Interview by McGregor
Photography by Fumie Ishii

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I met up with Glenn Mercer and Bill Million of the Feelies for dinner in Hoboken. The most underrated band ever from New Jersey (Haledon, to be exact) were set to perform their 1980 debut album Crazy Rhythms (Stiff Records) in its entirety, along with another set, at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ that night. While the rest of the band ate dinner with their families at the venue, Glenn, Bill and I headed down Washington St. to warm up with some Japanese food.

Do you guys practice a lot before you play?
Bill: Not at all.
Glenn: We try to be really efficient when we do get together because it doesn’t happen that often.

Historically, it seems like you were a band who practiced a lot more than you played.
Glenn: Back in the old days, yeah, but not too much anymore. Brenda lives in Pennsylvania and Bill has to drive up from Florida.
Bill: I don’t think we even practiced that much back then, obviously more than we do now, but now it’s just a handful of times throughout the time.

When you were first asked by ATP to do Crazy Rhythms, did you have to go back and relearn a lot of those songs?
Glenn: Well, we played those songs a lot throughout the ‘90s.

But even that was 17 years ago.
Glenn: Well, that was it. We played those songs a lot more because they were older, it was like second nature. We still had to refresh our memory in a few spots.

Is it interesting to hear the reaction to that album nowadays?
Bill: We were just talking about that.
Glenn: It is interesting, especially cause it was chosen as one of the top hundred albums of the ’80s, it sort of told us that people were still into it, and sort of elevated the status of the record.

As a kid hearing it for the first time a lot of things really threw me off and really intrigued me. The spacing in between songs, the sequencing, a lot of it is very jarring, especially in the MP3 age.
Bill: The spacing is sort of a misnomer actually. The spacing on the album is pretty standard. What happens is that, at the time we recorded it, it was all analog. There are certain songs on their where there is stuff going on, but the tape hiss sometimes overwhelms the ideas we had, a lot of which was around being very slight on the faders. Trying to make it a little more subtle and thick on the harmonies. The things going on in the background are just too subtle to hear sometimes.
Glenn: Like at the beginning of “Moscow Nights”. We played these different effects, and we moved them with our hands. This wind, this chilly sound, but with the analog hiss it sort of got washed out.
Bill: I remember the co-producer saying, ‘You gotta turn it up. No one’s gonna hear that.’ But we could hear it fine in the studio. But once it’s transferred to vinyl, it’s sort of weird.

That’s one of the really interesting things too, listening-wise. On vinyl, you aren’t going to stand up and move the arm, but in MP3 culture, one might think, ‘Oh, this song is fucked up,’ and just click to the next track.
Bill (to Glenn): Did we bring that up when we re-mastered?
Glenn: Yeah, we brought it up and we kind of shortened it a little bit just for that reason.

What was it like going back and re-mastering after all these years?
Bill: We mastered it here in town. The guy who mastered it really did a good job. We didn’t want to completely go over the top with it.
Glenn: He was actually nominated for a Grammy for mastering classical records. His taste in music was a little different.

Always good to add some perspective to it.
Glenn: One thing did throw him though. We added the first single, the Rough Trade single, as a bonus track. We did one thing when we mixed that that threw him off. Well, I’ll tell you in a minute.

(Waitress walks up to the table)

Waitress: You ready?
Glenn: Yes.
Waitress: What you want?
Glenn: I’ll have the vegetable chow mein, small. With the brown rice. Please.
Waitress: Vegetable chow mein.
Bill: I’ll have the chicken rice soup, with brown rice please.
Glenn: And can I have a hot tea please?
Waitress: Yes. Vegetable chow mein, chicken rice soup. Brown rice. Hot tea.

(Waitress leaves)

Glenn: Okay. What we had done was, the idea was that we would try to convey the feeling that snare drum was traveling in a circle, circular motion. So we panned it to the right, and then back, but as we did that we added reverb to it so it would get further away. And we were mastering that [the engineer] was totally perplexed, and he said ‘I think it’s off-center or something.’ He didn’t refer to the snare so we didn’t know what he was talking about, just thought he had really good ears. Finally he mentioned the snare, and I said, ‘Oh that was intentional.’

I heard that you guys recorded the guitars directly into the console, as opposed to micing them through an amp.
Bill: Going into recording the album we were really adamant about producing it, because we considered that a big component of our songwriting We found a label that would let us produce it but we were still novices, so a lot of it was discovering it as we went along. It was a lot of fun to make because we would just turn knobs and be like, ‘Wow, that sounds really cool.’ However, we spent a lot of time just trying to find a guitar sound. After many hours, and a lot of money, we thought we needed to do something else, so we tried that.
Glenn: Actually it was not intended to be on the record. We were going to record it direct, then we thought we’d feed it back through a different amp in a different studio and record that.

How do you think being from New Jersey affected your sound?
Glenn: If we had lived in New York we would have needed to play a lot more often, in order to be able to afford to live in New York. Living in New Jersey gave us a situation where we could really take our time between gigs and really work on sound.

Did you hold down day jobs most of the time?
Glenn: Yeah, pretty much.
Bill: Yeah, on and off. I worked in the lock department at Greystone. There is an instrument we’re using tonight on a couple songs, “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide” and “Moscow Nights”, it’s this plate, that came from Greystone.
Glenn: Did the can come from there?
Bill: Yeah.
Glenn: Dave plays a can. We actually brought it to Europe and someone didn’t realize that it was an instrument, and so it got left behind.

It was a can from Greystone?
Bill: From Greystone to Europe. That’s where it is now. It was a bright yellow can. Just a regular can. Looked cool, sounded good.