this thread is for reaffirming the classicness of the feelies' crazy rhythms (do not read if you hate the feelies' crazy rhythms)

Crazy Rhythms is ace. I'd like thoughts on a random question actually: who thinks you can dance to it?

The record I associate most closely with CR is The Bongos' "Time And The River". My question is: if I have all of the Bongos records on Fetish, are there any others I should consider? Didn't they lose *that* quality at some point?

Barone and Mastro also made a worthy duo (as opposed to solo) album called _Nuts and Bolts_. The Barone tracks are almost the equal of _Drums'_ best work. The Mastro tracks have their charms, but many of the lyrics embarrass today ("want to see your mountains and dig your rocks/got an angel in my pocket").

Growing up in nowheresville Central NJ in the early '80s, the Feelies and Bongos made me proud to be a Garden State resident. They're still two of my all-time favorite bands.

Thanks Mike for the advice on the rest.

It is a shame that The Feelies other three albums are not in print these days.

I haven't heard much of any of their other groups or records other than one Wake Oolio record I played a couple of times back when I had a radio show when I was in college.

Don't forget the other albums! I actually prefer the Good Earth...depending on my mood.

Nabisco, so NOT OTM!

(not that there is anything wrong with tom petty)

so do I. I always read raving reviews of their live shows, with all those great covers, and I just hope someone will finally release all their back catalogue. (in a rather pathetic move, I bought the "Something wild " dvd just to see them play for 30 seconds...)

I was recently wondering why someone hasn't resurrected the Feelies sound circa Crazy Rhythms. I play in a weird cover band that does "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness", and chances are the people we play in front of have never heard it before, but they dig it. They don't really dig it when we do "Lady Godiva's Operation" though.

Time For A Witness is a truly underrated record.

i don't hear that AT ALL. their sound is so introverted and seemingly unconcerned with "reaching out" to any particular demographic.

thank fucking god, and bout fucking time.

I'd probably take Feelies most days. I love Television but am more often in the mood for Feelies.

everybody keeps telling me so and I'm fucking jealous of all of you.
also, about their later albums: they are so unpretentious, subtle, simple without being simplistic. they had this marvellous, almost ascetic understatement. and songs like "deep fascination", "invitation", "find a way" are just so good.

Age, I guess. And maybe a little bit of disappointment.

I've been dying to hear the early live "punk" Feelies stuff, and would assume that compared to that stuff, Crazy Rhythms already shows them moving in a different direction.

But I stand by the belief that, at least with the Good Earth, the structure, the energy, the sound, the aesthethic, isn't as different from Crazy Rhythms as most people assume, it's just a slight shift in the arrangement.

Let's hear it for the Trypes EP and the Yung Wu record as well. I've been looking for the Dave Weckerman solo 7" of Shore Leave for a while...I think you can still order Young Wu and maybe Good Earth as CD-rs from Coyote/TwinTone.

i like the good earth as much as it's only life. i always kinda seperate the first album from everything else. they are all great.

They're from New Jersey. They weren't chic downtown cool hipsters; they were dorks from across the river. They were a populist band, whether they were successful at it or not (see Something Wild).

wild xpost

I don't think the later stuff, or at least the Good Earth, is necessarily "safer", some of it as angstful as Crazy Rhythms, maybe it's just a bit more subtle, and a bit more acoustic. Otherwise I think the songs aren't that different. But it's also the production...Crazy Rhythms being marked by much electric guitar played direct, whereas Peter Buck's production of the Good Earth is more conventional.

Dan your comments re: the Good Earth are OTM. I thought it was just a sort of more acoustic/more straight forward Crazy Rhythms. It doesn't have the immediacy of youth, but it does have the warmth of experience.

Fantastic.

i have that Shore Leave 7" (autographed, even!) somewhere...

I'd guess that if the Feelies had remained together and recorded an album or two between CR and TGE, the difference between the two may not have seemed so glaring.

http://www.geocities.com/thefeeliesweb/images/disc/noone.gif

see: http://www.geocities.com/thefeeliesweb/disc/disc.htm

I agree - when I say "safer" I dont mean less risky, just literally retreating in their hometown (sorry if I'm not able to express myself a little bit more clearly). The difference between the two albums is all in the "perpetuous nervousness" of CR and the "slowdown" of Good Earth (with everything this title also implies).
Anyway, please reissue these albums soon!

http://www.oxfordcollapse.com/

the aforementioned oxford collapse do this. i highly suggest everyone checks out butterglory's rat-tat-tat for more.

I should throw Crazy Rhythms on again. I love it so much.

The Tom Petty thing is wrong in the sense that they didn't become Petty-esque, but I can see the later Feelies stuff as being closer to Petty than their earlier stuff. It's not OTM but its aspiring to OTMness, a state Nabisco would achieve but two years later.

i thought they were live. what do i know?

i liked the one oxford collapse album i heard okay. the one band that really reminded me of them was groovski. they are polish/polish-american. they changed their name to grovski though, cuz everyone thought they were a jam band. it was a good move. groovski is a pretty bad name even if you are polish. or at least their guitars had that satisfying jangle. they reminded me of the wedding present a little too. none of you will ever hear them though, so, um, nevermind.

Really, this would be something. I missed 'em the first time. They played Maxwells, I think, when I was in high school in NJ and I almost went but I didn't have wheels.

Why assume this?

To me, early REM pwnz all over the Feelies for scope, breadth, passion, etc.

i saw them open for lou once too, and they were better than lou! and they probably would have been better than lou even if rem were lou's backing band. no, really, they were GREAT live. and rem could be really good too. i only saw them (rem) twice a zillion years ago, but they were always entertaining.

Jim DeRogatis wrote about the Feelies in his book about psychedelic rock, and suggested that the Feelies mostly produced themselves on The Good Earth. Since DeRogatis has connections to the Feelies (he was Speed the Plough's drummer on their first album, which Bill Million produced), I'm thinking he wasn't just making this up but probably knew something. I've read similar stories about Crazy Rythyms - that the band produced themselves on thatrecord. The Trouser Press article from 1980 included on that Feelies fansite suggests as much.

Track list:
1. The High Road (Mercer/Million) 4:20
2. She Said, She Said (Lennon/McCartney) 2:49
3. Slipping (Into Something) (Mercer/Million) 5:57
4. Sedan Delivery (N. Young) 2:57

Line up:
Glenn Mercer (guitar, vocals)
Bill Million (guitar, vocals)
Dave Weckerman (percussion)
Brenda Sauter (bass)
Stan Demeski (drums)

Notes:
Produced by: Bill Million, Glenn Mercer
Engineered by: Don Sternecker
Recorded at: Mixolydian Studios, Boonton, NJ

i'm not saying that buck didn't lend an ear though. he probably did. it's only life, which million & mercer produced, doesn't sound THAT much different. they had more money to spend. that's about it. i'm sure rem helped them get on to a major. no doubt about it.

Why don't I ever know about these things?

I've heard a fair number of Feelies bootlegs, and honestly I just can't imagine that a recording is ever going to come anywhere near their live sound, which was as perfectly balanced as anything I've ever heard and a somewhat dispiriting demonstration of the limitations of recorded music.

that song sounds nothing like the feelies. you're on crack.

I learned it by watching you! I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU!

at your service, sir:
http://s54.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2CRDF2UE20FWI10SCNYPJV2ZRP

Marco, if you're able to search on a p2p network, you might want to try to look for The Feelies Live at the Rat from 1986. It's actually recorded in Cambridge, MA (they never even played the Rat). The mp3's I downloaded (unfortunately, I no longer have them, just a copy on minidisc) sound amazing, even though the first half (or so) of the show is in mono (it seems as though someone suddenly realises there's a cable not plugged in properly as halfway through a song -zdung!- there they are in full on stereo-glory). Very propulsive & subtly powerful.

Let's hope the (album) reissues will see the light of day soon! Maybe Rhino could do a live-release, just like they did with Television (Live at the Old Waldorf)

Here's part of a thing I wrote:

Like many teenagers in the eighties, I craved a particular kind of music that I had not yet heard. Before I got to college my access to music was limited, but I'd heard the typical high school music of the Smiths, Cure, Violent Femmes, which had significant angst but was sometimes too fluffy. Anger is indeed an energy and punk fueled it. However, not all teenagers are necessarily political enough at that age to be filled with anarchic rage, or had been savagely dumped yet, let alone kissed. There's other pent up energies, of course. Like nervousness. Fear and frustration that you'll never "grow into" your awkward body, that you'll find anyone who wants to touch it, let alone slather their tongue over it. That you won't become "Somebody." Nervousness, frantic friction, fear of embarrassment, tension and release but no satisfaction. Teenagers push their bodies in various ways beyond pain thresholds and exhaustion, yet the relief from the nervous energy is always temporary. Talking Heads occastionally a touched on that on their first couple albums, as did XTC. There's a reason those bands appeared as dorks on their album art. They understood a different kind of tension, whereas perhaps the Type A beasts in school that seemed to be able to drink and screw and bash heads to oblivion enough that they really didn't suffer from that type of pent-up nervousness.

The Feelies were just the band to fill that void. Their nerdy portraits in glasses and preppy pastel outfits emblazoned on a sky blue background, they looked like their audience. They were named after the high-tech virtual reality movies (and perhaps porn) that people were addicted to in Aldous Huxley's paranoid classic, Brave New World. The first song on their 1980 album was called, appropriately, "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness." The song started with silence, followed by faint percussion. Blocks, toms, and then bass gradually entered the picture, growing increasingly faster. Once the dry, brittle, furiously strummed dual guitars started (three times the speed as a Lou Reed), The Feelies were a rogue train veering off its wheels with no brakes. It sounded exactly how a I felt. Running with nowhere to go, crescendoes without climax, wildly repetitive action without end. Their sound distilled a perfect aesthetic sensibility, and really sounded like no one else...

Classic (It's work-related, boss!)

It's so good to hear some good recordings of their covers. I especially liked the deadpan delivery of Brenda on "Dancing Barefoot" - a great version. The version of "Sweet Jane" is a recording on which the Feelies back up Lou Reed! I've read about this happening but until now I'd never heard recorded proof.

I do hope Coyote/TT are reissueing the albums soon, an extra disc with covers and a live one would be terrific...

Tyler - I'd love to get my hands on one of those bootlegs, esp. the one with Richard Lloyd. Maybe we can arrange something?

I almost fell down from my chair!
and what about the Smithereens soundtrack!

Arden, for some info/recordings of live and/or other stuff you might check this site and contact the person who keeps it up.

Just posted some video of the Hoboken gig:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv7LM_jLUsw&search=the%20feelies

arden's activted a myspace-page last year, on which some late 70's live tracks can be heard.
www.myspace.com/crazyfeelies

just read on mercer's page(www.myspace.com/glennmercer
) that he's releasing a solo album this week. both tracks that are featured on the page have that gorgeous pastoral the good earth-feel to it. looking forward to late night summer listenings..

Wait, I never posted on this thread? What the hell is wrong with me. Then again most everything that needs to be said has been. (I think my AMG review of this is still up, I'm not sure...)

It's been, what, four years since I last heard this? Gen-you-wine classic -- "Moscow Nights," of all things, used to make a few love song comps.

Nice review of The Good Earth, Ned! It's a record that is a little easy to overrate.

HEY Y'ALL CHECK IT OUT

http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Rhythms-Feelies/dp/B000Z7G7KU/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1200960575&sr=8-1

ABOUT FUCKING TIME

I can finally actually own this! I lost my burned copy so long ago...

so there's nothing extra on this? HMMM.

This record is greatness. The story I heard was that they'd plugged guitars directly into the mixing board, instead of recording them through miked amps, to get the crisp dry constant tone that's all over this record. Can anyone confirm?

Paint It Black on here has always bugged me. It shouldn't have been tacked on, it's from a later period, is mixed much louder than the rest and doesn't sound like it belongs, kind of sabotages the end of the CD.

agreed, I would never wanna hear that after the glorious end of this record.

i saw the feelies open for rem @ the felt forum (LOL), must've been 87 or so. they were a little dull, and rem were ok until someone got smei-crushed because people were crowding the stage and michael stipe left in a huff. that's pretty much the moment i stopped giving a shit about rem.

semi

I was at that show and in that pit! REM did a cover of Set Me Free that was pretty sweet. But confirming your take that the Feelies were dull that night I had totally forgotten that they were the openers. Weirdly I was more impressed watching Yung Wu do a few songs off Crazy Rhythms a couple years later.

wau, small world. the Felt Forum is like the greatest venue name of all time.

Yeah, dad a, I believe they did record the guitars that way.

xxxpost

One thing I love about this album is the liner notes, the way they painstakingly itemize every instrument used and who-played-what. Anal folks like myself LOVE having all that information at their fingertips.

Thanks MVB! (So gershy, I suppose you're not in love with Felt Forum's current rebranding as the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden?)

oh, i haven't lived in nyc for years, last i heard it was the paramount. aren't there plans to build another msg a few blocks over?

Listened to it today! "Raised Eyebrows" ftw!

That's news to me gershy. The Felt Forum Feelies/REM show was the only one I ever saw at MSG so I can't say I'd feel sentimental about the loss, especially since the place was so square they handed out Stagebill-type programs before the show, listing an unimaginably bad season lineup of concerts, just to make it clear that good shows were the exception and not the rule.

The cover art to Crazy Rhythms is like a perfect arty counterpoint to the Ramones NYC-brick-building four-on-a-wall debut.

I lived in Montclair for a year and got pretty excited to find that there's a record store called Crazy Rhythms in Verona. My excitement instantly evaporated when I asked the proprietor if there was any connection and he made clear that no, he didn't care for the Feelies or about them. Do not shop there.

here's an awe-inducing clip of the feelies performing crazy rhythms in 1980

I've got the old CD - is there much difference between that and this reissue? Any plans to reissue the later albums? I need The Good Earth as well.

i havent listend to this awesome record for too long.
now it's time.

The Feelies are probably my all-time favorite live band, but I can definitely see them losing something in an arena setting.

i saw an rem/feelies arena show at that time in...connecticut, i think. and feelies were great. not nearly loud enough, obviously. but they were definitely into it. saw them open for lou at the tower in philly and that venue was AWESOME for them. smaller, but still really big and the sound was great.

i was really hoping they would bust out what goes on or something at that lou show, but nothing doing.

Saw them three times — all amazing shows. Last time was at the Blue Pelican in Newport (which, before it closed down, was the ONLY reason ever to venture into that lame city, besides the folk and jazz fests) with the late, great Boston band Lifeboat opening. They all jammed on "What Goes On," which was also in Lifeboat's repertoire.

Crazy Rhythms was in Montclair but closed years ago.

I was there last June. From my one visit I gathered that it's the same guy running it, same store name (he named it after the jazz standard), just moved further up Bloomfield Ave to a hole in the wall in Verona.

the old cd is incredibly quiet. anyone have the vinyl?

i have the vinyl. sounds fab.

art, is your CD on Line Records? I know a lot of people with gripes about their dB's reissues.

er, i have old vinyl. there was a vinyl reissue, wasn't there? mine's on Stiff.

all my feelies is on vinyl. i need a copy of the last album though. maybe i'll break down and buy a 20 dollar cd on amazon. i had the tape, but it got lost.

a&m i think (xpost)

and i do wanna get the new glenn mercer cd too.

i haven't heard time for a witness in so long it will be like having a new feelies album!

best thing about time for a witness is the reversed photo in the cd booklet that makes everyone in the band look like a lefty. that warms my lefthanded heart every time i see it.

second best thing is the la's-esque pop of "doin' it again."

but as feelies albums go, it's very meh.

i remember being really excited when it came out, but i didn't play the tape much.

seriously, if there are feelies fans who don't own wake ooloo's hear no evil, they should buy it. i love that album. i'm ashamed to say that i don't own the other two wake albums. i'll get around to it, i swear!

i dunno, i'll rep for Time For A Witness -- definitely the most straight-ahead of the Feelies records, but it has a great guitar sound and some nice tunes. But I love everything those guys have done. they should be headlining coachella, amirite? Anybody else pick up the Glenn Mercer solo CD last year? It might have a bit more of a "Feelies" sound than the Wake Ooloo stuff. More subdued than anything else he's done but pretty nice all the way through ... any news on them putting out the pre-Crazy Rhythms stuff mentioned upthread? PLEEEEZE.

Great band, and one of the most consistently listenable, too. There's rarely a time when they don't fit the mood or setting.

All four records are strong, I can't even pick a favorite.

hay i just ripped my cd so i can listen on the computer. it was a conicendece

and what about the Smithereens soundtrack!

I first heard about / saw part of this film last week. Here is one of many notable things about it: at the very end, the van is occupied by a bunch of hookers, among whom is a tranny hooker played by a young Chris Noth.

So if anyone ever challenges you to a degrees-of-separation thing where you have to get from Sarah Jessica Parker to Richard Hell in one move, there you go

The Glenn Mercer album is pretty good, though not on the level of The Feelies at their best or Yung Wu. I kind of like the cover of Within You Without You/Love You To. It's on emusic.

This album didn't make any sense to me until I played it EXTREMELY LOUD and fairly drunk. Then it became one of my favorite albums ever.

I always recommend this to people who like Marquee Moon, though to me Crazy Rhythms > Marquee Moon by a nose

When the hell is that deluxe vinyl reissue deal supposed to be coming out???

see here for that news plus exciting reunion news:

the feelies - classic or dud?

just posted a Crazy Rhythms-era live show over on the blog: http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/ so good

playing this live in September at ATP of course :-)

GRRRRR!!!!

haha, yeah, that's how I feel. wonder how it'll sound? probably great, but it didn't seem like they played all that much off of Crazy Rhythms during the reunion shows last year -- just the title track and "Raised Eyebrows" I think ...

Tyler, you have the best blog. Thank you. More feelies!

I seriously considered making a pilgrimage to maxwell's with Mrs. Staggerlee for those shows. Alas, do not have an extra $2000 lying around.

ALAS.

awesome, tylerw, thank you

i went for a run that lasted the duration of 'crazy rhythms' not long ago. i found it exhausting

http://www.tomwarren.com/music/images/feelies_30.jpg
crazy rhythms recording sessions! more here:
http://www.tomwarren.com/music/Feelies.html

good lord, this band was/is(?) perfect.

nothing here that hasn't circulated previously, but a cool way to approach the pre-Crazy Rhythms years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HjrcAhmH_U

I was dancing round the shop when I found the Stiff "Crazy Rhythms" in our local Oxfam for £2, early last year.

those ork records version of fa ce la and forces at work are so good

I think of this record sort of like Wire's Pink Flag - an atypical debut whose style they never exactly returned to.

I saw them opening for Lou Reed in 1989, and if they were not the best band I've ever seen live, they were certainly the best whose music I didn't know before seeing them. They covered "Dancing Barefoot" as someone mentioned above, and either said nothing or no more than "thanks" to the audience.