Geils delivers hard-drivin’ rock and then some

THE J. GEILS BAND With the Chris Robinson Brotherhood

At: Bank of America Pavilion, Saturday

The gauntlet was thrown down early Saturday night - before the J. Geils Band had even played one note, in fact. With the house lights down, and the house party about to begin, the sporadically reforming, yet perennially adored group was introduced to a sold-out crowd as “the original bad boys from Boston’’ - a seeming (and not so subtle) dig at that other ill-behaved, break-up-and-make-up band with whom Geils shared (or did not share, exactly) a Fenway Park stage last summer.

On this, the first of a two-night stand at the Bank of America Pavilion and the second date of a short reunion tour (although Geils’s frontman Peter Wolf disputed calling it that, instead describing the scenario as a much more casual affair: “We just get together when we get together’’), there were no catwalks to cause a catty kerfuffle, and no distractions from the band business at hand, which was playing hard. And then, playing some more.