Your Inside Is Out/Your Outside Is In
Many had covered The Beatles, few had ever done it like this. It's 1980, and on their debut album, The Feelies, a crew of kids from suburban New Jersey, are turning one of John Lennon's jolly-good let's-feel-the-joy joke songs —The White Album's "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey)"— inside out. Lennon exhorted his band to "take it easy," The Feelies are out to make things hard; the original's looseness whipped into a painful shape, worked into an agitated state. It's, in their hands, a hymn to paranoia.
Locking in on its single-riff intro, the quartet play it without any of the spontaneity or joy that one associates with The Beatles. Instead, it's incredibly tense; taut to the point where it's uncomfortable; throttling forward like the band are holding their breath, hoping to get through it as fast as possible.
In short: The Feelies play The Beatles as themselves: melody razed away, harmony dispatched, good times absent. The song is pared to its repetitive essence, essentially one chord played insistently; turned into pure rhythm. To 'flesh' things out, they add only more rhythm: bang on coat racks, cans, woodblocks, castanets, and maracas; achieving not a sense of harmony, but cacophony, in which the polyrhythms seem to ratchet up the tension even more.
Can't Relax When There's Work to Be Done
This is the sound of The Feelies, the sound of Crazy Rhythms. These rhythms aren't crazy in the wa-hey!/letting-it-all-hang-out-sense, but they can drive you mad. Legend has it that drummer Anton Fier (who'd later command the Golden Palominos) would often end up physically ill during liveshows, but let his bandmates know he wasn't done by tapping out 'NOT TIRED YET' in morse-code on his snare-rims.
Crazy Rhythms is the sound of a band with that much energy keeping it bottled up, with no escape valve in sight. Listening to it, you start to wonder when The Feelies might just explode. It took them four years to get around to making it, and six years to follow it up. Playing this wound up takes its toll.
Mark Abel, the sound-man from CBGBs who engineered the record, called The Feelies' twin frontmen Bill Million and Glenn Mercer "the most obstinate people [he'd] ever met." It's no surprise that the masterminds behind music this uptight were control freaks. Million and Mercer achieved their ultra-dry, distortion-free electric guitar sound by plugging directly into the recording console; transmitting a pure signal that went onto tape without any of the reverb, either added or natural, standard in recording.
At times, their clenched, tensed, metal-sounding playing reminds me of the muted power-chords Dave Day thunked out on banjo in seminal proto-krautrock garage GIs The Monks; another band who stripped rock'n'roll (and, indeed, The Beatles) down to unadorned, almost austere rhythm.
Anxiety Always
Of course, there were forebears for The Feelies much more obvious than The Monks, New Yorker acts that clearly served as their inspiration: the Velvet Underground and, indeed, fellow VU acolytes the Modern Lovers. But where both those bands practiced the kind of stripped-down minimalism —fast-strummed guitar chords; deadpan vocals; tom-heavy, cymbal-wary percussion— that The Feelies were drawn to, there was still a sense of joy, of verve, of swagger in the way that they did it.
Not for The Feelies. The opening song on Crazy Rhythms is entitled "The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness," and it seems self-descriptive; making a case for the band's music as a succession of nervous tics marshaled into obedience. The album starts in near-silence, with just a click of wood percussion, before uncoiling into a typically-taut tale of suburban despair; in which Mercer paints an unflattering portrait of an anxious, silent, indolent youth that is, in the end, revealed to be he.
Though they would play in New York City, at CBGBs and Max's Kansas City when punk was still in bloom, no-wave was polluting the air, and a new-wave of artistic liberty beckoned, there was never anything bohemian about The Feelies. They were as suburban as a freshly-mown lawn; as white as a picket fence. They were serious, sober, and single-minded; a band who preferred coffee over beer; precision over swing; and, most notably, tension over release.
Record Label: Stiff
Release Date: April, 1980
