"We have a lot of interests outside music," says Mercer. "We don't associate with people in the music business. We don't go to New York. We don't really like the music business at all. We try to avoid it as much as possible. We try to approach this more or less as a hobby."

Mercer and Million, both of them married, are neighbors in suburban New Jersey. They spend their days "cooking, cleaning, gardening, painting, drawing" or playing together with their new recording equipment, making music that may or may not be one day taught to drummer Anton Fier and bassist Keith Clayton and recorded for release or performed at one of their notoriously rare live appearances (often on public holidays, with appropriate decorations).

"We're not compelled to play," says Mercer. "That's why we try to keep the business at a minimum. We don't want money to determine why we play at any given time. This is the first time we've ever done this much playing -- two nights in a row, two sets a night."

The music they play, when they play, is deliberate, lyrical and airy. Crazy Rhythms is produced (nominally by Mark Abel, but functionally by Million and Mercer) with a desert clarity -- a space seems to surround each instrument -- and a spareness for which they had to fight, arguing with their engineer against double-tracking the rhythm guitars for a more "powerful" sound. (Stiff is apparently hemming and hawing over the Feelies' insistence on the last word; they'd like the next album to be more "commercial.") Songs form rather than begin, the elements magnetically, naturally cohering, each part well-chosen and inevitable. Simple but effective percussion rides above and below textured guitars. Lyrics appear as a compositional rather than narrative element -- atmospheric, written to the mood of the music rather than the other way around. "For about three years," says Mercer, "the songs didn't have any lyrics; I'd just improvise. It was only about three weeks before we went into the studio that I wrote these lyrics."

The approach is Formalist, almost restrained -- concert rock and roll. Even the guitar solos, so traditionally subject to teeth-gnashing, chest-thumping excess, are concise and to the point. Anonymous virtuosity is eschewed in favor of more creative and personal solutions to technical limitations. "Virtuosity is something we purposely try to avoid," says Million. "As long as I've been a musician I've known musicians who were technically accomplished, could play the same thing over and over, but it's like an electronic beat-box: There's no variable, it's too perfect."
 

T	he Feelies, if nothing else, are open to variables. Far from mechanical, in live performance they are somewhat less than tight (rehearsing only slightly more frequently than they play in

public),preferring interesting mistakes to flawless recreation, keeping themselves open to surprise, maintaining freshness at all costs, making each performance an act of discovery for themselves as well as for their audience. The infrequency of their live appearances is predicated at least in part on fear of familiarity-bred contempt: Mercer and Million can't imagine that audiences want to hear them perform the same material again and again any more than they want repeatedly to perform it. "When we have something new, we play," Mercer says.

The new material they presented at their Whisky shows was at once more experimental and more lyrical than Crazy Rhythms. "Our older songs were written on guitar, as songs," says Million. "Now we're working more with tape recorders, tape speeds, rhythmic jams." One new piece, "Angels on Trumpets," had Mercer tootling on a Tonette (a plastic whistle popular among elementary school teachers) against a pre-recorded tape background of slow percussion that Million thinks "sounds like elephants." "In Search of the Unknown Element" (a good description of their working method) had Million, Mercer, Clayton, Fier and their anonymous percussionist (added only for live shows) moving forward at variable speeds, chords shifting over chords, beat across beat, harmony washing over harmony; it was short, odd, and completely lovely.

In fact, there is little about this band and its music that isn't in some way lovely, or charming, or moving, right down to the look of earnest anxiety that seems permanently emblazoned across their faces. What makes it so, I think, is their care, their deep personal involvement in everything they play -- not only in their refusal to compromise their vision of what and how they should play and, more important, why they play, their resolute determination to keep the music fresh for themselves and by extension their audience -- but that every note they sound, by intent or mistake, is there for a reason, is there neither for money nor notoriety, but for itself, because it's the right note, chosen and played with love.¶