Each day, around what should be closing time, The Onion sends me an email. I cherish it.
Sometimes the humor drifts into the absurd, but it’s often more effective when laced with truth. This one hit home.
Neil turned 80 last November, after a huge U.S. tour. He canceled a bunch of international dates this year but will appear at Farm Aid in September. I can’t imagine that he — like Dylan, McCartney, and various other legends — needs money. To say he loves making music is idiotic. He simply breathes melodies and chords and guitar solos. Who wants to walk away from their supply of oxygen?
The Feelies are, maybe, walking away. Earlier this spring, they posted that their only shows of the year would happen Memorial Day Weekend at White Eagle Hall, home turf in Jersey City, to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary.
I should’ve picked up on it. For a while, the Feelies have been good for a few mini-mini tours every year, exclusively east coast, from New England down to DC. There was something about that phrasing (ONLY SHOWS OF 2026) that made me wonder.
Michael Azerrad attended one of the Memorial Day shows and wrote a heartfelt piece (below) with a believable deduction that he’d witnessed a finale. I felt immediate regret and grief.
In 1986, I bought tickets to see R.E.M., a November show at the Felt Forum in New York City. The Feelies opened; Peter Buck had produced their then-recent, now classic album The Good Earth.
I can’t find a single memory of the R.E.M. performance tucked into any corner of my brain — I’m sure it was great — but I remember clearly the Feelies. First the sound: clean but fast, sometimes angular, frantic percussion, and especially the build of “Slipping (into Something)” into a wall of feedback. But also the sight of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million pinballing around the stage, propelled by the music’s energy and force. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; what I saw reimagined what a rock show could be.
I spent the next month or so searching suburban NJ record stores for a Feelies record, not even aware that the Feelies were from NJ. How were their records not everywhere?
Today, I have most everything they’ve recorded, including the white vinyl of Crazy Rhythms that I bought at Vintage Vinyl, in Eatontown, my first successful find.
And so many Feelies shows…somewhere between 10-15, I’d guess. Yet now, knowing what I know, I should’ve gone to more.
Number two was the legendary Rockitz, my freshman year at the University of Richmond, my first bona fide club show. Number three was the pre-hiatus tour in 1991, at the Library (a bar, not a place of learning) in Richmond, where I remember Brenda not seeming particularly happy. Seventeen years later, the celebratory reunion shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, 2008. Speaking of Maxwell, I brought my Maxwell when he was 3 to the Storm King Arts Center show. Many shows in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Velvet Underground show was a celebration of my wedding anniversary with my Feelies-digging wife.
The Feelies are woven through my life. I lusted for and ultimately bought my Telecaster exactly because that is all I’ve ever seen Glenn play. And their live shows were absolutely monumental. A 2015 show at the Bell House in Brooklyn included 38 songs: covers, multiple encores, loaded to the hilt.
They made me feel young every time I saw them, placed me back in the Felt Forum, experiencing music in a way that I now know changed me, pushed me to seek out rock that wasn’t played on my local radio, in cramped venues that would leave my ears ringing and my heart thumping from being close to the sound.
Now the Feelies have made me feel a little old (without even having to stand for two and half hours as my back and legs tightened) by likely dropping the curtain. I suppose writing this is my support network. I wish they’d hit me over the head in announcing those May shows so I understood their immensity, their finality. I would’ve been there to celebrate and grieve my 40 years as a fan as they slipped into something and out of something else.
Michael Azerrad, “Crying at the Feelies Show”