The Dawn of the Feelies

By JAY COCKS

Good idea for a movie. And a great title: Night of the Living Feelies. Here's this really bewitching post-new wave band, living and working out of Haledon, N.J. (pop. 6,888). The notion is that, in the movie, all the residents of a small town not unlike Haledon are red-eyed, ash-faced zombies who lumber into a Feelies concert looking for a midnight snack. The undead are, of course, finally rejuvenated, but not by their customary infusions. The raucous restorative powers of the Feelies is what brings them back to life.

Such a flick, says Feelies Co-Founder Glenn Mercer, 33, would be a combination of The Last Waltz and Night of the Living Dead. But if it must remain fantasy for a while longer, its premise serves as an excellent introduction to the kind of sweet electroshock the band can provide. Director Jonathan Demme concocted the Living Feelies idea when he first saw the band in 1980, and he subsequently cast the Feelies in Something Wild in 1986 and put | their tune Too Far Gone on the sound track of his current Married to the Mob. Demme says flat out the Feelies are the "premier live-rock band in America." They are in no danger of becoming the Demme house band, however. Their new Coyote/A&M album, Only Life, is just their second major-label release, but it ought to be a commercial bust-through.

Feelies Co-Founder Bill Million, 35, may have got the group's name "subliminally" from a long-ago child's game: put your hands inside a covered box and guess what's inside. If their music were a guessing game, you could, inside the Feelies, grab on to the vintage strains of the mesmeric Velvet Underground and strong traces of up-to-the-minute bands like R.E.M. What is fresh about the Feelies is the kind of sardonic innocence they bring to tunes like What Goes On and Undertow. Anyone who hears this new album will feel good first but think about it later.

An admirer of "that kind of drone quality" that was the rhythmic core of the Velvet Underground, Mercer works on Feelies material at home, on his own, then brings it in for his four partners to "mold to the melody." "Glenn writes the lyrics, though," says Million. "We don't ask him what they mean." Witty and oblique, as if they just slid off the edge of a tilted brainpan, the lyrics snuggle into niches tucked neatly inside the guitar- fueled rhythms that sound like rock for a trance state.

The Feelies leave the heavy messages at home. "We are not political," says Mercer. "If anything, we are spiritual." It must be a restless spirit just now, and a little bit anxious as well. Percussionist Dave Weckerman, 38, also free-lances in a Feelies spur group called Yung Wu and holds down a part-time job as a shipping clerk. Million, the only married band member, has a seven- year-old son and works behind the register at northern New Jersey's only rent- a-laser-disk store. Drummer Stan Demeski, 28, moved out of his mother's home only this spring, and Bass Player Brenda Sauter, 29, does free-lance photography jobs. The band is going on its most extensive tour in October, and Sauter has promised herself that life will be only music from then on. The Feelies play by their own rules, but even without a single gambler among them, Sauter's resolve seems like a safe bet. Or more. Put Only Life on again, and by the end of the title cut, it sounds like a sure thing.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York