Photo by James Appio

by Jamie Frey

Since the early 80’s, Jersey Beat has been dedicated to the discussion and dissection of rock music from the tri-state area. This entire time, Glenn Mercer has been an integral part of the New Jersey scene he comes from. With his fellow singer/guitarist Bill Million, his band The Feelies has brought some of the most unique and intellectual sounds and rhythms to punk and indie music, influencing bands from R.E.M. to Galaxie 500 to Parquet Courts. The debut Feelies album Crazy Rhythms I consider one of the best works of the era, and it was with great excitement that I got to speak with Glenn Mercer about the Feelies, his career and rock n’ roll.

Q: I first heard the Feelies at Battery Park on July 4, 2008, which was your comeback show after a very long hiatus of not performing together as the Feelies. How did that come about? Did Sonic Youth (the headliner) reach out to you?

GM: Basically. I guess it was their agent who approached us. At that point, I think ’91 had been our last show. We had been receiving offers for a while at that point, as well as offers to reissue our records. So it was just a good time for everyone in the band to do it.

Q: I was in college at the same and it seemed that right around that time, people my age really started to discover a lot of indie rock that hadn’t really been getting the attention it deserved. The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. and Jesus & Mary Chain all reunited about that time and had very successful tours. The audience just seemed to become a lot larger for those more fringe, more arty kind of bands. I did you feel about your audience at the time you decided to come back from that break?

GM: I guess it was a good time to do it. There was certainly interest in the band. I’m not sure why that is, I guess. Just trends, I guess? I suppose enough time had passed where it was nostalgic for some fans and younger people were just discovering a lot of that kind of music from the Eighties and Nineties.

Q: I think you have to go back to that old line about the Velvet Underground, that only a thousand people bought that first album but every one of them started a band. That kind of music just seems to have a much longer life than anyone could have guessed based on the initial reaction to it, and I think the same can be said about the Feelies. So let’s take it back a little. You grew up in New Jersey, as we all know. When did you pick up the guitar?

GM: I originally started playing bass when I was around 13. I can’t even remember the first songs I learned how to play. I remember that when I switched to guitar, it stuff like early Creedence, “Sweet Jane” was an early song I learned on guitar…

Q: How did you learn about the Velvet Underground, if “Sweet Jane” was one of the first songs you taught yourself? Those records were kind of hard to find, especially for a kid in the Jersey suburbs.

GM: People have to remember that it wasn’t like it is today, where there are billions and billions of bands and you can just go online and hear pretty much anything ever recorded. Back then, you learned about bands from reading about them, mostly. I had two older brothers who were into music and had a lot of records, but basically it was pretty easy to find out about stuff like the Stooges or whatever just be reading your favorite magazines. There really wasn’t that much going on, so it wasn’t that hard to find good music.

Q: From my point of view, I would have thought that bands like the Velvets and Stooges would have been really obscure back then, but I guess if you read the right magazines, they were the primary purveyors of information about that kind of cool music.

GM: I think people think that because those bands didn’t get played on the radio. People assume that most people got exposed by being on the radio, but that really wasn’t true by the time I was getting into music seriously. It was probably true a few years earlier, like ’66. You’d hear a lot of stuff on AM radio, that was pretty much the only source you’d hear new music. But then FM came in and albums got more important than singles, and things just really took off from that point.

Q: What was your first band?

GM: I don’t remember the name, but the first band that was semi-professional was when I was about 15 or 16, and we played pretty much every weekend for an entire summer. That was when I was still playing the bass.

Q: Was Feelies the first band you played guitar in?

GM: No. There was a band called the Outkids first. Originally we were a cover band and did what was popular at the clubs around that time. Like, Bowie was big, Mott The Hoople, things like that. Once we started writing original matter, the sound veered into the “Nuggets” garage-rock thing. We did a lot of covers from the “Nuggets” album and a lot of garagey type stuff. So by the time we were doing all our own originals and playing in New York, we were a garage-rock band.

Q: So you’re playing glam, you’re playing garage, how did you get from that to “Crazy Rhythms?” Because I have to tell you, that is a record that I’ve spent a lot of time with. Aside from being great work, it has one of the most apt record titles I can think of. And I think that what separates the Feelies from most of your peers is the rhythm. So how would you characterize the Feelies beat? I hear som African rhythms, a Bo Diddley beat, and maybe some krautrock?

GM: Well, I didn’t really listen to that. Dave (Weckerman) did, but he didn’t have a lot to do with those songs, he’s not on the first album. But he was definitely influenced by all that stuff. I don’t care to define our sound or explain where it comes from. It probably has more to do with what we leave out than what we put it. I think the fact that Bill (Million) and I both began as bass players has a lot to do with our influence, but I’m not even sure about that. But locking in with the drums, that’s something that comes from playing bass. I think you can trace everything back to Bo Diddley or even to African drums if you go far enough.

Q: Your version of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And Monkey” is, to me, one of the best Beatle covers ever recorded. How did you wind up with a Beatles cover on your first album?

GM: We were just looking for another song to fill out the album, really. It didn’t seem all that ambitious or cocky to us to cover the Beatles because we weren’t trying to recreate their version. It was more a question of, how do we take our sound and apply it to a Beatles song? I think out of all the Beatles covers we’ve done over the years, each one seems to get further away from the original.

Q: I definitely hear that. It’s like there’s the Feelies version of the song, and then the way it originally sounded. That Feelies sound is always first. I never realized until recently that Crazy Rhythms was originally released on Stiff Records. I had always thought Stiff was only British bands. How did you wind up on that label?

GM: I think we just sent them a demo. They were really one of the only companies that considered our request to produce ourselves. We did have interest from other labels but they all wanted to work with a producer, and we didn’t want any part of that.

Q: Were you a fan of the Stiff roster, like Elvis Costello and Ian Dury and Nick Lowe?

GM: No. Not at all. That almost steered us away from the label. They seemed a little too preoccupied with promoting the label itself rather than the bands on the label. It was all about the Stiff brand. And in retrospect, I can see the merit in that kind of approach. But it kind of turned us off. I guess we realized that an indie label has to promote itself, but at the time we really had no interest in that stuff and just wanted them to pay a little more attention to us. We just though it should be about the music, not about the label.

Q: So the record came out in 1980. The first wave of punk was pretty much over at that point. How did people describe the Feelies at that point? I don’t even know if words like college-rock or post-punk were being used yet.

GM: Everything was Punk and then it became New Wave. It was before words like college-rock or jangle-rock came along.

Q: This is all history to me, I came along after all this happened, so I really find all of this fascinating. I do consider myself lucky in that I got to play the original Maxwell’s with my bands a few times. And the Feelies and Maxwell’s were almost synonymous in terms of music history. Do you remember how you started playing there?

GM: We were going to England for the first time and we wanted to do a warm-up show before we left. And for whatever reason, we didn’t want to play in New York. Maybe because we had just played there or maybe because we wanted to try out new material under the radar or something. Our bass player Keith (DeNunzio) used to go to Maxwell’s all the time. In fact he worked there. So he had a connection and he recommended it. I remember going in and thinking, this isn’t going to work, it’s too small. So we were getting used to playing the bigger places in New York City. But that first show was a lot of fun, the energy level was real high, and it just seemed like the people there were much more concerned with hearing music that getting drunk or picking up girls. New York tended to be kinda trendy, people were always trying to get into the new hot spot in town and they didn’t even care who was playing. Maxwell’s was the opposite.

Q: So once you found the place, I know you became a regular in the scene there. What were some of the other bands you got to meet and make friends with at that time?

GM: I think we knew the Bongos even before we played Maxwell’s. They had sent us copies of their first single because they were big fans of ours. But when we first played there, there really wasn’t any Hoboken scene yet. That all came later.

Q: The Bongos were famous for always saying “We’re the Bongos from Hoboken, New Jersey” wherever they toured, even back when New Jersey was often just the punch line to a lot of bad jokes. Did you always consider yourself a Jersey band and did that influence your career in any way?

GM: I’m sure it’s influenced us. I guess more the aspect of being a suburban band than being a city band. That environment that we grew up in has a lot to do with our sound. The way I feel when I’m in the city, my senses just feel overwhelmed. I think our music is suburban because it has a lot of subtleties.

Q: You mentioned that you started out playing covers, and the Feelies have always played a lot of covers. A lot of original bands won’t do any covers but you seem to take a special pride in yours and they’re always great choices. How do the Feelies choose covers?

GM: They’re all songs that meant a lot to us by bands we really like. Most of the songs we cover are pretty well known by our audience, so it’s not like we’re feeling a need to turn people on to a specific band. It’s just music that’s inspired us. It kind of brings it full circle.

Q: Are there any bands that came after you that really turned you on, and that you feel might have been influenced by the Feelies? I’m thinking specifically of R.E.M. but I’m sure there are lots more.

GM: I guess there are a lot of bands we’ve played on bills with really stick in my mind, like Husker Du, Rain Parade, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, fIREHOSE. The Replacements are a band we all like. We never played with the Replacements but that’s just a band that comes to mind that we all really liked who kind of followed in our footsteps.

Q: Do you listen to much new music?

GM: Not really, no. I just don’t have the time, really.

Q: Will there be another Feelies album?

GM: We’re working on new stuff. There’s an instrumental record that I did this past year, some of those songs go back around ten years so it’s really a compilation of stuff I’ve been working on. And then Bar None will be doing reissues of the Feelies albums Only Life and Time For A Witness. And then after that we’ll have a new record. We’re working on new material now.

Q: You released the first new Feelies album in 20 years in 2011 with Here Before. Do you find that releasing albums now is more difficult than it used to be, or is it easier because of the democratization of music on the Internet?

GM: I think the major consideration now is that people just don’t buy records anymore. That has a trickle down effect that affects every aspect of what we do. Music just seems a lot more disposable now. You don’t pay for something, you just take it for granted. The bands we were friends with back in the late Eighties all basically signed to major labels around the same time. And the fact that all those bands broke up shortly afterward says a lot about the whole idea of these marginally successful bands reaching the mainstream. It really was never based on reality; expectations were just too high on both the band’s part and the record label’s part. When I was growing up, there was room for a lot of different stuff, a lot of different levels. You could have a band like the Stooges, and then a band like the Rolling Stones, and anything in between, and it was all acceptable. Everybody could at least have a chance. Then corporations took over and had to sell a lot of records and artistry and being original took a back seat to having mass appeal. Originality wasn’t rewarded or seen as having value for a long time and now I think you’ve seen music has shifted away from that and it became that the only way you can judge something is by how much money it makes or how popular it is. Everything’s become a lot more generic.

Q: I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on the Feelies and it seems like there are certain words that keep coming up over and over: Tense, nervous, anxious, urgent. The only other bands I’ve heard described this way are the Talking Heads and the Modern Lovers. Do you think these phrases have any merit? Do you consider yourself an anxious or nervous person? Are those personality traits that affect your music, or is it all just perception?

GM: I think so, yeah. Less so now, but I’ve always been sort of anti-social. Shy, nervous, anxious. That’s always been an element in rock ‘n’ roll in general. I think being introverted and rocking out have always been inseparable. The wonder and the beauty of music and rock is that it allows for that expression and it allows for those feelings to be validated and shared and work themselves out. It’s an outlet for frustration. That’s been a big part of rock ‘n’ roll since the beginning.