#11 The Feelies – Crazy Rhythms
The Feelies – Crazy Rhythms
Picture it: A wonderful summer night in the city of Chicago. The Feelies were playing a free show at Pritzker Pavilion, at Millenium Park in Chicago as part of the cities free Monday night shows that they would put on during the summer months. Pritzker is probably the best outdoor venue for sound that I have ever had the pleasure of attending.
The Feelies are an odd sort, more resembling acquaintences of Napoleon Dynamite than hip rock stars. The venue, for all it’s glory often was run like the Gestapo, tapping fans on the shoulder for taking photos in the aisle or even dancing even if everyone was only sparsely packed.
The band had been on my “Bucket List” of bands to see before I die. My appreciation for their music had been after the band had broken up and for the few times that they had reunited, the band would often stick close to the East Coast, preferring venues like Maxwell’s in Hoboken so a trip out to the Midwest was an unexpected treat.
Just to my right, I saw the big guy, Jim Derogatis, the longtime Chicago music critic and huge fan of the band.
I just remember as they were closing the first set with the title track off one of my favorite albums of all-time, the politeness ended. The crowds just started streaming to the front of the venue with security unable to hold them back. . . . and I could not hold back either and rushed the stage. I wanted to be feel that energy. I wanted to feel that perfect rock and roll moment, just like when Lou Reed eloquently wrote about “Jenny” in the song ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’: “She started dancing to that fine-fine-fine-fine music, ooh her life was saved by rock and roll”. Between Stanley Demeski’s drumming and Glenn Mercer and Bill Million shredding it onstage, this band of nerds were better than I could have ever expected. That moment, my life was being saved by rock ‘n’ roll.
And then they proceeded to play Paint it Black (Rolling Stones), Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars) (R.E.M.), What Goes On (Velvet Underground) as well as one of their originals Fa Cé-La
What sets the Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms as one of the most important works is right in the title itself: ‘Crazy Rhythms’. Anton Fier, the band’s original drummer creates one of the more important percussion albums of the era percussion, still containing the same energy as that record but without the sloppiness.
The guitar sound that the Feelies were able to display was also very unique for the time plugging their guitars directly into the recording device than into an amplifier. What we see is Bill Million and Glenn Mercer complimenting each other perfectly as they weave this tapestry of sound behind Fier’s beats.
I have always had a love of this record if not for the place that it played in my favorite band of all time: R.E.M. It is very obvious by listening to this the impact that The Feelies had on R.E.M. They were able to take the energy, the knowledge of pop music the energy of Punk and create a new “Alternative” music scene.
At first listen, many of the songs would start off with a delicate twist. In ‘The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness’, it’s the quiet percussion sounds laid down before you start hearing the distant sound of guitar picking as the volume is slowly raised. In the first 2 minutes of ‘Loveless Love’, the quiet and slow buildup of the guitar work of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million and the tom-tom drumming of Anton Fier and before you know it your head is bopping up and down as the tempo is sped up.
‘Crazy Rhythms’ is the best album you do not own. This can be attributed to several factors.
One, the album did not sell as well as anticipated, even though it had received glowing reviews when it was released. Secondly, after Crazy Rhythms was released, both Anton Fier and Keith DeNunzio left the band, which put the band in limbo. It was not until 6 years later that they recorded ‘The Good Earth’, an equally impressive record.
Lastly, because the band never received that level of commercial reception on top of the fact that the bands music labels had either gone defunct and their music library sold off, it was years that ‘Crazy Rhythms’ was out of print. Outside of getting into a discussion about the merits of file-sharing, there were enough new music fans checking out their recordings and giving them a listen.
The Feelies are the little guys that you want to root for and ‘Crazy Rhythms’ is a record that is easy to embrace on so many levels.