I had the extremely good fortune to write an article about the Felice Brothers for Crawdaddy.com in late 2010 that was published online in January of 2011. One of my favorite contemporary acts, I went way overboard in researching the article. Though I was paid handsomely for my work, I went considerably over budget in my research, running up gasoline, food, and hotel bills as I traveled to see the band in Louisville and Nashville in the weeks running up to their appearance at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House, where I interviewed James Felice for the article. Covering one of my favorite bands for the legendary Crawdaddy was a great honor for me. I will forever look upon this assignment as being akin to “winning the freelance Super Bowl”. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman and to James Felice for being so gracious with his time. Months after this piece first appeared I ran into James Felice at Cincinnati’s MidPoint festival and he spoke glowingly about the article, saying that it was one of his favorite things he’d ever seen written about the band. Remembering my face and our conversation, he asked, “Did you write the review of our new CD for Crawdaddy too?” I assured him that indeed I had and again he complimented my work. As good as it gets for a freelancer who remains an unabashed fanboy as well. Crawdaddy more or less folded in 2011, as they were gobbled up by Paste Magazine who has a much bigger readership but apparently no intention of honoring Crawdaddy with more than an untended, rarely-updated blog page on their site. Try going to Crawdaddy.com and you’ll see links to maybe a dozen articles or so, a shameful and inexcusable under-representation of the magazine that launched “Rock Journalism” before there even was such a thing and yes, even before Rolling Stone magazine. Shame on you, Paste. Anyway – here’s the piece I wrote about the Felice Brothers. Like the other stuff I wrote for Crawdaddy, I am real proud of it. Since even the band seemed to appreciate the article, I thought it would be a shame for it to just disappear forever from the interwebs. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. –rh
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If Keith Richards recorded an acoustic album in a loose, back porch hootenanny setting with Tom Waits producing, he’d be lucky if it came out sounding as raw and authentic as the Felice Brothers’ self-titled release from 2008. Though they have enjoyed an increasing amount of success in the Alt-Rock and Americana scene over the past few years, the Felice Brothers remain relatively unknown. With a sound often described as a bittersweet whiskey binge of Dylan-esque ballads and folksy anthems, the Felice Brothers also have an arsenal of infectious acoustic honky tonk numbers. Performing with sweaty, blood-in-their-eyes passion, the Felice Brothers’ live performances are a ramshackle hillbilly soul catharsis exorcism. They look like they’ve been on the road for five straight years, which they have. Trudging ever onward, they spend months at a time on the road, schlepping coast to coast in a beat-up old RV that they have driven all over the US and Canada. Even a cursory glance at their tour dates is enough to give you road fever. The band seems to be constantly touring, taking very few days off and frequently traveling several hundred miles in between shows.
Brothers Ian, James and Simone Felice were raised in a musical family in the Catskill Mountains. Drawing inspiration from their father and many generations of musicians that came before them, the three formed an ad hoc group and eventually moved to New York City. Busking on street corners, in subway stations and city parks, the band soon came to the attention of a small European label called Loose Records. Already veterans of the road at a very young age, the band cobbled together Tonight At The Arizona from a cluster of early demos and hit the highway once again.
Night after night in one city after another, the band performed a seemingly endless string of live shows unmatched in visceral intensity and emotional power. The ragged band of troubadours pressed on as their reputation grew. Their material originating mostly from brother Ian’s pen, it resonates with echoes of the past. Folk legends, murder ballads, strange tales of the rural poor. Some literal and linear in nature, others more abstract. Every last one of the slow tunes is heart wrenching and the rave ups are all unfailingly gut-bucket gritty.
The band’s self-titled CD surfaced in early 2008 and soon “Frankie’s Gun” and “Whiskey In My Whiskey” blossomed into college radio staples. A published novelist and renaissance man whose creativity knows no boundaries, brother Simone left the band to pursue other avenues. With fiddler Greg Farley and drummer Dave Turbeville now full-fledged members of the Felice Brothers entourage, the road was not kept waiting.
The band shares vocal duties. Ian and the similarly tight-lipped bassist Christmas Clapton keen and bleat like rusty saxophones. (Their vocal stylings are frequently compared to Dylan.) Wherefrom these stick figure scarecrows straight outta Steinbeck conjure the full spectrum of human emotion I don’t know. Burly, bearded, cherub-faced James has a huskier tone suiting his larger frame. A raspy raconteur with a voice of considerable depth, he howls “Goddamn You, Jim” and “Let Me Come Home” through tears of rage and desperation. Even Farley is strapping on a guitar and stepping up the microphone to belt out the occasional Cajun hillbilly rock and roux number nowadays.
Already accustomed to busking in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City, when their frozen fingers couldn’t feel the frets, teeth chattering between verses and subway trains drowning out every other chorus, the Felice Brothers’ dream to one day play the Newport Folk Festival was not going to be thwarted by a mere power outage. After the rain cleared, they just played barefoot and acoustic in the mud in front of the stage. By instinctively braving the elements and rising above less than ideal circumstances, they turned adverse conditions into a damn good story and overnight it became part of the legend. Just another tale from the road. Throw another log on the fire.
In support of 2009’s Yonder Is The Clock, the family Felice expanded for that summer’s Big Surprise Tour with Justin Townes Earle, Dave Rawlings Machine, and Old Crow Medicine Show. Though spanning barely a dozen stops on outdoor stages around the Midwest and down south, the tour was seen by many as a natural heir to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A totally unique program was improvised by loose and spontaneous aggregations that included members of all four bands as they meandered on and off the stage throughout two lengthy sets on each stop of the tour.
Our bedraggled and baying band of road dogs was busier than ever this past summer, touring with few breaks straight on into the fall. Squeezing several European dates in between two extensive US tours, the band’s material began to evolve and change in unexpected ways. In Louisville, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, this writer was witness to two performances that were wildly divergent in color and content, though the shows were a mere eight weeks apart. In the interim the band had ventured to the far corners of the earth and back again, their travels reflected in the evolution of their new material. With just a few dates left on of one of the longest treks of the band’s brief but already storied history, the gracious and loquacious James Felice took a few moments to chat with me before the band’s performance at the historic Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. Finding the band finally in the home stretch of a lengthy fall tour, with the comforts of home almost within their grasp and the Cincinnati skyline looming on the horizon as darkness fell on the Ohio River, I asked James Felice about the band’s relationship with the road.
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RH: You guys seem to be out there on the road almost all the time with very few days off.
James Felice: Yeah. I guess most bands at our level do a lot of touring because these days it’s the only way you can make money, really. We don’t have too many things tying us back at home and we’re always excited to get out on the road and play. It’s fun and we know that it helps us to live. We’re gonna be able to live this winter and not freeze to death because we toured all fall. When you’re a touring musician your work is sort of all lumped into a few months at time. Then there’s other times when you have nothing to do because it’s not like a nine-to-five job. It’s more like a September 1st to December 1st kinda job. It’s almost like going up to Alaska and being a fisherman or something like that.
RH: At some point does the road begin to feel like home and when you’re back home with nothing to do that feels strange?
JF: Yeah, absolutely. We call it Post-Tour Depression. For at least a week after a tour, especially a long tour like this one, you don’t know what to do. It’s seven o’clock and you feel like you should be loading into a club. It’s actually really weird how lonely and lost you feel. At home it’s really quiet. It gets really quiet really quick and kind of boring and scary. You almost feel like you’re suffocating sometimes, but you’re not of course. You’ve just been to forty-five, fifty cities in the last two months so it can be weird to come back home. Especially because we live in a little town where there’s nothing going on. I just have a little house I live in. I don’t have a real job. There’s no schedule. Like tonight, I’m doing this interview in a bar. I don’t usually do that. At home I’d be stacking wood or building a fire or something. So yeah, you fall into that depression but then two weeks later you’re thinking, “I can’t fucking believe that I was on tour! How did I live like that?”
RH: I’m sure you try to make the routing of the tour as easy as possible, but sometimes I guess it’s unavoidable that there’s going to be long drives between shows?
JF: Yeah. The first part of this tour was on the west coast and in the southwest so the drives were always very long because the cities are so far apart. We had something like eleven shows in a row from San Diego up to Vancouver. Then the next day we had a day off, but we had to drive eighteen hours to Salt Lake City. Then ten hours to get to Denver. Then seventeen hours to Omaha. So there’s an incredible amount of driving. We’ve put 12,000 miles on the bus in the last couple months. Maybe more, actually. It’s a lot of traveling. It’s a big ol’ country, man. It’s really, really big.
RH: Eighteen hour drive – that’s no kinda day off at all, is it?
JF: (Laughs) No, no! But I know I could be a truck driver now, you know? If this falls through, I could be a truck driver or a bus driver. Just get my CDL and be ready to go.
RH: You guys have been trekkin’ around in that same RV for a while now, is that right?
JF: Yeah it’s the only one we’ve ever had. Well, the only thing we’ve driven cross country. When we were just getting started we had like a “short bus” - like they have for special needs kids? - which we were! But that didn’t really last too long. We were gonna drive the short bus cross country on our first tour that we booked ourselves. And I remember we were like two miles from home just driving around and we hit a pothole and we all almost died. We almost careened off the road and we were like, “You know what? We can’t do this. We gotta be safe. We can’t take this thing across the country”. Driving that thing was so fucking dangerous.
RH: How much of the new material does the band write while you’re on tour and road test from night to night?
JF: We road test a lot. But we don’t write very much on tour. We’ve been working on our new record. We’re almost done now. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from the new record that’s coming out in March, I think. And it’s a different kind of sound. It’s a different record. The next tour we do, when we tour for the new record, it’s gonna be a different sounding band.
RH: Tell me about the new song, I think it’s called “Royal Hawaiian Hotel”?
JF: Yeah, actually I think it’s gonna be called “Ponzi”.
RH: When I heard it at the Nashville show that one struck me as really different. Ian puts down the guitar. He’s doing more of a frontman kinda thing, swinging his arms around a bit, a little more animated than usual…
JF: Yeah, we’re trying to have fun, man. We’ve been playing this folk kinda rock thing I guess, whatever you wanna call it, for a while. And it’s fun to do but we gotta keep movin’ on. Can’t play the same music your whole life. And, you know, we haven’t really cashed in on it as hard as some. It’s kinda funny ‘cause now you see a lotta bands doing really well with the kinda stuff we were doing. There’s like a whole scene now, bigger than I had noticed before. There seems to be a growing scene that plays this kind of music. But I think it’s time for us to move on and try out some new shit.
RH: The Felice Brothers are already an established act and quite prolific, obviously. But right now I have sense of you guys being on the brink of huge step forward. With the amount of new and very different material that I’ve heard over the course of just a handful of shows, I am reminded of Exile-era Stones or Wilco’s Being There. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like single disc wouldn’t even scratch the surface of where you guys are at right now and maybe a double album might called for.
JF: Yeah, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. Ian, my brother, writes most of the songs. He’s so prolific that we still pull up songs that he wrote years ago sometimes. Even things that didn’t make the first record. He’s got so many great songs. This new record is actually not going to be a double record. It’s a short, concise, straight to the point kind of thing. Which is important because I feel like our last record was a little sprawled, a little bit too much? This one’s concise and it’s different because we’re moving forward. Ian and the rest of us in the band, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing and we don’t want to be pigeonholed. You know, this whole rootsy, folky, Bob Dylan, The Band, good time shit is cool. But it’s not us, really. It was. We started playing this kind of music because it was the only goddamn thing we knew how to play, you know? Acoustic guitar, a drum, an accordion. But it’s not who we are, you know? We’re certainly dirt bags. And we’re certainly broke still. But we are musicians and we like to challenge ourselves. So we just have to keep going.
RH: I’m often struck by the dichotomy between stage right and stage left. You and Farley do a fair bit of jumping around, but Ian and Christmas sometimes seem almost reluctant to be onstage at all.
JF: Well yeah, they’re more reserved. They’re more introverted I guess, than Farley and I. It depends on the show. It depends on the crowd and the energy and how things are going. Every show with us is not the same because we’re not acting up there. We’re not playing to a script. It seems like a lot of these big acts out there, there’s like a script that you play: You smile here, you make this joke there, you do this flourish at the end of this song. We don’t do that. We are completely loose and the feeling is always new and different. So some shows are not gonna be as wild and animated. They might be more intense and dark. Ian is sort of like the forefront. He’s our leader, he’s the guy. He’s in charge. And so he sets the tone. And naturally I guess Farley and I are a little more animated, and Christmas a little less so, and Dave does his thing behind the drums. So it depends on the show. The last show we played was crazy. Ian was crazy. He’s all standing up on the drums and fuckin’ around and it was great, you know? But the show before that he was dark and more subdued. That’s just the way it is. That makes it exciting for us because we can’t be sitting there doing the same thing every night. Sometimes the audience gets pissed because it’s maybe not what they expected. But that’s okay.
RH: Well I guess if your challenge was to be as animated as Farley on stage every night you’d have your work cut out for you!
JF: Right! I’d fuckin’ break my hip or somethin’!
RH: You’ve indicated that you’d rather not say at this time what label will be releasing the next record. What else can you tell me about the new record and where you guys are at right now?
JF: Well, when we first got started we had all these labels knocking on our door after Tonight At The Arizona came out. Major. Huge. The biggest labels in the world. Some of the biggest producers in the world. And they flew us out to L.A. and here and there. We played for them and they said they wanted to produce our record. But at the end of the day we decided we didn’t want do that because they all wanted to tell us what to do. They wanted to have a hand in it. The A&R guys told us, “Yeah, yeah. We’ll let you do what you want but I’ll come in and check in like every couple days and make sure everything’s going well and I’ll have ideas.” And we said, “Fuck that”. We don’t want any A&R guy, or anybody telling us what to do. We turned down a lot of big time opportunities and went with Conor Oberst’s label Team Love and they’re great. It’s a little tiny label run by really awesome people. They don’t have a lot of money but they did their best with the record. But you know, we’re still struggling, man. You know, it’s hard to maintain a high level of artistic integrity when you also think “I’d also like to be able to pay my rent”, you know? The way the record industry is these days, for a lot of bands, it’s a struggle. It’s something that we have always struggled with as a band since we first started playing. Ian didn’t want to release Iantown (the band’s earliest demos). He’s like, “That’s a piece of shit. I don’t wanna put that out.” But we said, “Ian, come on. You know… You live in a tent. Let’s get a place to live.” So we did. But you know, Ian is very serious about artistic integrity. He lives and dies by that shit. So I think we’re doing okay. We’re real proud of the new record.
This time we’re gonna step it up a little bit to a slightly larger label. Nothing huge because we don’t want to go with a major that’s going to tell us what to do. And hopefully we’ll get on the right track. These people [at the new label] respect us for who we are and they like the music. They care about it, beyond making money. Because we’re never gonna be huge, I don’t think. You know? We’re gonna do our job and we do it very well. And we’re gonna get bigger than we are now. But we’re not gonna be doing like Lady Gaga numbers. You know we’re not gonna be doing nothing like that big. But these people, at Team Love and at the new label, they care about the music and that’s awesome. That’s what we need: we need financial support and freedom at the same time. Which is very hard to get, in any artistic endeavor. When you try to do anything. And that is the artist’s dilemma: Do I wanna eat? Or do I wanna do what I wanna do? And where do those two things meet? There’s always a compromise. Always. No matter what. But where do they meet, money versus freedom? Comfort versus freedom? Which of course is the great debate in the whole world.
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