Song of the Week: The Feelies

The Feelies: "Dancing Barefoot"

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than a few days knows I'm a huge fan of the Feelies. My ardor goes back nearly twenty years, from the moment I picked up a budget-priced vinyl copy of Only Life at Record City in Skokie, which is now long gone but where for several years I spent many a lunch hour while working in the area. Then it was their 1986 masterpiece The Good Earth, and lastly their good-but-not-great finale, Time For a Witness. (Oddly enough, I never picked up their debut Crazy Rhythms though I'm fairly familiar with most of it.) I missed the opportunity to see them on their final tour, in 1991, when they played at the Vic the night before I was leaving town on a fishing trip. Looking back, I would gladly have traded the extra exhaustion the next day for seeing this great band in their prime. Regrets.

The Feelies always had impeccable taste in covers, with their albums, EPs and B-sides including their takes on the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except For Me and My Monkey)" and "She Said She Said", the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black", the Velvet Underground's "What Goes On" and "White Light White Heat", Neil Young's "Sedan Delivery" and Iggy Pop's "Real Cool Time". (All but one of their albums closed with a cover - and Feelies' frontman Glenn Mercer continued the tradition on his recent solo album, with a medley of two George Harrison-penned tunes, "Within You, Without You" and "Love You To.")

All of this is a long-winded way of pointing to the tune I've linked to above, the band's cover of Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot", with bassist Brenda Sauter taking a rare lead vocal. I'm mostly familiar with Smith's song from the U2 version that saturated alternative rock radio in the early 1990s, but I'm quite pleased to realize that the Feelies did it even better. What I love about their version is that while it's unmistakably the Patti Smith classic, it's also pure, quintessential Feelies - the strummed rhythm guitar, the rich lead guitar, the crisp percussion, the subdued vocal delivery. The band took a very familiar tune and made it their own, which is how all great covers are. Terrific.