The Feelies' Bill Million: The Signal Interview
Million talks about the band's new live record of Velvet Underground covers, his guitar practices, his trip to Woodstock, and much more...
Recently, legendary alternative rock pioneers The Feelies released their first ever live record, Some Kinda Love, a set of Velvet Underground covers they performed around the The Velvet Underground Experience Exhibition in New York five years ago. It is their first release of any kind in seven years. Among the wave of bands who had been influenced by the Velvets over the last forty-odd years, The Feelies have always ranked one of the best, celebrating the artful guitar syncopation and minimalism of Lou Reed and Co. while also writing great songs, with records featuring hooks understatedly sung by Glenn Mercer, framed by the locked-in guitar duo of Mercer and Bill Million. Some Kind Of Love is a fantastic celebration not only of the great songs and sounds of the Velvet Underground, but of legacy of The Feelies, who have kept their esthetic flame grooving for decades (albeit with long bouts of seeming inactivity).
I first heard The Feelies when the KUSF music director unpacked The Good Earth, their 1986 masterpiece, and proceeded to run into the production studio to throw it on for a listen. I had never heard anything like it (or have since): the laid back, muted, almost folky back-porch sound with those duel electric guitars frenetically strumming groovy, simple chords with their signature rhythm, all the while Glenn’s voice buried sweetly in the sonic beauty of the band’s playing. I listened to the record over and over and over again.
When I found out that The Feelies were coming to play the I-Beam for their tour around the record…and they were coming to KUSF for an interview…I immediately asked the program director if I could conduct it. I was 17 and had just recently been stood-up for an interview with John Cale and Chris Spedding…and was both completely scared and truly excited to be able to interview a band that had become one of my favorites. I did as much research on The Feelies as my pre-internet self could, writing down question after question that I thought would prompt a deep, interesting discussion. Everyone from the band showed up for the interview, minus drummer Stan Demeski, and they sat in a semi-circle around me in KUSF’s Studio B (where we would conduct interviews), hanging on their chairs, staring through the walls. The interview did not go as plan, with the band giving a slew of uninterested, one-word answers to my earnest, deeply thought-out questions and I was too young and inexperienced to dig myself out of the lonely space that was created from the on-air non-conversation. To add insult to injury, later in the evening I was prevented entrance to the I-Beam for the show, in one of the few instances that my brother’s ID did not work at the door (Damn it, man…I am a young looking 27 year old…now let me in).
I did get to see them a few years later in Berkeley when they powered through a great short set, opening up for Lou Reed on his New York tour (thank you, Steven Baker, for the tickets) and have followed them ever since. Hearing the advance copy of Some Kinda Love a few months ago, and just loving it from start to finish, singing along to all those great Velvet Underground songs magnificently Feelie-ized, I reached out to their publicist to see if I could set up an interview. I told him about the last time I interviewed them…and thought it would be nice for a second chance to talk with them, with a focus on their newest release. Bill Million accepted the interview, and granted me a friendly space to have a deep, insightful conversation about the Feelies…about his musical path…about The Velvet Underground. Deep thanks to you, Bill.
Enjoy the interview! I recommend listening to Some Kinda Love as you read through… available everywhere including Spotify, Qobuz, and Youtube (although the latter presents only a song at a time)…
DAVID KATZNELSON: I just want to start by saying I am a long time Feelies fan and a long time Velvet Underground fan. I met Lou Reed a couple times, but I never really wanted to talk to him because he had a reputation of sometimes not being the nicest guy. I loved his music too much to be tainted by a bad interaction.
BILL MILLION: It's kind of funny that you mention that you didn't want to talk to Lou because it makes me recall a story of the first time we met him, as it was being set up by our manager, Steve Fallon, who also owned the club Maxwell's in Hoboken. A great, great venue. Steve had called about a holiday party for a radio station out in Long Island, and Lou was going to be playing at this holiday party and the Ramones and Joan Jett were playing, as well as quite an eclectic mix of folks. When we were asked to play it, we said we would do it if Lou would sing with us or play with us. I said it off-the-cuff as kind of a joke, figuring that's not something that's ever going to happen. And as it turned out, it did happen and our manager called back and said, "Lou wants to give you a call and talk to you about it. And he's pretty excited." And I said, "No, I can't really talk to Lou (laughs), make Glenn do it."
We went back and forth. Steve called Glenn and I guess, I don't know, Glenn might've given him the same response, so Lou ended up calling me. So I can understand. It was pretty interesting because again, not unlike you, we're longtime Velvet Underground fans.
DAVID: When did you first hear The Velvet Underground?
BILL: I was in high school, maybe 16, something like that. It was a long time ago.
DAVID: And did someone turn you onto them? Were they on the radio?
BILL: Have you heard of the station WFMU? They’ve been around a long time, and they used to be a part of Upsala College. Danny Fields used to be a DJ on the station, and he turned a lot of people on to The Stooges, the MC5, The Velvet Underground. So, he played a lot of that stuff and it's where we heard it for the first time.
DAVID: I read somewhere that you actually got to see them. Is that true?
BILL: Yeah, I think it was at the Electric Circus down in the Village.
DAVID: Was that the Doug Yule era?
BILL: Yeah, yeah. He was there too.
DAVID: Was the show amazing?
BILL: Yeah, it was good. What's not to like? Actually, I remember The Stooges show a little bit more from that same venue. It was really over the top, even for Iggy1.
DAVID: So fast-forward to The Velvet Underground Experience Exhibition, which I went to and you were asked to play a live show for it. Are there more details about how that came about?
BILL: The way it came about was the curators had put the show on in Paris before they came to New York. And when the show was going on in Paris, they sent us an email and said they had plans to bring it to New York and they wanted to know if we wanted to be a part of it and play at the venue where they're going to have the exhibition. So we said, "Yeah, sure." And after a while, they did eventually bring it to New York, but I think they had some issues with the venue for the exhibition, and I think it turned out to be too small. So we ended up just coordinating it with them and moving to a bigger space in New Jersey called White Eagle Hall.
DAVID: Right. And that was where it was recorded.
BILL: Yeah, that's where it was recorded.
DAVID: And that's five years ago. What made you guys decide to put out the record, Some Kinda Love, now?
BILL: Well, a number of things. First, we're kind of notoriously slow at doing things, and I'm not saying that's good or bad or one way or the other, but we do take our time about things. And then we liked what we heard. We had made the decision going in to multi-track record it and the initial rough mixes, we thought there might be something there. And then a couple things kind of happened, COVID hit, and we tried to mix it, exchanging files. The engineer that recorded it would send files back and forth to Glenn and I and we would say, “No, we want the guitar like this or the vocal with some reverb or whatever." So we were just going back and forth. Literally, it was almost like a studio type recording in a way, with the amount of microphones that were used.
And so that went back and forth for months and months, and it turned out to be kind of a frustrating exercise because we weren't really getting what we wanted. It's not like you're standing in the same room with the engineer saying, "Just bring this up a little bit," or "Bring this down a little bit," or "Move it over to the left." A week would go by and we'd hear what that sounded like, thinking it's not really what we had in mind. So it was kind of a tedious exercise that we really weren't comfortable with. So we shelved it for quite a while.
In the interim, it seemed like all of a sudden, there was everything The Velvet Underground. You couldn't turn on a television or radio without hearing The Velvet Underground. There were so many different interpretations of their music, different albums from different artists. Beck did a lot of Velvet Underground stuff. I mean, recently I heard The Black Crowes do Oh Sweet Nuthin'. Elisabeth Moss on Handmaid's Tales doing an a cappella version of I'll Be Your Mirror. It's like everywhere you turned, it was The Velvet Underground. So it got to the point where we questioned whether it was even worth pursuing and putting out.
DAVID: Tracks on Some Kinda Love like Run Run Run, We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together, There She Goes Again: the record you guys did is “THE” ultimate homage to the band and a true celebration of how great they were live. Are you a person like me who is so into The Velvets that you collect all the bootleg live shows you can get ahold of?
BILL: No, I don't. Actually, I'm not a collector of really much of anything other than I have a bunch of guitars, but no, I don't collect. In fact, Stanley is more like the archivist of the band. Dave keeps a pretty good diary should anything ever come up and questions are being asked, but that's not me. I don't collect. I'm familiar with the more popular of The Velvet Underground albums that everyone knows. But I think to your point, what ultimately made us decide to do it—the starting point was Lou just wrote so many great songs and you could do these interpretations that really had very little to do with what we would say The Velvet Underground were about and still have a great version of a song because their starting point was they were really great songs. But I think one of the things that we wanted to do was showcase what kind of inspired us in the first place when it came to their music, the different elements that they brought that inspired us to start playing our own music.
DAVID: Is everybody in the band as much of The Velvet Underground head that you and Glenn are?
BILL: I think probably Glenn and I in particular, Stanley is heavily influenced by Moe's approach to drumming. He's a big Charlie Watts, Ringo fan, so he loves it. Dave wasn't all that familiar with The Velvet Underground. He's come to appreciate them over time. Although I guess after The Velvet Underground show we did, he said he probably didn't want to do another Velvet Underground song as long as he lived, which is kind of funny. And Brenda came to become familiar with them as well, but I think probably Stan, Glenn, and I.
When it comes to someone like The Velvet Underground or The Beatles or The Stones or any of those really iconic groups, you're perpetually learning. With All Tomorrow's Parties, the tuning is what Lou had always called the “Ostrich Tuning.” I think Lady Godiva's Operation uses that tuning and All Tomorrow's Parties…it's like every string is tuned to a D, so it does have this sort of very droney effect that is unique. I've never done that with my guitar. I've played with open tunings before and I love listening to Keith Richards approach and learning a lot of things he's done, but nothing like that. I don't think he's ever gone down that road.
DAVID: Do you think that now that you've done it, you might incorporate it into something else?
BILL: Yeah, you never know. I think writing music is ultimately just a state of mind that comes on.
There was a song off of our fifth album Here Before that Dave heard as a Velvet Underground song. Glenn heard it as kind of this southern front porch stomp kind of Chickasaw Mudd Puppies type of song. And the riff was probably very The Velvet Underground. So...
DAVID: With Dave being tired of playing The Velvet Underground, I guess we're not going to see a two-sided LP Sister Ray drawn-out jam from you guys anytime soon, I would assume.
BILL: I don't know. You never know. It's a great song, right?
We actually did a version, Glenn and I, when we were mixing the song that I just mentioned from Here Before. It's a song called On and On. Yo La Tengo was doing the Hanukkah shows2 in Maxwell's and they wanted us to come over. The studio that we were working in, trying to finish the mix of On and On, was in Hoboken. So we got done with the mix and we went over and played a version of Sister Ray with Yo La Tengo.
DAVID: Is that recorded somewhere?
BILL: You know, I don't know. I don't know. I can ask Ira (of Yo La Tengo)
(DAVID: I FOUND IT after the interview).
DAVID: You toured with Lou Reed a while back, on his New York tour, and that was actually the first time I got to see you. Your live version of What Goes On was my favorite Lou Reed song of the night, actually.
BILL: I think it was the very first Velvet Underground song we did. Again, Dave keeps a diary of such things, and I think when we had a reorganization of the band, Dave came back, he cites that as the first thing that he played with Glenn and I.
DAVID: The very first song he played with you was...
BILL: What Goes On. It was in my basement.
DAVID: The Velvet Underground songs teach you how to jam. That's one of the things about The Velvet Underground. They teach you, they give you freedom. The Feelies to me are always very set with the beat and the rhythm, but there's also this freedom and kind of tension, right?
BILL: Well, yeah, and I think for me…I can get into playing the myriad amount of approaches to a simple D chord that could go on and on. I mean, there's open notes like the root chord, the suspended…you could just create something very interesting within itself. And I think with us, when we get together and jam, it usually is a very simple approach, and we usually get lost in it. That’s when you know you've done something right.
DAVID: What are the next things you guys are going to do?
BILL: Well, that's a good question. We've never been big planners, but we have some shows coming up in November in Philadelphia and at Woodstock, and I think right now that's it. We had another band called The Willies that we started bringing back and playing again. This group that we kind of put together between Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth, something that was more like Eno or Philip Glass influenced, Bowie's Low album. And we just did a show in Brooklyn back in June as The Willies opening up for The Feelies, so might pursue a Willies album. We had talked about a combination of maybe Feelies and Willies because we do have some Feelies music. Willies do a lot of covers, but also there's quite a number of originals as well. It could be that type of approach instead of a straightforward Feelies album. It could be a combination of, which we thought could be interesting. So we'll see where it goes.
DAVID: So there's definitely talk in the air of something, right?
BILL: Yeah, yeah. We're all talk.
DAVID: I’ve heard that there have been times in your life that you don't play the guitar a lot. Do you have other artistic pursuits?
BILL: I like gardening and landscaping, actually. I find that very interesting. But really since the band got together I play every day and I think so does everybody else in the band. Every time I sit down to play, come up with something, I think it goes back to your point about playing—just you can jam with yourself, just get into this sort of hypnotic repetitious rhythm. And a lot of times something comes out of that as well. But I play every day now.
DAVID: Is it always electric or acoustic? Or is it different stuff?
BILL: Well, it's a combination. I have a couple six string acoustics, and I'll play them, and I play a 335. It's a Gibson and it's acoustic-electric. I actually very rarely plug into an amp when I'm at home. When we did our last album, I ended up recording a lot of the songs with a condenser mic that was close to the strings on the 335. And it was still going through an amp, but the amp was more ambient, about four or five feet away. So it kind of created a sound that was acoustic sounding but not quite there. It was really very clean sounding. We ended up using those recordings on the In Between album.
DAVID: And you flew it into the recording?
BILL: Yeah. It was interesting 'cause we've never done this before, but we had trouble duplicating the sound of some of these songs and the rest of the band just played along, which normally when you record you start with bass and drums, basic track, or a rhythm track with drums and you add to that. I think for a lot of traditional type bands, the bass and the drummer are trying to become one. I think the feel is more Stanley and I, which allows Brenda to kind of go off and play higher up on the neck and more melody parts.
DAVID: Having a drum come after the guitar part must give it such a groovy vibe. I've got to go back and listen to that record again.
BILL: Yeah, I think on that record...The third song in and maybe the fifth song in, Pass the Time. Time Will Tell, I think. Yeah, they it came out fine.
DAVID: What is on your turntable or on your bookstand or on your digital device that you listen to or read right now, if anything?
BILL: Well, it really runs the gamut. So the book that I just finished was called The Trackers by Charles Frazier. That was the last book I read. And then as far as music, I don't play vinyl really, my CD player broke, so I just download songs. I wasn't really that familiar with Sinéad O'Connor, and with her passing, I started listening to her. I read somewhere about Keith Richards being obsessed with Rag Doll by The Four Seasons so I listened to The Four Seasons. I love the production of that time period, whether it was The Four Seasons or The Mamas & the Papas or anything from that period. It's probably the analog and the simplistic approach to where they placed instruments that I just really love. It really runs the gamut for me. I put on Eno ambient music in the morning.
Are you familiar with Alan Lomax?
DAVID: Very much so. I'm on The Association for Cultural Equity board, which is the organization he created, and I co-produced the Alan Lomax in Haiti box set years ago. I love Alan Lomax. Yes.
BILL: A good friend of mine, he's a bluegrass banjo player. His name is Tony Trischka. He actually turned me on to Alan Lomax years ago when I lived in New Jersey. It’s fascinating, the recordings that have a tie between Ireland and Scotland and Appalachia. It was just incredible the work that he did.
DAVID: I guess you guys aren't coming west anytime soon.
BILL: No, not likely. We don't really travel that much. We always have offers to play all over the place, but mainly stay in the northeast part of the country. We had just recently played shows in Brooklyn, and we played up in Cambridge and Amherst, like I mentioned, we're playing at Woodstock in Philadelphia, but it's mainly that part of the country. I think even the furthest south that we've gone is Chapel Hill. We did a Pitchfork Festival a couple years back in Chicago, and then we followed that up with a show the following night was in Detroit. But the band really doesn't like to travel that much.
What’s actually interesting is even when we played at Maxwell's, and we used to rehearse there all the time and are really sorry to see that venue go because we really liked it, we talked about the whole concept that you see out in Las Vegas with residencies. It’s kind of a cool concept because touring and traveling...I just watched The Last Waltz and that's all that they talked about: how rough touring was. And it is, it really turns you inside out. But when we played at Maxwell's, we'd do three nights in a row, and even when we played with Lou, when he played on Broadway on the tour that we were on, he played a week at the St. James Theater. It was great. We'd drive in, play, listen to Lou, and drive home and get a good night's sleep.
And what was cool was my family was with me and we were tossing a ball from the stage to my son who was way up in the upper balcony, going back and forth. It was a great experience.
To have a residency in Las Vegas of all places…I don't know if you've ever been to Las Vegas, but it's pretty strange.
DAVID: My wife and I did our ten-year re-vows in Las Vegas with Elvis.
BILL: My wife and I just actually had a wedding anniversary. We decided to go to these national parks, and we flew into Las Vegas, and we caught The Beatles Cirque du Soleil show. And then we went to Joshua Tree--we got out of Vegas pretty quick, we just saw the show and then left the next morning. But yeah, it's just weird. U2 did that big show in that new venue called The Sphere. The B-52's were there, I think that Beck was there, and the Pixies were there, which surprised me. My thought about Las Vegas is Wayne Newton or Celine Dion. I don't think of the Pixies playing in Las Vegas, but they did!
DAVID: Speaking of great concerts: you went to Woodstock?
BILL: I went to Woodstock.
DAVID: How old were you?
BILL: 16
DAVID: What was the best band for you at Woodstock?
BILL: Well, there were a lot of great bands, obviously, but the one that left the biggest impression on me was Richie Havens and that strum that he had going on during Freedom. The Who were great, Santana was great… just a lot of really great bands.
DAVID: Was it just you wandering around by yourself or were you with a bunch of friends?
BILL: Well, I have two older brothers and they actually drove up on a Thursday night. The festival was Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And they drove me up Thursday night to set up a camp. But they had something else going on…I don't know if they were working or I don't really recollect what they had going on…but they had to return home to North Jersey and they just said, "We're going to set up camp, we'll see you tomorrow." I never saw them again. I don't even remember how I got back home. I’d go to the field where the concerts were going on, and then I'd go back to the campsite and I just never came across them again until I got back home. So it was just me. It was pretty weird.
DAVID: Was it a kind of a place where strangers would be welcoming you?
BILL: Yeah, it was great.
After a rehearsal that we had recently, a couple months back, I had some free time and I decided just to go up to take a drive. It was a beautiful day out. And I went up to Bethel where the site was, and they've built a really cool museum, a lot of footage they have in different theaters, and they did a really good job in actually acknowledging what went on there.
When it comes to the history of such things, some places know what they have and other places don't have a clue, unfortunately. They made the bad decision of knocking down the Cavern Club where The Beatles played, yet you do have something like the Woodstock site, which they've decided makes good economic sense to retain and people will come to visit and hang out there. And they did a good job.
DAVID: Bill, it was great talking to you. Congrats on the new record. It is a killer.
BILL: It was great talking to you. Always good to talk because of music.
**YOU CAN HEAR BILL’S TOP VELVET PICKS ON HIS TIDAL PLAYLIST**
Interview failure: WHAT WAS SO CRAZY ABOUT THAT STOOGES SHOW??
Yo La Tengo is known for their yearly Hanukkah shows…