Feelies - Nerves on Edge

“Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?” Enquired the Assistant Predestinator. “I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate. There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it’s marvelous. Every hair of the beast reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects”.
(Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”)

Group entertainment, forced socializing and sexuality, controlled drug addiction. The dystopian delirium of "Brave New World" is only a tangential part of the Feelies' imaginative world; it might almost seem like a schoolyard fetish with which to certify their image as New Jersey nerds. And yet the music of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million resembles a little those collective gatherings described by Aldous Huxley: unrestrained, indeed barbaric in its pre-rational, subliminal quality; above all, extremely erotic, in its ritual yet also plastic representation of the sexual act.
What's fascinating about the Feelies is how the dystopia of the British writer - elitist at least on an intellectual level - gets turned on its head and mocked by the American band. In those countless nights at Maxwell's in Hoboken, there was no realization of the contemporary horror of oblivion and self-annihilation, of the domestication of consciousness: simply, with the rare physicality of great human works, life took shape - albeit the sweaty, youthful, hormonal and imperfect life of rock.

The "crazy rhythms" of late-70s New York

New York in 1976-78 is the real point of attraction for American new wave: dozens of bands descend on the city in a desperate search for a record deal. The shared imperative is to stand out, to get noticed: at the summer festivals a dozen bands take the stage every night, each with their own original repertoire. Between Cbgb's and Max's Kansas City, Television, Blondie, and the Talking Heads perform... In this chaos, the Feelies will be visible enough to get themselves promoted by Verlaine's band's manager and keep playing (and dreaming) around town, but not visible enough to get snapped up by a label.  
The band's initial core is made up not only of Mercer and Million, the two guitarists, but also Dave Weckerman, who would later become the percussionist - a prominent role, then - without officially appearing in the credits of the Feelies' first record. The band's early history is one of slow progression, in which a sonic exploration, independent yet fueled not only by the New York scene but also by the British punk movement, merges with the need to deal with sudden line-up changes. The key moment comes when Vinnie Di Nunzio, the drummer and brother of bassist Keith, leaves the Feelies to play with Richard Lloyd of Television. His replacement is Anton Fier, a musician already known for having played with Electric Eels and Pere Ubu.

The band's sonic experimentation - that is, doing away with cymbals in favor of a broader percussive accompaniment (maracas, tom-toms, tambourine) - would translate in practice, on this occasion, into an animalistic rhythmic drive, into overexcited shows (legend has it the band members drank huge quantities of coffee before every show) which the Feelies doled out sparingly throughout the year. "We only played on national holidays," Mercer recalls. Little interested in live activity, obsessive in polishing their sound, and with a very limited repertoire: perhaps this explains the mystery of why the band never signed to a label. By the time the single "Fa-Cé-La" came out on Rough Trade, however, the five from Haledon, New Jersey were already under contract with Stiff, eager to get their hands on what they considered a band with an easy hit single and explosive live potential.
In fact, it's the Feelies who consciously respond to the first offer that guarantees them complete production autonomy and control not only over the band's music but also its image. The first "disappointment" for the London label of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe will be an in-house record for the length of the album's recording sessions: four weeks, during which Mercer and Million's dissatisfaction with the guitar sound would push them to the desperate choice of recording their parts without an amplifier.

"[...] The production was definitely unique, to my ears. One of the main reasons is that we had a lot of trouble getting a good guitar sound in the studio. We tried everything. Different amps, different rooms. We basically exhausted the possibilities of the studio we were in. Mark Ambel, the co-producer of the record, said: "Why don't we record the guitars direct and re-amp them when we're ready to mix?" We were supposed to do the mixing at a better studio. He told us we'd get a better sound there. So we were recording the guitars direct, which is like a rule. Never record guitars direct. It sounded really dry, dead. But actually we started to like that sound. A lot of the guitars on the record were left that way. We found that, when you record direct, it's a bit closer to your ear. You have the space of the speaker and ... of the microphone while you're recording. A lot of people think acoustic guitars are just electrics recorded direct. A kind of dry sound".
(Glenn Mercer)

The start of the record is more than a simple introduction. In that minute of primordial darkness, in which sounds overlap from a distance as if in a cave slowly filling with torches, entire epochs seem to pass and a promise of no return is silently sealed in blood. Something mysteriously primitive can be felt coming from the sounds of Crazy Rhythms. That dryness, the muffled insistence of the drums and percussion, the bestial scrape of Million and Mercer's symbiotic guitar interplay, turn "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness" into a solemn opening statement, in which this shy, withdrawn boy next door seems to rise up into a giant totem, every bodily orifice erupting fire. The "boy next door" doesn't seem to do much of anything, because "he don't help out in the yard", or because he doesn't help his mom carry the grocery bags. The nerd's revenge is accomplished in the chorus:

The boy next door is into better things
As far as I can see
The boy next door is into bigger things
The boy next door is me

The Feelies "choose" - then as now - a necessary set of reference imagery, starting with the famous album cover (quoted and replicated on the debut of Weezer), in which they flaunt the most brazen look of the school cafeteria outcast. In reality the band's aesthetic doesn't seem to be clothed in any particular intellectual trappings: the impressionistic lyrics of Crazy Rhythms seem aimed at capturing the feelings of their peers and describing their world in a handful of words, rather than building up a solid conceptual pantheon.
The record's true importance undoubtedly lies in its musical content and in its intrinsic, explosive sonic novelty. What transcends the sum of the record's ingredients - the punk of the cover of "Paint It Black", the album's bonus track, Verlaine's guitar, the first monochord wails of no-wave in "Forces At Work", the accelerated psychedelia of the "White Album" in the cover of "Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except Me And My Monkey)" - is precisely the whirlwind fusion of past and contemporary ingredients, accelerated madly until a core as pure as possible is obtained.
Rhythm takes on a central, dominant role (the title track). And the guitars of Mercer and Million, after a youth spent learning the instrument together, are symbiotic, complementary - see the almost instrumental "Raised Eyebrows", but above all "Loveless Love", introduced by minimal chord sequences and Fier's Maureen Tucker-style drumming, which lays out a kind of ante-litteram, post-punk theorem of "math-rock", though eroded from within by the usual anxious streak, with, in the finale, a rapid up-and-down of the six-string that dissolves into a very brief impressionistic patch of floating electronics.
Eager to distance themselves from the punk-rock image of the most prominent bands of the era (Stooges and MC5, for example), the Feelies would look to the experience of Eno's work to create spaces and landscapes between the instruments, drawing on the composer's lessons about the "studio as compositional tool".
A summary of all this is probably the band's first and only single, "Fa-Cé-La", with its robotic percussive section, as if drums and percussion were fused into one enormous, perfectly automatic mechanical contraption, Million's minimal, frenzied strumming and Mercer's voluptuous flashes, their voices overlapping as they reiterate their scattershot, impressionistic message: "Get a message to Mom and Dad: - Everything is all right -".

All right, but not for Stiff. Despite the fact that the Feelies had to pay out of pocket for the extra days spent in the studio, their label wants to pack them off on a promotional tour featuring all the bands on the roster, with a rotating headlining slot. The band, used to playing no more than eight shows a year, refuses to take part in that three-month forced-march tour. Things turn sour, until the final break.
This happens when, in response to Stiff's request for a demo for the second album, the band turns in "The Obedient Atom", a track in pure Feelies style: "Almost entirely instrumental, with some vocals at the end," Mercer recalls. The label summons them to the office; they want a verse-chorus hit.

Amid the difficulties of keeping the project going and the band's genuinely scant activity, the Feelies' members start taking an interest in other projects. Anton Fier leaves the group (for good, which will perhaps have the greatest influence on the Feelies' subsequent output), while Keith DiNunzio starts his own band.
So, once again, it's the original Feelies core (Mercer, Million and Weckerman) that remains to keep playing together, under a new name: the three of them will be, for several years, the Willies.

An active hibernation until the return to the "Good Earth"

The Willies played in the dark, sitting down. We wanted it to be an anti-rock experience.
(Glenn Mercer)

The name "Feelies" may not have reached the popularity needed to give it any real value, but the three musicians are by now a point of reference for early-80s New York. The Willies make performance art more than music: Bill, Glenn and Dave accompany a recorded tape through long, strictly instrumental psychedelic digressions. The darkness in which the shows take place is also part of the rejection of image that is part of the Willies experience.
Through this activity the three gain enough of a reputation to come into contact with director Jonathan Demme and play in one of his films, "Something Wild" (in which they also perform a cover of "I'm A Believer"), as well as composing the soundtrack for Susan Seidelman's "The Smithereens".

Around '82 Glenn writes a new song, this time with vocals ("On The Roof", which would later appear on The Good Earth). The three keep playing as the Willies, since by now the band has more of a following than the Feelies themselves, but they bring to the stage songs that echo their earlier experience - mainly just to see if the Feelies still work. The audience enjoys it far more than they did the dark shows of the old Willies, and so, in May 1983, with the addition of Brenda Sauter on bass, the Crazy Rhythms band's first reunion show takes place.

In the early 80s things are much easier for an independent band. Whereas before you could only play in big cities and therefore had to put together long, expensive tours across the whole country, now college radio allows for a widespread, capillary diffusion of music that previously struggled to get beyond its own city limits, in a genuine ante-litteram Network of pizzerias, bowling alleys and small venues scattered across the United States. As soon as word gets around that the Feelies are back together, Mercer & co. are contacted by a manager, who offers them a national tour.
For the first time in their career, the Feelies will play twenty-five dates, probably more than all those accumulated in the previous years combined. Even in small provincial towns, names like R.E.M., Replacements and Minutemen are familiar faces; in a couple of years the band gains a live experience it never had before. More importantly, the songs on their second album, The Good Earth, would have a gestation very different from the painstaking studio work of Crazy Rhythms.
Perfected show after show, they would finally be recorded once a deal was secured - on their own terms, naturally - with Twin/Tone through Steve Fallon, owner of Maxwell's and their unofficial manager.

By 1986, the year the record comes out, a lot has changed. One band in particular - R.E.M. - has already found great success while openly drawing inspiration from the Feelies, so much so that Peter Buck would insist on serving as sound engineer for The Good Earth. Glenn and Bill, despite the independence of their vision of sound and music, would not be immune to what the independent scene of the period was expressing.
Anton Fier's departure - he would go on to become Herbie Hancock's drummer - would force a rhythmic normalization; the Willies experience would be felt in the gaseous, multicolored psychedelia of "Tomorrow Today".

The sound of the electric guitar without amplification transforms into its natural evolution, the acoustic guitar; more broadly, the sound “fills out,” losing that artistic patina of instinctive liberation, of the deaf atonal urges of Crazy Rhythms. The vitality of the guitar jangle, already fully immersed in the new atmosphere from the opening guitar-and-piano duet of "On The Roof" onward, nonetheless recovers, in melodic terms and in its overall opening-up, the youthful struggle of six years earlier.
The Feelies of 1986 are a band made up of musicians who are by now seasoned, aware and resigned to the fact that their music will never reach the ears of the general public (unlike what happened to the bands they shared stages with in late-1970s New York), but ready to take up the challenge of hidden America, which only at that moment was emerging into the world of "urban" music.

It's hard to imagine an album better suited as a travel companion for the long crossing of the plains and mountains separating America's coasts than The Good Earth. Chords alternating relentlessly like pure fuel, sharp and aerodynamic, a rhythm section morphing from racing bike to reliable tour van: all set for "The High Road" (already an instrumental piece by the Willies), with Mercer's dazed vocals, suddenly a wandering jester, after having been the captain of piracy on the raids of Crazy Rhythms. Impressionistic he was and impressionistic he remains: the human voice appears and disappears like a distant echo in the microphone, the vague Reed-like mumble of someone who prefers to let his instrument do the talking.
The Feelies' evolution into a pop band tout court is above all exemplified by the mutation of the "de-amplified" guitar into a genuine acoustic one: that's the whole secret behind the shift from the previous record's opening razor-cuts to the reassuring swirl of chords - gleaming as rarely elsewhere, as in the records of Galaxie 500 - of "Let's Go".

Alright
Let's go
Let's go
All night long.

The beginning of the end: "it's only life"

The pupil had by now surpassed the master, and so the Feelies go on tour as support for R.E.M. (as well as for Lou Reed), for twelve dates in major U.S. arenas. They undertake their first European tour: they are by now a band with a proven pedigree. It's no coincidence, then, that they get approached by a major label, the then-A&M, which would later evolve into Polygram and, finally, Universal. But if Stiff was "an independent label that behaved like a major," as Mercer recalls, A&M is exactly the opposite. Having known and admired the band since well before it was fashionable, A&M's executives allow Mercer and Million to co-produce their third album.

Without quite meaning to, the two turn out a rather accommodating album in terms of the sounds of the era (starting with Mercer's vocals), with a very homogeneous sound, smoothed over by reverb on the drums. A decidedly relaxed work, not only lacking the sharp edges of Crazy Rhythms, but also the vitality of The Good Earth. The chords chase each other amid percussive chimes ("The Undertow"), rhythm and lead guitar dance sensually in long, voluptuous embraces ("Higher Ground"): the Feelies have invented a formula and stick to it, without daring to shift an inch.
Already on Only Life, in short, one can sense, beyond the fun of playing together and being able to do so on their own terms and timing, the fatigue of a band that, having come within sight of the economic independence guaranteed by music alone, discovers the mirage of remaining so, tangible or not. Playing live becomes a habit, recording a calculated repetition of by-now mechanical gestures. So the accelerations of "For A While" unfold with a necessary, rather than spontaneous, drive, and dissolve once the task is done.

Besides the sense of having forged themselves a trade, the Feelies have to contend with the troubles of their label. Shortly after the release of Only Life, in fact, A&M is absorbed by Polygram - the label's entire management changes hands. New people, who don't know the Feelies and don't know what to make of a band still considered "promising" (by record-industry standards) a full ten years after their debut, opening shows for younger acts. Their independence in the studio is probably still seen as an adolescent whim.
Perhaps for this reason too, for the Feelies' fourth record, Polygram will provide them with the best recording studios in the country, even against their will, needlessly spoiling them the way an absent father might. Perhaps sensing what was to come, Bill Million brings to Time For A Witness the meticulousness of someone afraid of giving the world his last creation, having the tracks recorded obsessively over and over (they spent a whole week on the title track alone).

The scant attention and understanding shown by their label is, however, nothing new for the band, and it won't stop them from shutting themselves away in their dazzling new studio to record an album that several fans of the band consider the best in their discography. Perhaps a bit too generous toward the group's farewell to the scene of the time, because Time For A Witness has neither the sheer expressive power, the creative struggle of Crazy Rhythms, nor, probably, the melodic inspiration of The Good Earth.
Be that as it may, the record doesn't really break away from the more era-accommodating sounds embraced with Only Life, but it does manage to recapture, for instance in the rough darkness of the guitars on "What She Said", a bit of the band's old instinctiveness, filtered through the experience of a now-veteran band.
The guitar interplay between Mercer and Million takes center stage even more than in the past, every track feels like a sexually reconciling dance ("Find A Way"), an orgiastic ritual orchestrated amid splashes of colored paint. It's '91, and the band, with this thickened sound and a far more regular lead guitar, dispensing solos and circular riffs, seems more than ready to take on the challenge of the new decade.
Their manager, Steve Fallon, makes them understand that the time has come to try for the big leap: no more out-of-the-way clubs, but a real tour of major U.S. theaters, complete with sound engineers and lighting crew. The band is divided, and to Mercer in particular the idea doesn't seem like a good one: better a packed club than a half-empty theater. Million, however, has health problems and no health insurance: from Florida, his wife's family is pushing him to find stable work. This is the Feelies' last chance to break through.

The theaters will indeed turn out half-empty: the tour will shatter the band's great illusion of popularity. "When the guy carrying your amp makes more than you do, something's wrong," Mercer says, quoting Paul Westerberg to describe the situation. For A&M it will be yet another confirmation, after the drop in sales of this record compared to the previous one, of the band's limited potential. So they cut their support for live activity: if they want to go out and play, they'll have to do it on their own dime.
The Feelies can't afford to self-finance a tour, and for Million playing live is a grueling physical ordeal, especially because of the smoke. In July 1991 the Feelies play for the last time, with the unsettling feeling, watching long-haired kids jumping on stage with their skateboards, that everything has changed. A month later, "Nevermind" will be released.

Million doesn't leave the band for good; he would just like to play in his free time, now and then, while staying in New Jersey. His family has by now settled in Florida, and in that summer of '91 his father-in-law offers him a stable job. Million's departure will coincide with the Feelies' breakup: his is one of the few truly irreplaceable rhythm guitars in rock history.

A tree never uprooted

The Feelies will inevitably fall apart, like an already-teetering structure stripped of a load-bearing column. Glenn and Dave will keep playing together in Wake Ooloo (while Stan Demeski joins Dean Wareham's Luna, of Galaxie 500), wading together through the MTV era, when "alternative" breaks through onto the TV screen and new bands get coached by managers on what to say in interviews.
Everything carries on like this until 2001: a single phone call, sparked by contractual squabbles, the first in years, is enough to bring Glenn and Bill back to the days when their only worry was the running order of songs on a record, or which amplifier to spend the money earned from recent gigs on. The promise to play together again is vague, but enough to re-establish contact and keep it alive until the right occasion comes along.
As soon as word gets around that the Feelies seem willing to play together again, requests pour in, but the real "offer they can't refuse" arrives in the late spring of 2008: Sonic Youth, whose drummer co-owns Maxwell's, want them for their July 4th show at Battery Park. The summer date favors a reunion of the lineup from the Feelies' last three records: Mercer, Million, Weckermann, Sauter and Demeski. The following year, they'll perform Crazy Rhythms in full for an edition of All Tomorrow's Parties, on the occasion of the album's reissue, together with The Good Earth, via Bar/None (and Domino outside the United States).

After Galaxie 500, it's precisely them who stoke the "vindicating" appetites of the American indie audience. As if history were setting things right, finally granting the Feelies the success they never had. Bill and Glenn discover, however, that they've remained exactly who they always were: they swap tapes of ideas they've developed over the years, drawing eight tracks from Mercer's and five from Million's.

Here Before comes out, again on Bar/None, in 2011. Perhaps a bit too close to the "classic" reunion album, this work sees the reproduction of the Feelies' sound - or rather, of their second incarnation - take precedence over everything else. The risk of a "nostalgia operation" is very much real, but in this the band seems unconcerned with its own artistic ambitions, consciously giving up on any unlikely image makeover.
Here Before is, in short, openly a gift to the fans and to themselves: heavily indebted above all to The Good Earth, with a few successful moments ("Nobody Knows", the "On The Roof" revisited of "Should Be Gone") and others less so (the somewhat by-the-numbers power-pop of "Time Is Right", for instance), like the performance of a former gymnast. Whether they fumble or pull off the moves of twenty years earlier, it's all applause regardless.

The second chapter of their comeback, In Between (2017), is even more intangible. Songs like "Stay The Course", "Time Will Tell" and "When To Go" emerge timidly, sung almost voicelessly, arranged with the barest minimum, and fade away inertly. The reprise of the title track, minutes of closing guitar feedback, is however one of their most faithful imitations of Velvet Underground. At times a two-man affair between Mercer and Million alone, marked by a dignified old age that goes hand in hand with their characteristic humility, yet which still drags the album (their sixth in almost forty years) down into neutrality. An attempt to appeal, across the board, to more than one generation.

What followed were releases made up entirely of covers. Some Kinda Love (2023) documents a 2018 live show devoted entirely to their idols Velvet Underground. Rewind (2025) collects the covers scattered across the years, essentially expanding on the previously released EP Uncovered.

Contributions by Francesco Nunziata (“Crazy Rhythms”) and Michele Saran (“In Between”)

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