The Feelies’ Bill Million Reflects On Their Velvet Underground-Themed First Live Album ‘Some Kinda Love’ (INTERVIEW)

New Jersey-based Indie-Rock pioneers The Feelies have released their seventh album, Some Kinda Love, their first-ever live album. But even that comes with a twist since the music is not their own, but rather a performance from a retrospective of The Velvet Underground that they were invited to take part in the East Village in New York in 2018. Finding that The White Eagle in Hoboken, New Jersey, was the best venue to host the performance accompanying the exhibition, they played a sold-out gig on October 13, 2018. 

The performance of The Velvet Underground show was recorded and produced by Feelies founders Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, and it’s out now via Bar/None Records on digital platforms, CD, and double vinyl LP. This poses many questions for fans, since The Feelies have never performed an entire concert of another band’s music before, and never released a live album either, despite being very much known for their live shows, so what motivated such a significant gesture? I spoke with Bill Million about how the performance came about, some fascinating things about The Velvet Underground, and about his experience of interpreting and playing the music. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: How did it happen that the people doing The Velvet Underground Experience reached out to you and what were your thought processes in deciding to accept this project?

Bill Million: A few years ago, they had an exhibition in place in Paris initially. They had reached out through e-mail and said they were planning to bring it to New York and wondered if we’d like to be involved. We indicated that we would like to be involved. Actually, a couple of years then had gone by and they did bring it to New York. Originally, we were meant to perform in the exhibition space, but they had some trouble nailing down a good space for it. We ended up going over to Jersey City, to a venue that we’re familiar with, called The White Eagle Hall. 

That’s a beloved venue in its own right. I can imagine that a museum space might be harder for sound whereas White Eagle was one that you were familiar with.

Yes, exactly. I can imagine that you could do something in a museum that might be scaled down and at a lower volume. But for what we were trying to do, we needed a sound system that could support it.

Were there specifics to what you would need from a sound system for what you knew that you were going to play, or did you just set it up the way that you would for any of your shows. 

We do have certain criteria and lean on our sound man for that. He’s one of the first considerations when we want to do a show, he has to sign off on the technical specs of the space and stage size. But we were familiar with White Eagle Hall, and we’ve known Todd Abramson, who books there, for quite some time, going back to Maxwell’s days. 

I know that you have done cover music, but I think you’ve done that more with your subsidiary band, The Willies. Is that right?

The Willies actually hadn’t performed in quite a long time, and we only recently started considering playing again with some friends. The Willies do covers, but also originals, so it’s a mix. With The Feelies, it’s a little different. We’ve been in the habit of just playing by ourselves, without an opening band, unless we’re playing a festival. 

We did the Solid Sound Festival with Wilco and recently we did the Fall Festival in Hoboken. The Bongos were on the bill, as well as Lenny K. who did a number of Nuggets songs. In that sort of situation, it’s a more scaled-down set for us, but typically we play two sets. It’s primarily original music and during the encores, we’ll start doing different covers, whatever we’re in the mood for.

It’s a novel thing to be asked to do an entire show just about one band. You were kind of being asked to inhabit that music.

I think for us, what the interest was, was that it was something completely different. Usually, those are the things we like to get involved in. One example was when the artist Dan Graham had his exhibit at The Whitney Museum, and he asked us to perform acoustically on the opening night. We also did a charity event at Carnegie Hall, though it was just for one song. But those kinds of things are just interesting. We enjoy playing regular Rock venues, and that’s one of the reasons that we don’t play that often, to keep the fresh sense and to keep it from feeling like a grind every night. This was a one-off, one-night thing. 

I saw the band recently since the album was coming out, but reflecting back on that particular night five years ago, I realized it was really quite an undertaking. That particular night, we started by playing 18 Velvet Underground songs, then we came back and did a Feelies set that also included encores. Bruce Springsteen doesn’t have anything on us!

That’s something like a three-hour show! I didn’t know that you also did a Feelies set. 

It is. The Velvet Underground part of the night did include some songs that we’d performed in the past in different encores, but there was also quite a bit of it that we had to learn, that was new. It was a challenge, but I think that was part of the appeal of it, that it was a challenge. Everybody in the band seemed up for it.

The album sounds fantastic. Did you know in advance that you were going to record this and have a special setup?

Yes, we wanted to record it, so we had one of our soundmen multi-track record it. I knew that going in. I don’t think that he recorded The Feelies’ part of the evening.

I just realized that it was a double bill, and you were the double bill. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yes. Well, we decided many years ago that it was a lot easier than moving equipment to have different iterations of the band with some different people. We had The Willies, and we had another group called Yung Wu. Our percussionist Dave took lead vocals and we’d perform his songs. That sort of thing. That helped facilitate not moving equipment, so there’s a method there.

Did the band have a philosophy of how you wanted to present The Velvet Underground music? Was this very much your interpretation of the music or were you trying to find some kind of sweet spot close to studio versions of the songs?

No, I don’t think so. It’s not something that we really over-thought. We picked our songs, and we played as we play, and it wasn’t more complicated than that. Just by playing them, we knew that they’d be our version. We went over Dave’s parts with more detailed arrangements, for instance in a song like “Sunday Morning”, he played bells. For “Who Loves the Sun”, he was playing the triangle. There were a couple of keyboard parts here and there which we had recently started adding. 

It was more about picking some nuances from the original versions of the songs. We went back and listened to them and thought it would be a nice touch to add this or that. In rehearsal, we didn’t really talk about it too much in-depth, we just knew it was going to be filtered through our own ability to play the songs.

I got that sense from the recordings, and I’m relieved and happy that you didn’t put yourselves through the wringer in having to use every aspect of the originals in order to perform them. When listening to these recordings, I found that I was listening more closely than usual, and realized that the original songs were a lot more complex than I tended to realize. 

It’s interesting you bring that up because I know that Lou [Reed] said something to the effect that Rock and Roll songs should only be one chord, two at most. If you do more, you’re getting into Jazz. It’s kind of a funny quote, but I think most of The Velvet Underground songs are relatively simple in terms of chord structure. I think that’s something that inspired some of us in the band to even start playing music. 

It was something that you could listen to and think, “That’s something I can do.” As opposed to looking at Keith Richards, or what was doing on in The Beatles. Other bands during those formative years felt a little more otherworldly, but The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were something that you could listen to as a young musician and be inspired. That was something that you could actually attempt to do, and pull off. 

But that’s not to say that there’s not a lot going on in their music. There are all these harmonic crossovers happening that create other things going on. It’s one of the benefits of a drone, or throwing chaos into the arrangement.

Probably what I was reacting to in the complexity was how unpredictable the song structures are. They really were very experimental, though you can see where certain influences were coming from, and each of these songs are very different. Was that a goal?

Yes. One of the things that we do consider quite a bit, which goes back even to our first album, Crazy Rhythms, is that we are very conscientious about the keys of the songs. On Crazy Rhythms, the first song is in a minor key, the next song is a major, and it goes like that, pretty much throughout the album. But there are also tempo considerations. At least for me, I find it difficult to pull out a Feelies track and listen to it on its own. We consider what comes before and what goes after and how those things complement one another.

That’s a live performance kind of perspective on the music, too. You clearly gave thought to your set order here. 

Yes, we did. We did want to represent kind of a good cross-section of their music. One of the things about the performance was choosing “Sunday Morning”, which was their first song on their first album, and “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’”, which was their last song on their last studio album, Loaded. That was the only thing that was decided. Something that ended up happening that was totally random, though, was that the release date of the album ended up being exactly five years to the day from when we recorded it.

Wow! That’s crazy.

It’s kind of spooky. 

I was surprised by all the influences I could hear in their music, like The Beach Boys, early Rockabilly, and even “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” was almost an Americana track. 

I see exactly what you’re saying. I recently came across a version of “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” by The Black Crowes. They have pulled out exactly what you just described. They heard something in that song that really fit with their approach to music. Then, I can hear Beach Boys in those songs. With a band like The Rolling Stones, you can look at their music and say, “Yes, this is a lot of what preceded it.” 

I think, in general, with musicians and songwriters, there’s a sense of continuing. You pick up things here and there over a long period of time, consciously or unconsciously, and it gets filtered through eventually. Even with The Feelies, I might hear things one way, and Dave might hear it another way. 

But with The Velvet Underground, I could hear those things, but couldn’t figure out what preceded it. And to some extent, I still can’t. Like that whole downstroke approach that Jonathan Richman has described as “the guitars acting as drums.” 

Was there a song during this performance that had a particularly meaningful feeling for you as a performer?

One that I think of is “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, because of the guitar tuning and Brenda singing lead on it. It’s a really stripped-down arrangement, so that one jumps out at me and I was very happy that it came out well.

It’s very haunting. That has a little bit of the drone-like feel that you mentioned. The beat is like a march, almost.

You asked if we did any deep dives into the original performances, and we didn’t really, but for that particular track, Lou had done the “ostrich tuning” where every single string on the guitar was tuned to a D-note. That was one where we did something more closely inspired by the original.