The Catskills are a magical place. They brought us Rip Van Winkle, after all. But the guy who wrote Rip Van Winkle got it wrong, and seeing as how the truth trumps all in my profession, which happens to be lying, I feel obligated to tell you the real story goes like this: that thunderous din Van Winkle heard coming from the Catskills on the eve of his 20-year sleep wasn’t the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s lost crew playing nine-pins. It was the sound of Bob Dylan and The Band in the basement of a rented house in West Saugerties they dubbed Big Pink, playing a loud and particularly raucous rendition of “Please Mrs. Henry.”
I know because I’ve been to the Catskills and I’ve heard that thunder, and above it I could distinctly make out Dylan singing, “Well I’ve already had two beers/I’m ready for the broom/Please Mrs. Henry/Won’t you take me to my room/I’m a good old boy/But I’ve been sniffing too many eggs/Talking too many people/Drinking too many kegs.”
Now along come The Felice Brothers from those very same magic mountains, and I’ll be damned if they’re nothing less than the second coming of the late, lamented The Band. The Felice Brothers may not boast three great singers like The Band, or a guitarist who Dylan once praised as “the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who doesn’t offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound,” but both bands share the same uncanny ability to intermingle joy and sorrow in the same song, and both write tunes that tell stories, and great ones at that. But most importantly, both know how to hit you right in the soul, where it hurts: lead vocalist Ian Felice–whose blue-collar roots are evident in the white wife-beater he always seems to be wearing–is the only singer besides poor benighted Richard Manuel who has ever made me cry.
Formed in 2006, The Felice Brothers–who include Ian Felice on vocals, guitar, and piano; Christmas Clapton on bass and vocals; James Felice on accordion, organ, and vocals; Greg Farley on fiddle and washboard; and Dave Turbeville on drums–got their start playing in New York City’s subway stations. Since then they’ve released eight albums–from 2006’s Through These Reins and Gone to 2012’s God Bless You, Amigo–one of which they recorded on two-track in a chicken coop. And here Dylan and The Band considered Big Pink roughing it. I think The Felice Brothers even had one of the smarter chickens serve as producer.
As for The Felice Brothers’ live shows, they’re boisterous, joyous affairs, with lots of trading of instruments, good old-fashioned camaraderie, and laughter. They have the magical ability to turn every venue they play into an Oklahoma honky tonk on a Saturday night, with chicken wire in front of the stage, guys pocketing .38s planning doomed heists, a jukebox glowing spectrally in a dark corner, and an old woman in a fancy but out-of-fashion dress turning delicate circles in the middle of the dance floor with her eyes closed and a lost smile on her face as Ian Felice sings, “Throw your arms around me/ Let’s keep this quiet/ Hear our hearts in the distance like cannon fire/ See our breath in the window, in the turning light/ Oh, it’s a wonderful life.”
I love those lines, and I happen to think that Ian Felice is one of the best lyricists around, right up there with John Darnielle and Mark Farner–er, Eitzel. Take the opening lines of “Fire at the Pageant” (“Harlan’s papa wouldn’t stay in the ground/ Dead and buried and he walked into town/ Lord God, what is Ma to do?/ Mama’s so mad cause he muddied up his suit/ Caught in a thorn bush, blowin’ on a flute/ Lord God, what is Ma to do?”) Or these poignant lines from “Forever Green”: “Your grandma was a country singer/ I’d loved to have seen her/ Making some barroom swing/ I could see you doing that/ If you had a Stetson hat/ And an electric guitar to sing with/ May you stay forever green/ Like the country between us/ Far after our hands unfold.”
I could list about a hundred Felice Brothers numbers I really love, but I’ll spare you because you seem like a nice person, despite the prison record. Suffice it to say their slow numbers, like “Wonderful Life” and “Roll on Arte,” have the same effect on me as The Band’s “Whispering Pines,” which is to say they never fail to induce an oddly pleasant state of melancholy. While the band’s upbeat tunes, like the over-the-speed limit “White Limo;” the rollicking “Take This Bread” (“Whoa!/ Take this bread/ Sure thing/ If I got bread you got bread/ And everybody in my company has got bread/ You look a little hungry/ I ain’t even that hungry, that’s how I look at it”); the very Basement Tapes-like “Memphis Flu” (which has the whole band singing raggedly to the sound of an accordion and some rough drums); and the accordion-fueled crowd favorite “Frankie’s Gun” always make me happy.
And isn’t that what music is supposed to do? Make you laugh and cry and in short feel more alive, and by so doing help to reconcile you to the numbing reality of having to toil and struggle against the utter futility of being alive on this dung-heap of a planet? In The Last Waltz Richard Manuel says, “I just want to break even.” Well, nobody breaks even–Manuel, who hanged himself in a Florida hotel room bathroom, certainly didn’t–but I can almost live with the fact when I hear Ian Felice sing, “A line of K and a diet Sprite/ Take my hand/ Let’s drift through this night.” As the late, great Levon Helm once said, “If you pour some music on whatever’s wrong, it’ll sure help out.” Truer words were never spoken, and if you don’t believe that you’re a turd.
Me, I may be full of shit, as both my ex-wives will happily attest, but I’m no turd. And speaking of turds, that was my initial reaction to the Felice Brothers’ latest LP, God Bless You, Amigo. My ambivalence towards the LP probably stems from the fact that it was a rush job recorded to pay for a new tour van, and is a mix of originals and folk standards. And as far as folk goes I think Bob Dylan had the right idea, namely that to make it palatable it was necessary to pump enough voltage into it to electrocute the entire state of Utah. That said, God Bless You, Amigo is growing on me, folk or no folk, and I’ll probably soon be calling it the best thing to come our way since Dylan sang, “Well, I looked at my watch/ I looked at my wrist/ Punched myself in the face with my fist/ I took my potatoes down to be mashed/ Then I made it on over to that million dollar bash.”
Anyway, The Felice Brothers opened for Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band on Friday May 10 at the 9:30 Club. I skipped Ritter because (1) I don’t know jack shit about him except he has a song called “Harrisburg,” that sad city on the Susquehanna to which my buddy Joe Katch and I once hopped a drunken ride in a train’s open coal car in the middle of a cold winter’s night, with a matchbox full of pot but alas no rolling papers, for no good reason other than I wanted to play Jack Kerouac. And because (2) Ritter could be the Second Coming for all I know, but so far as I’m concerned The Felice Brothers are an impossible act to follow. Shit, even Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Doc “Put me in coach, I’m ready to trip” Ellis’ June 12, 1970 no-hitter while on acid (“The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes,” he said afterwards) would be an anticlimax.
The 9:30 was packed with frighteningly clean-cut twentysomethings when The Felice Brothers opened their set with a brand new song, “Butch Cassidy,” one of three new ones they played along with “Some Say” and “Lion.” “Butch Cassidy” was slow and moving: “I was in the middle of a dream,” sang Ian Felice as Farley accompanied him on fiddle, before singing “I will be Butch Cassidy.” The Felice Brothers then broke into the popular “Whiskey in My Whiskey,” a slow night at the honky-tonk of a murder ballad that featured James Felice, a huge bearded guy with a huge voice, on accordion and vocals, with Farley joining in whenever he seemed to feel like it. “Some Say” was next: a rocker featuring a great guitar intro by Ian Felice, it had Ian and Farley sharing vocals and Ian singing, “I sang with all my might/ Some say I’m all right.”
Then they played the great uptempo “Run, Chicken, Run,” which had Farley and James and Ian Felice swapping verses like, “She’s the fairest of them all/ She loves her Adderall/ She’s kicking out the windows of your car” while the hyperactive Farley roamed the stage like a caged panther and Ian Felice swayed back and forth, seemingly lost in a trance. They followed that up with “Lion,” a midtempo number that highlighted James Felice’s accordion while Ian Felice sang, “And the crowd comes and goes/ To an end no one knows.”
But the show didn’t really truly take off–probably because of the new tunes, which you couldn’t sing along with–until the band kicked into an amped-up and hard-charging rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Cumberland Gap,” one of the numbers off God Bless You, Amigo. Farley took the lead on fiddle while Ian and James Felice sang together, and the audience went wild when Farley leaped onto a speaker to continue fiddling while Ian Felice turned the mic to the audience and got the crowd to sing along on the chorus, “Cumberland Gap, Cumberland Gap/ Way down yonder in Cumberland Gap.”
Then everybody left the stage but Ian Felice and Clapton on bass, and Ian played the beautiful ringing guitar tones that open “St. Stephen’s End,” a very slow and doleful tune that had Ian singing (rather bizarrely, given it’s mostly a song about the deaths of saints) “Did you hear about the elephant?/ Ran wild from the circus tent/ Killed a crowd of ten/ Before they shot him dead.” Next up was “Honda Civic,” a revved-up number (who knew a Honda Civic could go so fast?) that featured Ian and Clapton swapping verses (“Three shots in the windshield/ Four in the passenger side/ Now there’s mass confusion/ Clogging up the interstate”) and James Felice on organ, and that really took off when, much to the delight of the audience, Ian Felice jumped onto the bass drum to play a really twisted guitar solo and James Felice shouted “Take it, boy!” to Farley, who promptly leaped in on fiddle.
The great, rambunctious “Frankie’s Gun” was next. It opened with a washboard solo by Farley then took off, with Ian Felice singing, “Pull over/ Count the money/ But don’t count the thirty in the glove box buddy/ That’s for to buy Lucille some clothes” followed by an accordion solo and a chorus that had Ian Felice hopping on one leg and singing “Bang bang/ Went Frankie’s gun” and James Felice and Farley finishing it with “He shot me down, Lucille.” Finally, the band closed their too-brief (damn you, Josh Ritter!) set with the drum heavy, hard-rocking “Cus’s Catskill Gym,” which found Farley back atop the amp, fiddling while the 9:30 burned to the sound of Ian Felice repeating the lines “Stay away from Don King” (which always make me laugh) before the pace quickened and Ian leaped over the bass drum before singing, “Burn down old Vegas strip burn down/ Burn down old Cus’ Gym burn down/ You still gotta fight so burn on Kid Dynamite/ Oh! Iron Mike burn on!” The song then stopped on a dime and that was it, finis, except for the guy in the audience who shouted “25 more songs!”
At the Levon Helm Tribute held at the Brooklyn Bowl last June, Ian Felice sang “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” It was a tremendously moving moment, and marked a symbolic passing of that ancient Catskills magic from one great band to another. There will never be another The Band, with Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and Richard Manuel all joining in to sing “The Weight.” Or another Richard Manuel, who with a single turn of phrase could break your heart. But The Felice Brothers can break your heart too, and make you smile, or do both at the same time. And that’s the most beautiful thing I can think of, and something to hang onto as the world does what the world does, namely break your heart for real.
Photos: Richie Downs
