with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells on the pairs 1972 album Buddy Guy & Junior Wells Play The Blues.
Posted on: Tue, 13 May 2014 04:06:38 +0000
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