Hampton Phish Tickets – Cheap Phish Tickets!

By: Ron Hart

Straight outta Haledon, NJ, The Feelies were the complete antithesis of cool back when they officially formed during the year punk broke (1976, kids). Named after a deep reference from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and dressed like the kids who ran the math club in high school, this quartet of North Jersey suburbanites were the outsiders amongst the outsiders of the NYC underground during the late ’70s. They hated gigging in the city because driving through the tunnels gave them headaches, drank coffee the way Jimmy Page downed Jack Daniels before shows, and were known to shave onstage with electric razors plugged into their amplifiers.

But once co-frontmen Glenn Mercer and Bill Million switched on their guitars as the terse, tight rhythm section of bassist Keith Clayton and one-time Pere Ubu/Electric Eels drummer Anton Fier kicked in their boxcutter-sharp, jittery grooves, The Feelies were an unstoppable force. Their sound was pure minimalism, taking the repetitive patterns of such modern classical composers as Terry Riley and Steve Reich and compounding it with a Bo Diddley groove stripped down to the studs a la the Velvet Underground, creating a sonic style as unique as their image. Originally released in 1980 on the UK-based Stiff Records, the group’s debut, Crazy Rhythms, is only LP to feature to Mercer/Million/Clayton/Fier lineup and remains one of the all-time great albums from the New Wave era. Now, after years of being out of print after the album’s U.S. label, A&M Records, got sucked up by the Universal Records machine, Crazy Rhythms is available once again for a whole new generation to enjoy its quirky genius thanks to Individuals frontman Glenn Morrow’s Bar-None imprint out of Hoboken, NJ, home of The Feelies’ favorite haunt, Maxwell’s.

Remastered and repackaged in a very cool slimline digipak (this is key, as the album’s cover art featuring headshots of the original members of The Feelies against a sky blue backdrop is one of the main selling points – just ask Weezer, who paid homage via the cover of their 1994 debut), the CD and LP of Crazy Rhythms only features the original 9 tracks – which includes such favorites as “The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness”, “Fa ce-La,” and their scorching cover of The Beatles’ White Album rocker “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey” – at the request of the band in order to maintain the integrity of the album’s initial issue. However, the CD does include a download card that features five bonus tracks, including the original Rough Trade 7-inch single version of “Fa ce-La,” demo versions of “The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness” and “Moscow Nights,” and live renditions of the title track and a cover of the Modern Lovers’ “I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms” from a March 2009 show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.

Also released in tandem with Crazy Rhythms is its equally-indispensible 1986 follow-up, The Good Earth, produced by Peter Buck of R.E.M. and one of the true cornerstones of that jangly, college rock sound we all love so much.

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For Jerry Garcia, 1975 was a seminal year that found him splitting time between recording Blues for Allah with the Dead, directing The Grateful Dead Movie, and forming the Jerry Garcia Band – his long-running side project. JGB’s earliest days are the subject of a two-disc live collection recorded during that momentous year. THE JERRY GARCIA COLLECTION, VOL. 2: LET IT ROCK, JERRY GARCIA BAND, NOVEMBER 17 & 18, 1975, KEYSTONE BERKELEY will be available November 10 from Jerry Garcia Family/Rhino at physical retail outlets and at www.dead.net for a suggested list price of $19.98.

The Jerry Garcia Band – Garcia, his constant collaborator bassist John Kahn and drummer Ron Tutt – played its first show with Nicky Hopkins on piano in August 1975. The ultimate session player, Hopkins’ credits include work with The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane to name a very few. While Hopkins residency was brief with the Jerry Garcia Band, it played an important role in the group’s shift away from big jams toward song-oriented material.

In addition to being a brilliant songwriter himself, Garcia had a great ear for other people’s songs and the new band provided him an opportunity to explore others’ works. LET IT ROCK includes covers of Chuck Berry (“Let It Rock”), Little Milton (“That’s What Love Will Make You Do”) and Jimmy Cliff (“Sitting In Limbo”). It also features performances of Allen Toussaint’s “I’ll Take A Melody” and Hank Ballard’s “Tore Up Over You,” songs that would surface a few months later on Garcia’s Reflections (1976). In addition to other artists’ songs, the band dips briefly into the Dead canon for “Friend Of The Devil” and Garcia’s 1972 solo debut for “Sugaree.” Three Hopkins originals are featured as well, “Pig’s Boogie,” “Lady Sleeps,” and the curiously titled “Edward, The Mad Shirt Grinder,” a song Hopkins first performed with Quicksilver Messenger Service.

While it is not strictly speaking a complete show, THE JERRY GARCIA COLLECTION, VOL. 2 is sequenced to approximate a two-set club gig, highlighting performances recorded November 17 and 18, 1975, during a pair of intimate gigs at Keystone Berkeley in front of a hometown crowd. The shows demonstrate that this lineup was capable of collective improvisation on the same level as the Grateful Dead, says David Gans, host of the Grateful Dead Hour. “Everybody could play melody or rhythm, or both, at any time, flying in and out of formation and always in intimate relation to what the others were playing,” he writes in the collection’s liner notes.

Track Listing

Disc One

Let It Rock
Tore Up Over You

Friend Of The Devil

They Love Each Other
It’s Too Late
Pig’s Boogie
Band Introductions
Sitting In Limbo
(I’m A) Road Runner

Disc 2

Sugaree
I’ll Take A Melody
That’s What Love Will Make You Do
Lady Sleeps
Ain’t No Use
Let’s Spend The Night Together
Edward, The Mad Shirt Grinder

‘Awesome Sugar Magnolia encore from the Tower Theater in Upper Darby PA summer of 76′ Has a beautiful “Sunshine Daydream”