It would seem that fall has arrived in a day. That day was
yesterday, with rain and coolness. And now it feels like summer is gone. At
least for the nonce. A long walk today in the glories of that.
And this season of mellow fruitfulness brings to mind The
Feelies’ second album, The Good Earth. I’m not sure what time of year it was
released, but it was certainly fall and the start of another year of college
when I got some songs on a tape from my friend Tim. I know I eventually got the whole LP
from him, and it became one of those car tapes this time of year. Those were
the days of the strum and mumble approach made popular by R.E.M. Indeed, R.E.M.
looked to The Feelies’ first album, Crazy Rhythms (1980), as an influence on
their sound. It’s a good album for the transition, in my listening tastes,
from Talking Heads, who more or less peaked in 1980-83, and what came next. But
I didn’t hear it till after The Good Earth was already out and about.
Which song to pick? I have some hesitation because there are
three songs on the album that I pulled off as the main tracks—today’s song, the
title song, and “Slow Down.” Each of them is on a tape somewhere, giving me a
rush of folkiness crossed with that humming, cranking sound I associate with
the Velvet Underground’s Live ’69 album. And that album had long been a trusted
source of the musical equivalent of amphetamines. The Feelies are actually a
little more barbiturate than that, but you know what I mean. With tunes like
these you don’t need the drugs, you just enter the space of the song and get a
buzz going.
And that was important since, in those days of the late Eighties, I
had no truck with substances except for maybe a bit of wine. So whatever highs
were coming my way were coming from music with the ability to remind me of my
wasted youth, so to speak. And The Good Earth did that—it was because of those
mumbling, barely intelligible vocals. The Feelies were a band from up there in
northern NJ, near NYC. They felt “local” in the way that the lo-fi, alt wave
of new bands generally did. It was “college rock,” in a way, in the way that
every college town is kinda like every other college town.
I went with the opening track because, well, it’s the
opener. Kicks things off, sets the tone. “I know I / Said you can’t fly / On
your way / I hope you’ll be OK.” Sure. Just quoting those rather laconic lines
and thinking of how they’re intoned gives me a jolt of how it was in those
wasted days, if that’s what they were. What I mean is that there was a lot of
time not saying anything. Stoners have a way of being lost in their own mental
spheres. Drinking makes people loquacious. The Feelies on this album grasped the value of “few words.” Everything comes down to a sound, to an
autumnal feel that is both uplifting and declining. Thrilling. It’s in that
keyboard part that comes in after the first vocal, then an electric guitar
weighs in, feeling like driving up a mountain while gazing off into vistas. And
the “stop for a while” had the sense of being on the road for long periods of
time, just going, driving. Then a stop for a while.
In a while / For a
while. For a bit there in the 80s, I liked verse—even the kind I was
writing—to be a bit more minimal. Playing around with a phrase like “a while.”
In a while we’ll (blank) for a while. Who knows what, where, when, how long.
Just . . . in a while, for a while.
 |
| in the film Something Wild |
“Sing a new song / Call me when you’re better.” Psychic
costs were assumed. All those thinky pitfalls. Consciousness as fraught with
peril. The point was to clear a path for what needed to be thought, and to find
the time for things like “realizations,” “inspirations,” “perceptions.”
Eventually you might wind up (careful, there) with “interpretations.” But it
was better not to get pinned down on such, better not to articulate the whys
and wherefores.
Since I was embarked on a field of study that had me putting
a lot down on paper, I took a hit, as it were, from The Feelies’ The Good Earth, still letting musicians
live the life I couldn’t. Just feeling things, just playing in the band.
Working on a new song, riding a riff.
Around 1987 I got a darling of a video camera, a Sony. I
remember one day in the fall getting up on the roof of my parents’ house to
film a sweeping panorama of the church grounds across the street—often filled
with moody swathes of light and dark that time of year—and of course the song I
put on the clip was “On the Roof.”
Talk about it / For a
while . . . or not.
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