The Feelies formed as a four-man rock band in a New Jersey suburb whose biggest 20th century shakeup was a textile strike. They wrote some original material and learned a couple of Beatles songs. They took their show 20 miles southeast to Hoboken, drove to Manhattan under the Hudson River, tucked in their shirts, pushed their glasses up on their nosebridges, and unleashed a kind of hypnotic punk-lite so buttoned up that it sounds choked-- like they counted to four and grabbed an electric fence. Did I say the Feelies are a rock band? I misspoke. They're a particle collider.
Crazy Rhythms, their 1980 debut, has none of the attitudinal markings of rock-- no looseness, no swing, no danger, no laughs. Its cover-- a band portrait on a sky-blue void, echoed 14 years later on Weezer's "blue album" -- is bland and eerie. It looks like a misplaced rendering of four boys whose closest contact with rock music came from fixing radios. The title of the album appears as some innovative form of non-joke.
And yet, and yet. Three-chord punk-- apparently too excessive for them-- is boiled down to two-chord devotionals: one for the first three minutes, one for the second. Two- and three-note guitar solos drone over the mix like a Muezzin's call. Bill Million and Glenn Mercer sing in grey, unimpressive voices-- probably influenced by the Velvet Underground, but just as likely a product of the belief that lead vocals were for generally immodest people.
The focus and direction of the sound hangs on Mercer and Million's guitars, but the essence of the album-- the DNA sequence not found anywhere else-- is its percussion tracks. Cymbals and hi-hats are ignored almost entirely-- too cathartic, too showy. Almost every track is overdubbed with a dry chorus of cowbells, claves, woodblocks, bells and maracas. Glenn Mercer's credit on a cover of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" reads: "other guitar, vocals, bell, coat rack." Drummer Anton Fier thumps out the words NOT TIRED YET NOT TIRED YET NOT TIRED YET in Morse code on his tom-toms. Presumably, shows ended with the rest of the band unplugging him.
It's fastidious, committed and unendingly tense music. A couple of tracks-- first single "Fa Ce'-La" and "Original Love"-- take the shape of pop songs: A few minutes, a few parts, a verse, a chorus. Most of the songs, though, are shaped like Steve Reich or Philip Glass compositions: Music that creates drama by swelling, shading and repeating, not carving out peaks and valleys. The album's longest, most arresting tracks -- "Forces at Work" and "Crazy Rhythms"-- don't seem to change as much as dilate.
The music on the album is rare, but the tone-- especially with the knowledge that it was never really replicated by any other band-- is rarer. Weezer, the Talking Heads and the Modern Lovers used their social eccentricities as badges of honor and safe vantage points for self-expression. The Feelies don't sound any more comfortable on Crazy Rhythms than you imagine they might standing in a room full of strangers or mountain lions. They sound commanded by inspiration, almost religiously single-minded. Mark Abel, who co-produced the album with Mercer and Million, called them "the most obstinate people I've ever met." According to Jim DeRogatis's liner notes for the reissue, they started telling adulatory interviewers that driving through the Holland Tunnel gave them headaches.
Crazy Rhythms is their big album. Their talked-about one. The Good Earth, produced by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and released six years later, is their little one. Bassist Keith DeNunzio and Anton Fier left the band (Fier went on to play with Bill Laswell, Pere Ubu, John Zorn and a gymnasium's worth of notable avant-rock musicians). Dave Weckerman, Brenda Sauter and Stan Demeski-- all local musicians Million and Mercer had been tooling around in side projects with-- joined.
The tempos are relaxed, the percussion understated, the instrumentation largely acoustic. It's no less hypnotic than Crazy Rhythms, but it has a different notion of infinity: Wheat fields, Sunday drives, childhood bedtimes to the sound of adults murmuring from the living room. The cover image-- the band, slightly sepia-toned and standing in tall grass-- is a rural reconsideration of Crazy Rhythms, a stepping back. Mercer's vocals are a stream-of-consciousness hum under the shimmer of guitars. "Being a guitar player," he said, "I don't have much of a need to express myself as a singer" -- a claim that makes you think the guitar solos are going to be fireworks, and they aren't. Fireworks are not what the Feelies were about.
You don't hear too many people talking in hyperbole about The Good Earth is for the same reasons you don't hear people talking in hyperbole about taking a nap in the park. Listening start-to-finish, it sounds even more removed than Crazy Rhythms, an album that blurs together and exists unto itself-- different enough from their first album to be incomparable, different enough from a lot of other music-- even R.E.M.-- to be unmistakable as anyone else.
These albums have been out of print for several years. If you were lucky (or old) enough to own them the first time around, buy them again. The bonus material is nothing special: New live recordings from their recent reunion shows, a couple of demos, a couple of older covers (but not the cover of "Paint It, Black" appended to the last edition of Crazy Rhythms). And you have to download the songs using a little business card with a serial number because the band thought the albums should stand on their own, which they should.
But oh the glorious sound. I am not someone who relaxes on an animal hides in front of four-foot tall speakers and compares the relative merits of recordings, but I will tell you that these remasters sound fantastic-- crisp, nuanced, and all kinds of other luxurious adjectives. Apparently, there's a dog barking the background of The Good Earth interlude "When Company Comes". Someone mumbles during the guitar break on "Let's Go". And the coat rack, as clear and unexpected as ever.
