Brass Trax

Somewhere along the way the Feelies became obscure. Relegated to the pantheon of rock “influences,” bands who are known more for inspiring other, more famous bands than for their own work. It wasn’t always that way. The Feelies, a bunch of kids from the Jersey suburbs, were once the toast of the city. Critics called them “the best underground band in New York,” and the band’s brilliance can still be found in its first two albums, recently reissued on Bar/None records.

Bill Million, the lead guitar player and vocalist, once called the Feelies “a basement band.” He was describing where the band rehearsed, but the phrase could also describe its music. The Feelies didn’t make garage rock. There is nothing brute and primal about its music. It doesn’t hit you in the gut like a three chord rave up. Instead, it lends itself to headphone listening, possibly in a basement rec room, where its precise intricacies can be better appreciated. Nonetheless, the Feelies’ “basement rock,” like garage rock, sounds unforced, unpretentious—the work of an artisan, rather than a pedant.

That’s not to say that the Feelies were anti-intellectual. Unabashed inheritors of the Velvet Underground’s minimalist pop, the Feelies also knew their Steve Reich. Consider “The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness,” the opener to the band’s debut album Crazy Rhythms (1980), which begins with a single note strummed by both guitarists for nearly a minute, a frenetic stasis that eventually gives way to a pop song. The same song later includes a guitar bridge that sounds like the filigrees Brian Eno and David Byrne added to “Once in a Lifetime,” but the Feelies weren’t an art rock band, like Talking Heads. They occupied a liminal space in the New York City rock scene: Jersey kids who played downtown. As Thurston Moore recently told the New York Times, “[T]hese guys were buttoned-up-collars nerd boys from the ’burbs. They were totally straight from the backyard cookout. So it was cool to be not cool.”

Listen to “The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness”

The proof was in their chops. The band might have emulated the Velvets in their rhythmic simplicity and droning harmonies, but the Feelies played with a lot more precision. Their guitar tones were crisp, each note was played clearly, and the kind of chance effects that the Velvets squeezed out of their sloppy drone would never make it to a Feelies record, where every sound has been meticulously planned. (The band reportedly jettisoned its cymbals because the timbres were too imprecise. Call us if you hear a cymbal on the first two records.) In that respect, the Feelies resemble their New York contemporaries Television, and the crystal-clear guitar tone on tracks like “Fa ce-La” and “Loveless Love” share something with the solos of Tom Verlaine.

Listen to “Fa ce-La”
Listen to “Loveless Love”

The Feelies’ popularity in New York didn’t translate into record sales elsewhere, and Crazy Rhythms tanked. It was a crushing blow for the band, which went on hiatus—and yielded a clutch of spin-off bands that were, by most accounts, mediocre. The Feelies were back in the studio by 1985, however, and the result The Good Earth may surpass even Crazy Rhythms in grandeur and clarity of concept.

A lot happened between 1980 and 1985, but one development would have a particularly fraught impact on the Feelies and their reception. R.E.M. made it big. The Athens, Georgia band was filled with unapologetic Feelies fans—Robert Christgau once described R.E.M., hyperbolically, as “Feelies clones”—which would be both a blessing and a curse. From the mid-80s until the present day, virtually no critic has failed to compare the two bands.

In fact, it was a member of R.E.M., Peter Buck, who produced The Good Earth, and he might have had something to do with its countrified sound. (Then again, he might not have. Bill Millions maintains that the Feelies did most of the production work on the record.) At any rate, something slipped into the Feelies’ sound between 1980 and 1985 that brought it closer to the Byrds, farther from the Velvets. The Good Earth has moments of jangly psychedelia that wouldn’t seem out of place among west coast Paisley Underground bands like Rain Parade or The Three O’Clock. That’s not to say that the band forsook its former idols—”The Last Roundup” and “Slipping (Into Something)” could have been swiped straight from Lou Reed’s songbook—but it is to say that the Feelies’ sound had become less provincial, less tied to New York.

Listen to “The Last Roundup”
Listen to “Slipping (Into Something)”

The Feelies’ embrace of Americana didn’t exactly hurt record sales, and, for a brief period in the late 80s, the Feelies might have been “the best underground band in the United States.” They released three more albums—two on a major label—received a notice in Time magazine, and got soundtrack work from fans Jonathan Demme and Susan Seidelman. The band broke up when Bill Millions went missing—Gone to Florida—in the early 90s, but it has recently reunited, playing shows with Sonic Youth on the east coast and giving a new generation of fans the opportunity to hear its pristine guitar tones live and in person. It might not be long before the Feelies, like fellow “influences” 13th Floor Elevators and, indeed, the Velvet Underground, become appreciated in their own right.

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