The Variety Arts Center in downtown Los
Angeles must have been some snazzy joint.
A repository for the tattered and faded memory of
(broadcast) Hollywood from a time when radio was King, the Variety Arts center building is
a vaguely Moorish labyrinth of venues, of spent elegance and musty show-biz ghosts.
Between the comedy lounge in the basement and the scaled-down ocean liner on the roof,
there're a couple of floors the uniformed elevator operators — no kidding —
never stop at. They automatically take moderne club-going clientele straight
to number four, no questions asked.
Prior to sound check in the fourth-floor ballroom,
there’s an incongruous scene in progress. Some of those ghosts from the forties are
still clinging to this world. In the cavernous darkness you have to let your eyes adjust
to, there’s a kitschy jazz combo playing dinner music. A few decrepit waiters with
soup stains on their cumberbunds are scurrying around, serving a handful of overdressed
couples who are, let’s say, in their declining years. Both the help and the
customers appear to have been playing their roles here since FDR was giving his Fireside
Chats. It seems as if someone could turn down the volume pot and their images would just
fade away.
By the time the Feelies hit the stage, a sort of
reverse process has happened. Fade in: a younger, hipper set has emerged from the shadows,
and the formerly creaky ballroom takes on a cool, campy image, a well-juxtaposed backdrop
for opening act Hugo Largo and the Feelies’ riveting, jacked-up rhythms. The Feelies
begin their set almost imperceptibly, filtering onto the stage, Glenn Mercer and Bill
Million picking tentatively at their guitars, gentle vocals joining in, the tempo emerging
quietly and then vigorously, finally the full onslaught of percussion, bass and drums
erupts orgasmically and the Feelies are hitting their stride. Almost makes the joint seem
kinda snazzy again.
Guitarists Mercer and Million of the New Jersey-based
Feelies had played together in various combos in high school; current percussionist Dave
Weckerman had also played with Mercer at times. They formed the Feelies in 1976, at a time
when there was a fair amount of musical ferment in New York; but being in the suburbs, the
new band was expending a lot of energy on cover tunes in gigs at leather bars and high
schools. Still, their own sound was poking through— Glenn recalls a high school dance
which had the student bodies less than limber. "People didn’t like it. I
remember the teacher involved came running up to the stage and said, ‘Play something
they know, you’re losing ‘em!’ and I said, ‘We just played a Beatles
song!’"
Fortunately, the New York club scene was more open to
new ideas at the time. The group played at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City; a
soundman at Max’s urged Terry Ork, who had released the first Television single, to
come down and see the Feelies at their second New York show. Ork liked what he heard and
offered to put out a Feelies record. After the band heard what an outside producer had
done to their sound, they scrapped the project in favor of self-production. Mercer and
Million continued to develop their songwriting, focusing on interlocking rhythm guitars,
often droning or layered in repeating, single-chord motifs. If the tempos occasionally
seemed askew, they furthered the off-kilter illusion by adding Anton Fier’s thumping
drums and little percussive figures, minimizing predictable snare beats. The results
sounded fairly frantic, and the effect was heightened by the agitated, Velvets-inspired
electric guitar leads Mercer and Million scribbled into the spaces between their sparse,
detached lyrics.
At the end of the seventies the band signed to Stiff
Records in England and recorded their self-produced debut, Crazy Rhythms. The album
was eventually released in the US and generated critical praise but little else for the
band. Looking back, Mercer doesn’t seem that thrilled with having been on what was
considered just about the sharpest label of the day. "They promoted the label more
than they promoted their artists. They came off like some hip new independent label when
in actuality they were a lot stricter than a major label. They actually called us into the
office and had a lecture about how to come up with a hit song." Having less
enthusiasm for hit singles or lengthy tours than Stiff seemed to have, the Feelies’
initial splash dissipated like so many ripples on a pond.
In spite of their energetic appeal as a performing
band, the Feelies simply stopped playing live after a time. New York was where the action
had been, and as the club scene there became undone, the whole process of gigging lost
what little interest it had aroused in the band members. As percussionist Dave Weckerman
sadly describes the demise of live, underground rock in New York, "The club scene
basically just rotted away: the rent, fire code, you have to have a license to run a club... You have to be a billionaire or a philanthropist to own a club." Asked how it is
that good bands are still able to emerge from the city, he remarks, "Bands don’t
really come out of New York. Bands move to New York and start playing."
At this, Mercer puts in his two cents: "Well,
they did, but not any more. It’s the assholes that do it. They could go to Austin or
Athens and it’d be a hell of a lot healthier than moving to New York. Even New
Jersey, they get noticed better there. They’d never get noticed in New York."
In the meantime, with no new recording project and no
gigs in sight, Anton Fier left the band while the remaining Feelies grew restless and
started several offshoot bands. One such project was the Willies, solely an instrumental
group whose jams sometimes formed the basis for later Feelies material. There was also the
Trypes, an expanded line-up (but minus Weckerman) including a vocalist, keyboards and a
woodwind player, which played some local shows and released an EP of their own.
Additionally, Weckerman formed Yung Wu, which is basically the Feelies in a pop guise,
performing songs by Weckerman which are less percussive than the Feelies usually sound but
rather more guitar-and-vocal oriented. (Yung Wu should have an album of its own out, in
the US and Britain, by the time you read of it here.)
In spite of this ongoing activity, the Feelies proper
went through a period of dormancy during the early ‘80s. At some point, the timing
was right, and the band began to play live again, mostly in the New York area but
occasionally venturing farther afield. Mercer notes that the band had been discovered by
new fans during the interim, but the band’s reputation was intact and their old fans
remembered them, too. Steve Fallon was a long-time fan who had befriended the band in
booking them at Maxwell’s, his semi-legendary Hoboken nitery. Fallon also runs Coyote
Records, and suggested that the Feelies do a new record when they were ready. The terms of
the deal, loosely structured as it was, suited Mercer. "It’s almost based on a
friendship."
The Good Earth, the second LP by the
Feelies, was
the result of that friendship. Co-produced by Peter Buck and including Brenda Sauter on
bass and Stan Demeski on drums, the album displayed a more refined, more subtle and yet
very recognizable version of the Feelies. Given the gap of six years between
LPs, the
return of the band was a welcome one, and one that heralded a new level of visibility for
the band. In an ironic return to their roots, albeit on celluloid, the Feelies made
a cameo appearance
in Jonathan Demme’s film Something Wild, playing
a local rock group performing a Beatles song for a high school reunion.
Demme, who directed the Talking Heads’ Stop
Making Sense, caught an early performance of the band at the Whisky A Go-Go and was so
taken with the Feelies that he had originally wanted to do a feature-length film on
them.
The money was never raised, but Demme kept in touch with the band and finally found a use
for the extreme ordinariness of their appearance in Something Wild. Discussing the
improvised nature of the Feelies’ performance in the film, Dave Weckerman points out
that they are only there as another element in a visually complex movie.
"There’s this underlying current of thirdworldism, of primitivism, throughout
the whole movie. Like, towels in the bathroom would have some voodoo icon drawn on them.
You gotta see it like about four or five times to pick out all this weird stuff going on
in the background. That’s the kind of director he is; he puts in a lot of little
objects and things, that people may not see the first time. We were definitely background,
we were not like your average type band, but something strange playing at this high school
reunion. We were basically like guys who came out of the factory that day and had to play
at this reunion playing ‘Me and My Monkey.’"
The way things work in conjunction with their context
is something Weckerman seems to have given some thought to. Before coming out to the west
coast, where the Variety Arts Center show was the opening bookend to a week-long tour
ending back in downtown L.A. at the inarguably unsnazzy Al’s Bar, Weckerman picked
out some tapes for the van. "We were listening to a lot of Doors out here. The Beach
Boys sounded good while we were driving along the coastal highway. It’s good to have
a sound that blends in with the environment."
Rap music, which evokes urban pavement as surely as
the Beach Boys conjure up the sun and the surf, also creates an instant context for
Weckerman: "You know, I hear people driving by with rap blasting from their
car, and
it sounds great for like a moment. It’s all sound, it’s just sound, you
can’t really call it songs, but it has its place. It sounds good blasting out of cars
in the summer of 1987, but I think it’s a temporary, non-sustaining
entity. Then again, people said that about Elvis Presley. If music does get to be like
that, it’d
be great, it’d be real easy to write songs!"
Noting how difficult it is to reach a wide audience
while playing a style of rock as distinct and personal as the Feelies’, Weckerman
continues. "We were talking about how 20 years ago, rock’n’roll the
sub-culture became the mass culture. Like now there’s just tons of
subcultures.
That’s why Run D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys are kind of neat, they did bring two
subcultures together, sort of stitched them together... and created a new subculture.
Everybody’s so fragmented—there’s nothing like the Beatles, or a president
or a politician that people can gravitate towards. Heavy metal, a lot of people are into
that, there’s rap, college radio is into R.E.M. and bands like that, but there’s
no big mass thing that everybody can focus on.
"Like the Sex Pistols said, rock is basically
dead. A form of rock music, like rockabilly, will never die, there will always be
rockabilly bands. We’re basically pumping out stuff that’s like the
Velvets, the Stooges, that stuff is eternal too. As far as anything new and totally
awe-inspiring, I
think everybody’s heard everything up to this point. Things have gotten really
atonal, gotten back to being real normal... I think we’ve run the gamut, exhausted
the spectrum of sound, unless mutants are born with some new kind of hearing, and
they'll
create their own music. But that’s for the next generation. There'll definitely have
to be some sort of physical mutation for new music to come about."
Until then, Weckerman will be happy with the wide
variety of music already available. After wrapping up their trip with an impromptu gig in
the storefront space of Santa Monica’s Texas Records, he and Mercer mention some of
their influences and favorites (Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Santana and "Bo
Diddley—he used maracas a lot," says maracas player Dave), tossing in a plug for
their friends Yo La Tengo. "Some days I listen to real grandiose classical
music," Weckerman says pensively, "then I get sick of that. Some days I just
drink beer and listen to Humble Pie."
Coyote, Box 112 Uptown, Hoboken, NJ 07030
