The Feelies spent their Record Store Day in DC playing music—a lot of it.
The bulk of it was a three-hour show with two full sets and four encores at the 9:30 Club, in a show so rare it some fans flew in from across the country. But they totaled more than 40 songs altogether Saturday if you count their free afternoon set on a sidewalk in front of a record store.
There, at Red Onion on U Street, it was all acoustic guitars and woodblocks, curious looks from the spa next door, warm smiles from longtime fans, and clueless looks from young urbans cutting a wide path around the whole thing on their way to yoga.
The long-running quintet hardly seemed at home in the light of the afternoon. But they didn’t look that comfortable, either, in their nighttime 9:30 showcase. By now that’s kind of the modus operandi from the band who made one of their first recordings “The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness.”
They haven’t lost the nerves it seems. Guitarists Glenn Mercer and Bill Million still have a hard time even looking at the audience, let alone talking to them. As he sings, Mercer keeps his eyes steadily on the lyric sheets he brings up to a makeshift music stand attached to his mic stand—each song its own loose leaf page, folded over.
With five albums of largely original material over 35 years, they’ve got a lot to play. And while the songs are not as caffeinated as they were on the band’s classic 1980 debut Crazy Rhythms, they’ve honed the two guitar jangle, insistent beat, and deadpan vocal delivery that still ring strong on their latest release Here Before issued by Bar None in 2011.
At their best, the two guitars lock together in a melodic trance, the beats of drummer Stan Demeski and wildcard percussionist Dave Weckerman drive it forward, and bassist Brenda Sauter stitches it all together—they make the anthems build and soar and then set them down gently again.
Amid the bliss, you realize this isn’t a band that’s just survived, it’s become one the last standing jangle rock bands (of the many they inspired) while keeping that downtown New York cool going long after the deaths of Lou Reed and most of the Velvet Underground.
The band flourishes probably because it was able to take a couple of long breaks since Mercer, Million, and Weckerman first started playing together 40 years ago in a New Jersey band called the Outbids.
They had a six-year gap between the spectacular debut and a second album that solidified its current lineup. And then there was two full decades between 1991’s Time for a Witness and Here Before.
That’s allowed them to cherish what they have together without having to burn it out every night on the road. It also allowed a fan base to grow and appreciate their shows, which now come sporadically, necessitating the airline tickets for some.
The first Feelies show at the 9:30 after their reunion in 2012 was a sellout; the second one seven months later, a tie-in to a beer festival, was less well attended. Saturday’s show was comfortably in the middle.
While the frenzied pace of the early recordings has slowed a bit in recent recordings, they generally keep the rhythms jumping in the live shows, which was divided mostly with Million playing acoustic in the first set and strictly electric after that, creating a rhythmic drive on songs like “Invitation,” “Deep Fascination,” and “Change Your Mind.” There was an indication too, that they’re getting ready to record again with the introduction of three new songs, “Pass the Time,” “Flag Day,” and “Gone Gone Gone” in the second.
The Feelies are a band about interactions and it’s fun to feel the melding of Mercer and Million’s guitars and also how they both do this thing where they jump backwards suddenly to briefly rock out, as if they were cats who had been surprised by a cucumber.
Demeski and Weckerman’s percussive interactions were interesting too—the former would stick heavily on the beat while the other would pursue more erratically than ever the tambourine or maracas. For the longest time he didn’t seem to touch his snare and high hat. And did Weckerman spend one song just holding his head in his hands? Later he got more into things when he played castanets on a rain stick for the track “On and On.”
And while a number of their own songs were show highlights—and crucially, not just the oldest ones—the Feelies show they’re music fans as much as anybody with their superbly well-chosen covers, which they largely kept to the generous encores.
The exception came in the first set when Sauter gave her only lead vocal, covering Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot” (with Mercer murmuring Smith’s spoken word poetry over the final chorus).
It was one of three songs from the band’s own official 2016 Record Store Day issue, a four-song EP of covers of which they played three. In addition to Smith, they included Bob Dylan’s underrated “Seven Days” and Neil Young’s “Barstool Blues”—not the first song from his Zuma that they’ve done.
Also in their encores: The Beatles’ “She Said She Said,” featured on a previous EP of theirs; Television’s seminal “See No Evil,” The Stones’ “Paint It Black,” the Velvets’ “I Can’t Stand It,” and in the final encore, the Modern Lovers’ “Astral Plane” topped by Iggy and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
In all, you would say, a pretty good Record Store Day haul.
