Everybody knows greatness when they hear it. Even if they don’t have a head. Such was the case with Mike the Headless Chicken, the Fruita, Colorado Wyandotte cockerel who lived for 18 months after having his head cut off by farmer Lloyd Olsen in 1945 (Google it: I ain’t shittin’ ya.) Mike became an instant celebrity, made the rounds of state fairs and sideshows, but never missed The Felice Brothers play a midnight ramble, and was known to hop up on stage and do a sprightly jig whenever they played the raucous, “Run, Chicken, Run.”
Okay, so The Felice Brothers weren’t around in the late 1940s. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Felice Brothers are the best roots-rock band to come our way since The Band, and you don’t have to be headless to love them. The Felice Brothers’ unique and rough-hewn sound stems from their hillbilly instrumentation—including fiddle, accordion, washboard, and honky-tonk piano in addition to your typical rock set-up—and they’ve written songs (“Wonderful Life,” “Forever Green,” “Frankie’s Gun,” “Take This Bread”) that I would stand up against such Band classics as “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”—which lead vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Ian Felice did a killer rendition of at one of the several tribute shows held to honor late Band drummer Levon Helm.
Like The Band, The Felice Brothers’ songs have a timeless, mythical quality to them, lacquered like tintypes with shades of desperation and a reckless, heedless joy. Their tunes evoke long-shuttered juke joints, jealous murderers, double-crossing crime partners, women named Odetta, the Cumberland Gap, and bullet holes in Honda Civics. And there’s a wonderful, spontaneity to even their recorded material. On the raucous “Love Me Tenderly,” for instance, Ian Felice ad-libs in his raw and cracking voice, “Woah! James Felice on the piano!/Ho ho ho ho!/A real talent/All right Jimmy that’s enough/Let’s wrap it up.”
A wee bit of background: in addition to Ian and James Felice, The Felice Brothers include former traveling dice player Christmas Clapton on bass, Greg Farley on fiddle and washboard, and Dave Estabrook on drums. They hail from the haunted Catskill Mountains, where Bob Dylan and The Band recorded the immortal Basement Tapes. The band got its start busking in the New York subways, and has recorded in an abandoned chicken coop (Mike the Headless Chicken would be proud). They’ve released nine brilliant country, folk, rock, and hillbilly-tinged albums since 2005, although some purists went for the fire ax like Pete Seeger during Bob Dylan’s Newport electric set upon hearing 2011’s electronica and dancehall-tinged Celebration, Florida. It’s not my favorite, but that has less to do with the high-tech touches than the fact that I don’t think it’s their best bunch of songs.
The Felice Brothers differ from The Band in several respects. First, Ian Felice’s guitar plays, at best, a secondary role. What you hear most are James Felice’s accordion and Farley’s fiddle, although Ian does let rip with the occasional brief and ragged solo. Second, unlike The Band, whose live shows consisted of almost note-for-note reproductions of their recorded songs, The Felice Brothers play it loosey-goosey, skipping intros and endings, messing around with the lyrics, and going off on instrumental tangents, although they don’t tend to be long-winded about it, and nobody’s going to mistake The Felice Brothers for a jam band. And unlike The Band, who boasted three tremendous singers, Ian Felice handles the bulk of the vocal duties, with brother James contributing a lead here and there.
Anyway, The Felice Brothers returned to The Rock and Roll Hotel on Sunday, December 29, and it made me want to sing, as Ian Felice does in “Back in the Dancehalls,” “Damn it feels good to be back again.” Because I’ve seen The Felice Brothers a half-dozen times, and they’ve never failed to knock me out. And talk about spontaneity; after the show James Felice, who was manning the merch booth, led the assembled throng in an impromptu a cappella sing-along of the old traditional “Erie Canal,” which evidently every New York State schoolchild knows by heart, just as all Pennsylvania schoolchildren know Anal Cunt’s “Don’t Offer Me Weak Drugs or I’ll Kick Your Fucking Ass.” I remember singing it in third grade music class. Afterwards an angelic little girl raised her hand and asked sweetly, “Why can’t we sing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’?” The teacher promptly packed her off to the principal’s office as a suspected drug user.
I missed the opener due to a very strange set of circumstances. I was walking to the club when I saw the ghost of a headless chicken duck into a dark alley. So I did what anyone would have done—I followed it. The phantom rooster was waiting for me by a dumpster filled with trash, a chandelier, and a man in a sky blue suit with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Communicating with the specter of a headless chicken isn’t easy, but I finally understood he wanted me to sneak him into the Felice Brothers show under my coat. So I did. And he had a wonderful time, even making it onto stage during “Hesitation Blues” to do the old soft claw.
As for the show, it featured a mix of new, unreleased numbers, such as the aforementioned “Hesitation Blues,” an old popular song based on a traditional which had the band going at it hoedown style while Ian Felice sang, “Well, If the river was whiskey/And I was a duck/You know I’d swim to the bottom/Lord, and never come up.” Other new ones included the rip-snorting, accordion and fiddle-dominated “Lion,” the short, slow, and sad “Got What I Need,” which highlighted brother James’ woebegone vocals and doleful accordion; the rocking and rollicking “Some Say,” which featured some nice piano by James and brother Ian singing about finding himself in a field of ghostly shadows; the sad “Saturday Night” with its great back-and-forth vocals and mournful fiddle; and show opener “Butch Cassidy,” a beautiful mid-tempo number in which Ian Felice sings, “I was lost in the meadow of a dream/And you can say what you want/Be who you want/Oh I’ll be/Butch Cassidy/And you can be the Sundance kid.”
But it was the old standbys that got the audience jumping, such as the band’s riotous version, complete with great ensemble singing, of the Appalachian folk song “Cumberland Gap,” which had the whole audience screaming, “Cumberland Gap/Cumberland Gap/16 miles to the Cumberland Gap.” The slow and sad “Hey Hey, Revolver,” about a man tempted by a gun to do something desperate to remedy his bad luck, featured some really purty fiddle, one down-in-the-mouth accordion, and brother Ian singing the great chorus, “Hey hey revolver/Don’t lead me on/Your shiny barrel/Is long and narrow/Hey hey revolver.”
The great and happy-go-lucky “Loves Me Tenderly” featured more interaction between fiddle and accordion, not to mention some wonderful ensemble singing. Meanwhile Ian recited a long and bizarre list of gifts his girl might like (e.g., “a typewriter and a violin”) then sang, “I left my blue-eyed lady/And went with Tony Mercedes to the gambling room/I lost my diamond watch/But in the parking lot I took it back again.” Meanwhile, the breakneck rocker “White Limo” sent the audience into an uproar, what with the fiddle going about a thousand mph and Ian Felice giving it all on vocals, shouting “White legs, white noise, white country blues!/Black helicopters on the news!” while the whole band spit out the chorus, “What a lovely lady/What a lovely limousine/Woaoh!”
“Take This Bread,” a lovely loping number, also had the audience singing along. Great piano, a big kick drum, some hot fiddle, Ian Felice’s rasp of a voice, and more great ensemble singing make this one of my favorite numbers, but I was disappointed when he skipped what I think are the song’s central lyrics. Still I sang along lustily with everybody else on the chorus: “Take this bread/If you need it friend/Cuz I’m alright if you’re alright/I ain’t got a lot/But all I got you’re welcome to it/Cuz I’m alright if you’re alright.” The crowd sang along just as loudly to the honky-tonkin’ “Whiskey In My Whiskey,” a murder ballad sung by James in that foghorn voice of his, and which featured a rough-and-ready guitar solo by Ian and a rip-and-run accordion solo by James.
“Honda Civic” featured some radical tempo changes, racing along faster than any Honda Civic (I used to own one: total dog) ever has, then slowing down long enough for Ian to sing, “There’s a confrontation/At the Wonder Bread warehouse downtown/Security cameras are mounted on the gate/1998/Three shots in the windshield/Four in the passenger side/Now there’s mass confusion/Clogging up the interstate.” Throw in a brief but frenetic guitar solo by Ian, and some fantastic group vocals, and what you had was a song that kept you completely off-balance, as did the stop and start of “Cus’s Catskill Gym,” with its great warning “Stay away from Don King/Stay away from Don King” and the ecstatic lines, “Burn down/Old Vegas strip/Burn down.” The tune slowly built in speed, with Farley sawing away frantically on the fiddle until it was complete mayhem, at which point the tune stopped on a wooden nickel.
The great and dark “Penn Station” had the audience singing along again, what with Estabrook leading the band with some stop and start drumming and Ian Felice singing in his ragged voice about dying in Penn Station with his eternal fate to be determined by which train arrives first: “And I know on track number seven/There’s a train to take me to heaven, Lord/But a faster train’s coming near/That the devil engineers, oh Lord/That the devil engineers.” Meanwhile the song kept speeding up, like that train engineered by Satan, until it evolved into a total hoedown, with Farley playing his fiddle higher and higher and higher and the whole band singing at a breakneck pace.
“Dead Dog” was a sad tune—I’d love to hear a song called “Dead Dog” that’s a happy tune—and I don’t have much to say about it other than it was all guitar and somebody—I was too far away to see who, although it might have been Estatbrook—on vocals. As for “Marie,” it had James and Ian swapping vocals, one sweet piano, and some really natty ensemble singing. James sang about “how my hands aren’t as dirty as my mind” after which Ian took over and sang those immortal lines, “They say this song’s in G/But I don’t give a shit/I wrote this song in the key of love,” which Stevie Wonder would have written if he could swear, but he just doesn’t have it in him.
The encore consisted of the band’s trademark tune, “Frankie’s Gun,” a great number about a guy hauling contraband who gets shot by his partner despite the fact he “could have swore the box said Hollywood blanks.” Accordion- and washboard-fueled, the song was only mid-tempo but seemed to fly along due to the way Ian Felice frantically tried to cram all the lyrics in. The entire audience sang along with the chorus, “Bang! Bang! Bang!/Went Frankie’s gun/He shot me down, Lucille” before the band shut the song down with a repeated “Sha nae na/Sha nae na na nae na na/Sha nae na/Sha nae na” followed by a delirious closing yodel by Ian.
The band closed their show with a cover of Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.” I’ve never heard The Felice Brothers cover a song by a contemporary artist before, but they kicked ass on Sir Neil’s big axe anthem despite the almost complete lack of guitar pyrotechnics. Ian’s vocals had some echo on them, and the band’s ensemble singing was as great as ever, and the audience screamed out the chorus, delirious the way I only see crowds at Felice Brothers shows, which tells me this band, which currently has at best a cult status, will soon break through to the big time, or this world’s just plain goddamn crooked.
As for Mike the Headless Chicken, he passed on to Clucker Heaven in a motel room in the Arizona desert in March 1947, and I like to think Mexican radio station XERF was playing The Tune Wranglers’ great “Chicken Reel Stomp” on the 1946 Air King Radio on the cheap enameled dresser by Mike’s motel bed when he bought the farm. And I was wrong about Miracle Mike’s inability to hear; farmer Olsen’s legendary swing of the axe left the cock with one ear, which explains a lot. No head, one ear—that’s all you need to know The Felice Brothers are the proverbial shit.
Mike knows it; I saw him outside the Rock’n’Roll Hotel afterwards wearing a Felice Brothers t-shirt and smoking a cigarette out of his neck. Then he pulled his decapitated head from under his left wing, kinda screwed it on, and said, “Fuck Hank Williams. Saw him at the Cherry Springs Dance Hall in Texas in ’47 and he was so soused he might as well have been singing in Swahili. Give me The Felice Brothers any day. Hey, anybody got any gage?”
