Went to see the Feelies with friends David, Jonathan, and Jason on Saturday night, and they were everything I'd hoped. I've never seen them live; most people haven't, as their legendarily "anti-careerist" career kept the New Jersey / New York postpunk legends from touring very much during their heyday in the 80s.
The whole band sounded great and played really assertively, especially frontman Glenn Mercer. His guitar solos were riveting, never meandering, and we cheered them spontaneously like at a jazz show. His voice surprised me, deep but more out front and confident than on the albums. He's a Lou Reed kind of talk-singer, but he can also really actually sing. It helped that it was some of the best, clearest sound I'd ever heard at a club. (In part because the size of the room was essentially halved for the non-sellout crowd, with the movable stage pushed forward quite a ways.)
Mercer, fact-checking-cuz /percussionist Dave Weckerman, and the rest of the original-mach II band looked really comfortable rocking out post-40 (post 50? It's possible, though they were pretty young when they started out in the late 70s.) Except for Bill Million, who I didn't expect to look comfortable, given that his "personal and family problems" broke up the band in '91 when he moved his family to Florida for a job at Disneyland without telling anyone. He looked kind of anxious and weird, the effort of concentration required to keep up with the "hyper-strum" rhythm guitar evident in his face. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he looked that way at the height of his powers either.
They played very lively versions of songs from all their albums, with energy building throughout the show as Mercer began to jump around and Weckerman worked himself into a frenzy. Then FIVE two-song encores, which seemed like a lot of leaving and coming back. Maybe Million dashing from the stage while the last note of several of the encores had something to do with it. The encores were mostly all covers--the VU covers available on Feelies albums, Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot," and Jonathan Richman's "I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms" paid tribute to the band's 70s New York roots. The cover of REM's early "Boxcar," presumably learned for the tribute to REM at Carnegie Hall a couple of nights earlier, worked in the opposite direction, paying tribute to themselves as an influence on REM and the whole indie underground. Neil Young's "Barstool Blues" was my favorite--a perfect choice for Feelie-ization, with metronomic strum replacing Young's quavery swing.
The first time I heard the Feelies was on cassette in Dave's Toyota Tercel in the middle of the night. He, my future wife Diane, and I were coming home to DC from New York, where Dave had taken us to see the Mekons for the first time. With "Crazy Rhythms" cranked and the trees rushing by in the headlights, it felt like were in a time machine. Later, when my wife took me to New Jersey in HER Toyota Tercel for the first time, we made a pilgrimage to Crazy Rhythms Records, where the selection was disappointing and they claimed never to have heard of the Feelies. But they pointed us to a very cool record store around the corner. I bought Mojo Nixon's "Whereabouts Unknown," produced by Roscoe Ambel with Will Rigby from the dBs on drums. The guy behind the counter in that second store looked like he could have been a Feelie or a dB himself.
Check out this interview with Glenn Mercer and Dave Weckerman in the great online magazine Perfect Sound Forever. The interviewer, Jason Gross, also has a music blog, Ye Wei aka Wild Taste.
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