The new film The Squid and the Whale should be a cause for celebration among fans of '80s nervous nerd rock: The Feelies are back in the house!
The song "Let's Go," from their 1986 disc, The Good Earth, is among the movie's choice soundtrack cuts (a fine soundtrack, by the way, that ranges from Lou Reed to Luna to Bert Jansch to Loudon Wainwright III. Wainwright's "Lullaby," written to make his then-toddler Rufus "shut up" and go to sleep, is worth the coin alone and explains a lot about those dissing, dysfunctional Wainwrights.)
But back to the Feelies. They remain one of the criminally underappreciated bands that rose out of the '80s post-punk movement, and it's a shame they never caught on like, say, the Talking Heads. They took the '60s stripped-down aesthetic of Reed and the Velvet Underground and married it to a giddy guitar energy, making at least one classic album, a couple of other good ones and one notable appearance in a movie before dissolving into memory. But you can still hear their influence today in bands from R.E.M. to Yo La Tengo.
Their debut, 1980's Crazy Rhythms, a quintessential New Jersey garage rock disc, should be on the shelf of any serious modern rock collector. At the time, the band members were still in or barely out of high school. The sound is raw but luminous, a buzz of jangly guitar rhythms and wild sounds, from wonderful originals such as "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness" and the hopped-up melody of "Fa Ce-La," to some of the best covers ever of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and my Monkey)" and the Stones' "Paint It Black."
All in all, this is a high water mark of the pocket-protector rock genre, more amazing for it being produced by a bunch of kids.
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Article comments
1 - Larry A. Sakin
Great review of a great band. "Crazy Rhythm" was my favorite album of their's... just loved the frenetic pace and the seemingly never ending guitar rev-ups.
I took a friend to see them in the late eighties, and she was just stymied. She couldn't believe all these geeky guys on a tiny club stage just blowing the roof off that place. Just amazing...
2 - GoHah
Thanks for the reminder--I loved the Feelies. They were one of those groups, like Game Theory, the La's, the Dwight Twilley Band, 20/20 that deserved wider appreciation.
3 - Eric Olsen
Deno and GoHa, man you guys are lighting up my inner musical temples with these references - so glad to have you both here! (You too Larry, of course, but you've been here a while!) I love the intersection of power pop and indie rock
4 - ClubhouseCancer
Ahhh, the days at Maxwell's watching this incredible band. the whole key to their live shows (and some of their best songs, like "Slipping in to Something" and the aformentioned "Too Far Gone" are that these simple, jangly guitar rythms just build in volume, speed, and intensity, and end up just burning the palce down. These guys were great, but they were strange New Jerseyans to a man (and woman) and were pretty much allergic to traveling, so their tours were short and unhappy, and they were pretty much doomed to failure.
Glenn Mercer lived next door to me for a few years in Hoboken and is not a nice person, to my mind. But his band is much-missed. By the way, the Yo La Tengo influence went both ways.