Song of the Day
The Feelies: boys with perpetual nerdiness.
The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness- The Feelies In the early Eighties the best band in New York City actually lived across the Hudson River in Hoobken New Jersey. The Feelies were a lovable group of nerdy guys just out of high school who had a chiming guitar sound and crazy off tempo polyrhythmatic tribal drum sounds.
The leader of the band was a musical savant named Glenn Mercer who didn't seem the least bit interested in being
the next big thing on the new wave music scene. I saw the Feelies live on three occasions during that era and they lived up to their growing reputation one of the best live bands of that era.
Their first album
Crazy Rhythms became a fetish item for the NYC rock underground after it went out of issue in a couple of years. The album was special for a lot of reasons: the bursts of guitar crossfire between Glen Mercer and Bill Million and the frantic drumming of Anton Fier gave a sense of immediacy and volitility to their music, but that enegry was counterpointed by a sense of mystery and introspection in the songs they wrote.
The Feelies waited six years to make another album and gained a notorious reputation as a difficult band to work with. The album the
Good Earth wasn't nearly as exciting as their debut. The Feelies regained some of their audience with the release of
Only Life in 1988 but broke up soon after that album was made. Over the past 20 years the Feelies have reunited periodically with Mercer and Million at the helm. That band has currently been reunited for about a year and a half and has gigged around New York, Boston and Hoboken but has yet to release another album.