Imagine if instead of doing heroin and hanging out with Andy Warhol and Nico, the members of the Velvet Underground became the coolest high-school teachers you knew, and on weekends were the house band for The Adventures of Pete and Pete?
That, is how I imagine the Feelies, who I saw at the Bell House on Thursday. I freely admit I am late to the Feelies. Late, late. I was just beginning to seriously listen to music when Crazy Rhythms came out, and wasn’t friends with anyone who might have turned me on to them.
The idea of listening to WLIR scared me. Bands that I caught a glimpse of on U68, were like glimpses into some dimension of New Jersey coolness that I had no access to, and Maxwell’s, might as well have been on the Moon.
Years later, I knew they were the band playing the reunion in Something Wild. They were Jonanthan Demme-co0l.
But I eventually found my way to Hoboken, and at the Yo La Tengo benefit gig in March, Glenn Mercer guested for a song, and someone told me who he was (I, having no idea).
“Nobody Knows”, a song, from their new album Here Before, has the verse,
“Is it too late to do it again?
Or should we wait another ten?”
In an interview in Spinner, Mercer said,
“The impetus was more like friends getting together rather than restarting our career again,” he says, “just for the sheer joy of playing the music together again.”
They don’t make an album for 19 years, and yet are as comfortable and tight as twins speaking their own language.
The only words spoken were “Thank you”, (after each song), and “We have a new album” (once).
But the happy wasn’t just theirs. Have I mentioned how AMAZING the gig was? It was hard holding the camera steady, when what I wanted, was to bop around like everybody else.
Their fans are seriously loyal, too. Several people next to me nearly swooned when they heard the opening chords of a favorite tune. If I got a song title wrong when uploading to YouTube, I got a comment within 30 seconds. Literally.
From the first of three encores, a tune from R.E.M.’s first EP. (Feelies were a big influence on them).
I’m glad they didn’t wait another ten.
P.S. Perfect Sound has a great interview from 1996, wth Mercer and Dave Weckerman explaining how they hooked up with Demme.
GLENN: He had called us in the early '80s and proposed a concept of a concert film that would take place in our home town. He described it as cross between The Last Waltz and The Night of the Living Dead.
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