The Making of CRAZY RHYTHMS by The Feelies - featuring Glenn Mercer and Bill Million

Life of the Record

For the 45th anniversary of The Feelies’ classic debut album, Crazy Rhythms, we take a detailed look at how it was made. After the band formed as The Outkids in Haledon, New Jersey in 1976, Glenn Mercer, Bill Million and Dave Weckerman started playing with brothers Keith Clayton and Vinnie DeNunzio. They changed their name to The Feelies as they started playing gigs around New York City. At an audition night at CBGBs, they connected with sound engineer Mark Abel, who introduced them to manager Terry Ork. They began to get booked regularly and receive some press just as DeNunzio decided to leave the band. After placing an ad for a new drummer, they brought in Anton Fier, who had just relocated to New York from Clevenland. Weckerman also left around this time so the band lineup was solidified as a four piece. Rough Trade offered to release their debut single, which came out in 1979. For their debut album, they wanted to find a label that would allow them to produce. After signing with Stiff Records, they began recording at Vanguard Studios with Mark Abel co-producing. Crazy Rhythms was eventually released in 1980.

In this episode, Glenn Mercer and Bill Million recall connecting as teenagers in suburban New Jersey over a shared love of the Stooges. Mercer describes arranging their songs around the drums and percussion parts, while bringing a nervous energy and quirkiness to his vocals and lyrics. Million talks about how their early experiences with recording helped them realize the necessity of producing themselves and how they waited for the right record deal that would give them a proper recording budget. They describe their joy of discovery in the studio and their process for coming up with spontaneous parts as they were eager to treat the studio as an instrument. From finding the right clean guitar sound to standing out in the New York punk scene to embracing the suburbs to the 1950s-inspired look of the band to taking inspiration from contemporaries like Jonathan Richman, Brian Eno, Mo Tucker, and Steve Reich to percussion played with random objects to making music on their own terms for nearly 50 years, we’ll hear the stories of how the record came together.