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

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...

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.