ZOPA, from left: drummer Olmo Tighe, guitarist and singer Michael Imperioli, and bassist Elijah Amitin. On the table sits a guitar built by NYC-based luthier Cindy Hulej.
Without citing Vonnegut, actor and musician Michael Imperioli, whose A-list filmography includes early career parts in Goodfellas and Trees Lounge through his recent role as Dominic Di Grasso on season two of The White Lotus, has felt these forces at work throughout his life. Whether it’s foresight, intuition, or even magic, Imperioli jokes that some friends have accused him of being a witch. Whether or not that’s the case is probably a matter of perspective.
Take, for example, Imperioli’s relationship with John Ventimiglia. In 1986, the two aspiring actors, who’d already known each other for years, were roommates when Ventimiglia, also a musician playing in bands around the New York and New Jersey underground rock scenes at the time, showed the then-20-year-old Imperioli his first chords on a guitar. He quickly took to the instrument, forming his first band almost immediately. At the end of the next decade, the two were cast to play life-changing roles on The Sopranos—Imperioli as Tony Soprano-protégé Christopher Moltisanti and Ventimiglia as the capo’s lifelong pal, chef Artie Bucco—forever intertwining their artistic paths on one of the most important television shows of all time.
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Coincidence has tied Imperioli to his guitars as well. After falling in love with his 1966 Fender Jaguar, which he had Rick Kelly of Carmine Street Guitars modify with humbuckers, he decided to track down a second. When that guitar landed on Kelly’s bench and the luthier popped the neck off, they learned just how much the two Jaguars had in common. “Those two guitars were made in the same factory on the same day in September of 1966. This is the year I was born,” Imperioli points out, incredulously. “And they’re maybe 30 serial numbers apart.”
So it goes that “very strange connections” pulled Imperioli into orbit with drummer Olmo Tighe and bassist Elijah Amitin in the mid 2000s and led them to form their now-long-standing trio, ZOPA. Imperioli and Tighe had first met while working on the 1994 film Postcards from America, when Olmo was only eight years old. They didn’t reconnect until years later, when Imperioli ran into Olmo’s older brother, Michael, at a party. In this chance meeting, Imperioli learned Olmo was drumming, and “for some bizarre reason—and I still don’t know why—I thought he and I should play music together,” he recalls.
“I had the idea of forming a trio, and it was really inspired by Galaxie 500 and what they did with a trio and the way it was three distinctive musicians coming from three different point of views making this one thing happen together.”
The two eventually connected against the odds, Imperioli going to great lengths to find the drummer, and they set up a time to rehearse. On bass, Olmo suggested Amitin, who, they learned, had his own family connections to Imperioli through his old management and family—real small world kind of stuff. By the time the three ended up in the same room, they already felt like they belonged together, and ZOPA was born.
Michael Imperioli's Gear
On stage, ZOPA manifest the trio energy of their influences, from Lou Reed to Dinosaur Jr. to Galaxie 500.
Guitars
- Two 1966 Fender Jaguars
Amps
- Fender Twin Reverb
- Fender Princeton Reverb
Effects
- Death By Audio Fuzz War
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- EHX Small Clone
- EHX Big Muff
- MXR Distortion +
- MXR Duke of Tone
- MXR Phase 100
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Neunaber Immerse Reverberator
- Walrus Audio Phoenix power supply
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario XL or Ernie Ball .010s
- Custom ZOPA Dunlop Tortex .88 mm
As much as this is a fun story, to Imperioli, it’s much more. The relationship, and their coming together seemingly at random to discover connections between them, resonates. And it makes ZOPA an extra tightly knit unit. (The band became even tighter when Tighe married Imperioli’s cousin and the two became family.) “I think it comes from good intentions and getting a good perception of somebody and wanting to further that connection,” he says.
At a recent show at Philadelphia rock club Kung Fu Necktie, there was a different kind of energy buzzing throughout ZOPA’s tightly packed audience. It was a frenetic, excited, and celebratory scene, with fans at times reaching for strums on Imperioli’s Jaguar as the band kicked out a set of mostly new songs from their newest, Diamond Vehicle, which was yet to be released at the time, as well as a song or two from their debut, La Dolce Vita.“That love of music was definitely infused into The Sopranos.”
ZOPA is a formidable unit; they’re a trio, with all the special rock ’n’ roll spirit that implies. Tighe appears on stage as bashful at first, but he emerges as a basher in the style of Dinosaur Jr. drummer Murph (though Imperioli suggests John Bonham is probably his more dominant reference point). At stage left, Amitin bops around confidently, donning a rock stance, bare chest popping through a one-third-unbuttoned shirt, easily dominating his Peavey 4-string. Imperioli’s presence lands somewhere between the two. He’s casual and engaging, comfortable taking the limelight during brief, melodic Big Muff-driven solo spots, but otherwise delivering a low-key stagecraft that evokes that of his biggest influences, which range from Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground to Dinosaur Jr. to dream-pop pioneers Galaxie 500.
Those influences play out across Diamond Vehicle. Produced by John Agnello, whose extensive credits include Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile, Lee Ranaldo, and Son Volt, the album evokes intimate rock clubs, where live music is mutually transformed by audience and artist. A few days after that show in Philly, we caught up with Imperioli to talk about his life in music.There was a lot of energy at your show the other night. Is that the ZOPA vibe or was that a Philly thing?
Imperioli: I have to say the Philadelphia audiences are consistently fantastic. I think it’s kind of a combination, but Philly has a certain spirit. I think just the spirit of the city, especially that neighborhood [Fishtown], where we’ve played a few times. They love music and they want to have a good time and they let you know it when they’re having fun. It makes it really exciting as a performer, without a doubt.
The audience included all ages of people but skewed young. Has that always been the case?
Imperioli: We started performing in 2006. In those first seven years, our audiences were more our own age group for the most part. We stopped playing together around 2013 for about seven years because I was living on the West Coast. During the pandemic, we released an album [La Dolce Vita]. I was on Instagram and often would post things about music, not just our music, but my musical tastes. When we started playing together again in 2021, we noticed that the audience had gotten a lot younger than when we started the band.
I think it’s a combination of being able to reach younger people through social media, and through some of the other projects I’ve been involved in, and The Sopranos finding a younger audience, and The White Lotus, which kind of hit a younger audience.You started playing when you were 20 years old. How soon after learning your first chords did you start performing?
Imperioli: I immediately started playing with one guy who was in my acting class who had been a musician first, and then two other musicians. We started a band that was really kind of a no-wave band based on the Mudd Club scene of the early ’80s, and it was just instrumental. There was no singer, and there was guitar, bass, and drums. I had the only guitar I could afford at the time, which was a nylon-string acoustic guitar. It was the cheapest thing in the store. I tried to mic it and it didn’t really sound good. Then, I bought a little pickup and glued it, and then I was able to plug into the amplifier and try to make sounds. And that’s how I started playing.
The band’s second record, Diamond Vehicle, was recorded with producer John Agnello, known for his work with artists such as Dinosaur Jr. and Kurt Vile.
What was that band called?
Imperioli: Black Angus. I didn’t really know anything. Then, I bought my first electric guitar, maybe a year or two after. That was a Telecaster, which I bought at Matt Umanov Guitars, which used to be on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was a little easier to play no-wave music with an electric guitar.
We only recorded demos, didn’t record in a studio at all. We did play one gig. It was an Earth Day benefit at a place called McGovern’s, which was a dive bar that had live music in SoHo on Spring Street.
Who influenced your no-wave guitar playing?
Imperioli: One of my favorite guitarists is Pat Place from the Bush Tetras. We did a benefit with them a couple of years ago, which was kind of a thrill to be on the bill with them. Pat Place’s approach to the guitar always really cut through for me. I think she’s somebody who really found her own style and really mastered that and just adds such a unique dynamic to the music.
“Going back to when I was 20, I was playing in bands and doing little plays and writing and producing plays and directing plays…. That’s always been my life.”
Speaking of that scene, I’ve seen you post on Instagram about Robert Quine.
Imperioli: Robert Quine, I think, was a genius. From Richard Hell’s Band, the Voidoids, and his work with Lou Reed. He was a distinctive, expressive guitar player with a unique voice that always stood out in his work. As a young person, he recorded the Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City, then eventually wound up playing with Lou.
I think Lou Reed is a very underrated guitar player. Of course, as a rhythm guitar player, it’s known, but his leads were very interesting, especially when he was improvising. He really was able to express a certain point of view from inside those songs. And when Quine decided to play with Lou, one of the stipulations he made was that he wanted Lou to play leads as well.
After Black Angus, you were in the band Wild Carnation.
Imperioli: Yeah, it was a couple of years later, before they were named Wild Carnation.
I was singing, I wasn’t playing guitar. That was kind of a brief thing for me. I had to leave the country for some project, and they really were ready to record. So, it wound up not being a good time for that.
Then, I met Olmo and Elijah in 2006, and I had been working on guitar stuff then. Shortly after we started playing, I started taking some lessons with Richard Lloyd from Television, who basically taught me how to practice, and that made a big difference. I mean, I was practicing before, but I just learned different ways to approach it from him. It was a really big, big step for me.
I only had a few lessons with him, but they really made a big impact over the course of a few months. He’s a very demanding and exacting teacher.
Michael Imperioli with his humbucker-loaded 1966 Fender Jaguar.
So, ZOPA was your first band that was based more around your songwriting.
Imperioli: I brought some songs that I had had kicking around for a while, and we created some songs—the process is pretty collaborative. Some songs come from a drumbeat, some songs come from a bass line, some come from ideas that Elijah or Olmo have lyrically. Some come from me, even if it’s something that I bring in like a chord progression and some lyrics. It really doesn’t become a ZOPA song until it’s worked out by all of us.
I had the idea of forming a trio, and it was really inspired by Galaxie 500 and what they did with a trio and the way it was three distinctive musicians coming from three different point of views making this one thing happen together. It’s never just a singer-songwriter with a rhythm section. That’s kind of always been the approach.
Dinosaur Jr. is an example that is similar, which is a big influence on me, and I think on ZOPA as well.
I can hear the Dinosaur influence in the band. Has J been a longtime favorite of yours?
Imperioli: For a long time. J’s a virtuoso as far as rock guitar goes, he’s really quite incredible.
My abilities are so far less than his, but sonically how he uses the guitar, and how he approaches a lead, the way he expresses himself, especially his lead playing, I think is spectacular and sometimes really breathtaking and moving.
I think my favorite guitar solo in all of rock might be the song “Pick Me Up,” from the Beyond album. Three minutes into the song, he starts this three-and-a-half-minute guitar solo. I think it’s just genius and perfection, and he’s definitely a compass point of guitar playing for me.
“I’m someone who likes to be engaged in things that are creative and exciting to me and find a way to keep doing that.”
When did you start writing songs?
Imperioli: Pretty much right when I started playing guitar. There’s one song that was on our first album that I think was the first song I ever wrote, called “Roll It Off Your Skin.” The last verse was written when I was living at the Chelsea Hotel in ’95, and then we started playing it together 10 years after that.
The Death by Audio Fuzz War informed the direction of the story in “Love and Other Forms of Violence” from Diamond Vehicle. Can you tell me how that song was written and the role that pedal played?
Imperioli: Sometimes, we’ll write songs and they’ll come out of jams in practice sessions for ZOPA. That’s all electric obviously. But if I’m writing at home, I’ll either use an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar that my son made that has a Strat body. I’ll just play that and record on my phone. So, that song just started off with a very simple two-chord thing for the verses.
I started practicing that alone in the studio with the Jaguar, and I had just gotten the Fuzz War from Oliver Ackerman who makes them—he’s a friend and a musician I really admire. His band is a Place to Bury Strangers. It’s a great band. I was going to use that in place of the Big Muff and just see what would happen.
I was using the Fuzz War for the rhythm part of these verses, and there was something in the way it fed back in a very weird way. There was this little high frequency that just surprised me. And it happened every time, no matter what amp I would use or what the settings were. But there was something about that, doing the verses cleaner and then doing them with the Fuzz War, and I was like, “Oh, this is what this song is about, light and darkness.” And it just gave me a direction for the chorus.
Our February issue had Stevie Van Zandt on the cover, so talking to you, I’m now thinking about the heavy musical vibe going on in Sopranoscasting.
Imperioli: That really comes from David Chase, who in high school was a drummer. He loved music, especially the British bands from the ’60s, like the Stones and the Kinks—like, David was at Altamont to see the Stones. That love of music was definitely infused intoThe Sopranos. I mean, David at some point thought Steven Van Zandt could be Tony Soprano. He was watching the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions, and Steven Van Zandt inducted the Rascals. And David loved his speech so much and thought it was so charismatic that he had him audition for Tony Soprano. Stevie was one of the three finalists for Tony Soprano.
At Philly rock club Kung Fu Necktie this winter, ZOPA delivered a fiery performance that ignited the packed audience with a setlist of mostly new material from Diamond Vehicle.
Photo by Nick Millevoi
I’m curious about the intersection between your acting career and your music, and finding time and how you navigate that.
Imperioli: It’s an extension of what I always did. Going back to when I was 20, I was playing in bands and writing and producing plays and directing plays. My wife and I opened this off-Broadway theater in 2003, and I was producing and directing and acting there. So that’s always been my life: writing, directing, acting, producing, film, theater, television, fiction, podcasts, Sopranos podcast….
If it’s something you’re passionate about, you just budget your time to include the important things. That’s all. There’s no formula to it. It’s just that I’m someone who likes to be engaged in things that are creative and exciting to me and find a way to keep doing that.
Is music any more important in your life now than it was before? Have you intentionally foregrounded that?
Imperioli: I think we’ve just gotten more confident. Recording is a big part of that, especially recording the new record. The first album was stuff we had written over the course of six years, and the new album was stuff that was in the last year or two for the most part.
We tend to do best when we play in local places that have a local music scene. Something like Kung Fu Necktie, the band that opened for us, Andorra, is a local Philly band. And in New York we’ve been playing a lot at Baby’s All Right and Mercury Lounge, places where people go to see bands, both local bands and bands that are touring. So, a lot of musicians come to the gig. I love playing clubs that are part of a local music scene.
Sometimes when we’re on the road, if we played a theater that has a very wide variety of touring bands, we don’t do as well. And it’s not as fun as playing at a club that’s part of a local indie music scene.
It connects more, I think.
Imperioli: Exactly. Meeting other bands, playing with other bands that are from similar scenes, it’s been really, really satisfying being part of that.YouTube It
ZOPA perform their two-song Lou Reed medley at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge, with Imperioli’s phaser set to max swirling, psychedelic effect.
The Feelies (from left): guitarists Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, drummer Stan Demeski, percussionist Dave Weckerman, and bassist Brenda Sauter.
But on the song, the Feelies do their thing, subtle though it might be. The band have had a knack for stripping songs to their necessary bits and making them their own since forming in the 1970s. Their slightly warped, minimal, high-speed take on the Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” set the tone on their debut, 1980’s Crazy Rhythms, and they’ve since made covers an integral part of their records and live shows.
The Feelies’ history with the music of the Velvets runs deep, including recording the band’s “What Goes On” for 1988’s Only Life. On Some Kinda Love, they paint a bigger picture as they cover 18 songs from the VU catalog. Throughout, the Feelies, in effect, convey an object lesson in how to approach the music of the Velvet Underground, offering refreshing lessons on how to rock ’n’ roll along the way.
Glenn Mercer's Gear
Glenn Mercer’s live rig consists of a modded Squier Telecaster, a simple pedal chain, and a modern Vox AV30 that he runs through a vintage Guild 1x12.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
Guitars
- Two modified Squier Telecasters
Amps
- Vox AV30
- ’50s Guild cab with JBL 12" speaker
Effects
- Boss Turbo Overdrive
- Boss Super Overdrive
- Boss Chorus
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL (.010-.046)
- Dean Markley triangle picks .50 mm
- Clayton picks
Let’s get back to “I’m Waiting for the Man” and consider its place in the rock canon with some extracurricular listening:
An early version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” appears on Words & Music, 1965, a collection of 23-year-old Reed’s demos for Pickwick Records, where he was a staff songwriter and session musician. It’s a humble slice of Greenwich Village folk, Reed’s vocal accompaniment a loose but grooving fingerpicked acoustic guitar figure.
In 1967, the song made its official debut on The Velvet Underground & Nico. The song is transformed and has arrived. The guitar figure has been boiled down to a droning two-chord vamp, with the exception of a four-measure turnaround that serves as the chorus. It’s electrified and distorted. Guitars sounds like they’re cutting through the tape. John Cale pounds piano clusters along with Moe Tucker’s propulsive tom and tambourine assault. Meanwhile, Reed coolly raps overtop. This is rock ’n’ roll in its most elemental form. All the energy, all the vibe, none of the frills.
“If you have to talk about stuff and work on stuff, then to me, you kind of lose the essence of what’s good about playing music. It’s all instinctual and telepathic.” —Glenn Mercer
A couple years later, in 1969, the band performed a live rendition of “I’m Waiting for the Man” for what would become 1972’s Live at Max’s Kansas City. By now, original Velvets Reed and guitarist Sterling Morrison were joined by the rhythm section of brothers Doug and Billy Yule, and together they deliver a tight, swaggering shuffle. Morrison reaches for the sky with bluesy bar-rock bends and trills and Lou howls and hollers. It’s loud, it’s alive. It’s also an indication of the Velvets’ evanescence. From folky strums to a pulsating psychedelia to proto-punk, nothing in their orbit remained the same in their short span.
There are other versions of the band playing the song, and the band’s approach varies—no matter what anyone tells you, don’t skip the pseudo-minimalist reading on the band’s 1993 reunion record, Live MCMXCIII. It’s not only great, but worth it for guitar nerds to hear Lou play the song in his headless-guitar phase. After their dissolution, Reed continued to reinvent on live albums; the John Lee Hooker-style approach he takes on Take No Prisoners is worth hearing. Tucker also recorded a delicately strummed, breathy version with moodier chords on I Spent a Week There the Other Night.
What the Velvet Underground did with the song within the band and beyond is one thing, but the perquisite reinvention in the hands of others affirmed its status as a rock ’n’ roll standard.
The Yardbirds seem to have been the first to cover “I’m Waiting for the Man,” not long after its release. Though it’s not on any official releases, it’s easy to find their energetic, rave-up version. Bowie’s popular cover glams it up, makes the turnaround chords a little more bluesy—replacing the dominant III chord that gives that part its doo-wop allure—and Mick Ronson plays some Spiders from Mars-era leads that seem take the song to a swankier part of town than Reed originally intended to describe. The U.K. Subs amplified the song’s punkish roots, Beck made a bachelor pad-friendly version, and Cheap Trick brought the song to arenas, with the histrionics that requires.
The Feelies evoke the VU by playing it straight from the heart. “We weren’t, like, super obsessed about it or anything,” says Mercer.
It’s against these covers that the nuances of the Feelies’ signature are laid bare. While other artists have looked beyond the limits set by the Velvets, on Some Kinda Love, the Feelies return “I’m Waiting for the Man” to its central musical premise. There is no stylistic reinvention. Nor do they kneel at the altar of the VU, copying every -ism of the original recording. They simply play the essential elements of the song.
Bill Million's Gear
Million says his preference for Gibson-style guitars evolved in response to Mercer’s Fenders, as a way to differentiate their sounds. Live, he runs his guitars and board into a Music Man with a vintage Gibson extension cab.
Photo by Matt Condon
Guitars
- 1985 Gibson ES-335
- 1986 Gibson ES-335
- Epiphone Hummingbird
- Epiphone J-160
Amps
- Music Man 112 Sixty-Five (no speaker)
- Gibson GA-100 extension cab with 12" JBL speaker
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky
- D’Addario Phosphor Bronze
- D’Addario Chromes (Flat)
- Dunlop picks .73 mm
Effects
- MXR Micro Amp
- Fulltone OCD
- Fulltone Fat-Boost
- Boss Chorus
- Maxon Overdrive
- DeArmond Volume Pedal
- Electro-Harmonix Canyon
- Electro-Harmonix Octavix
- Source Audio Vertigo Tremolo
- Ebow
As early as Crazy Rhythms, the band exhibited a kind of jittery, frenetic feel. As they moved from their early funkier art-rock inclinations to a more pastoral sound on 1986’s Peter Buck-co-producedThe Good Earth—on which they cemented their lineup—it stuck with them.
“I’ve never been that comfortable performing,” says Mercer. “I think that we took that nervousness, that stage fright element, and used it to our advantage. It made us appear to be the nervous awkward band or whatever.” Check out their performance in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild to see what the guitarist means as they take David Bowie’s “Fame” for a spin.
The connection between Mercer and Million is at the front and center of the Feelies’ sound. While they don’t shy from the traditional lead/rhythm route, their rhythmic hookup is notable. Together, they’re percussive, with chord stabs often bouncing between the two forming tense, funky interactions. To describe it, Million points to the Velvet Underground, but more so Keith Richards and Ron Wood’s classic “ancient art of weaving” approach to rhythm. “That’s the feeling I get when I’m playing,” he says. “We’ve been playing together so long that there is a lot of that guitar interaction. My approach is to weave between what Glenn’s doing, and what Stan’s doing as well with the drums, so there’s a reaction, little accents here and there. We’ve all become very good listeners over time with each other, so that stuff just falls into the pocket.”
The guitarists have had plenty of time to form their two-guitar thing—they’ve been playing together for about a half century at this point. “Originally, we started playing together in a different band,” Mercer points out. “Bill played bass, and I played guitar, and Dave played drums. So, that was just three instruments with a singer. Then, Bill suggested switching to guitar and getting a bass player. I think right from the start, we were just playing the songs, we didn’t talk about what each one was going to do. It was understood.”
“They had this sort of quiet energy. It’s just as much energy as the Stooges or the MC5, but in a different way.” —Bill Millon on the Velvet Underground
From that, their style coalesced and evolved, and Mercer says they haven’t second-guessed it. “It’s instinctual. I think if it was anything other than that, it wouldn’t have lasted as long. I mean, if you have to talk about stuff and work on stuff, then to me, you kind of lose the essence of what’s good about playing music. It’s all instinctual and telepathic.”
The Velvet Underground and Nico hanging on a Vox in 1966 (clockwise from top left): Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Moe Tucker, and Nico.
Their guitar tastes have even evolved around each other, and Million cites his own preference for Gibsons—using a Les Paul early on and switching to ES-335s in the mid ’80s, sticking to them ever since—as a reaction to Mercer’s Fenders, which these days are a pair of modified Squier Telecasters.
The two guitarists also share many influences; they both reference the Stooges, the MC5, the Beatles, and the Stones in our conversations. Mercer points to Ron Asheton as an influence on his leads, which on Some Kinda Love is audible in a simmering-just-before-the-point-of-boiling-over kind of way on “Rock & Roll” and on the tumbling double-guitar tangle-up at the end of “Run Run Run.” Notably, Million talks about being into the Velvet Underground in high school, citing Reed’s vocals, Tucker’s drumming, and how “the guitars were almost approached like drums in a way.”
“We took that nervousness, that stage fright element, and used it to our advantage.” —Glenn Mercer
Mercer, though, took a little longer to come around. “I didn’t like them,” he says. “A couple of songs I thought were pretty good. ‘Waiting for the Man,’” I really liked that. The rest of it just seemed like a hodgepodge of art stuff. I guess by the time the third record [1969’s self-titled album] came along it really sunk in.”
Lou Reed heard something he liked in the Feelies and tapped them to open for his 1989 tour in support of his New York album. He first linked up with the band at a holiday party for Long Island’s WDRE FM. Million remembers the party and says, when the band received their invite to perform, “I think it was me that said, as a joke, ‘If Lou plays a song with us, we’ll do it.’” The next thing they knew they were onstage together. “We were playing those songs at this really incredibly fast tempo! And he just seemed like he really enjoyed himself. Because of that he asked us to go on tour with him.”
Million remembers Reed as “very supportive of the Feelies,” and says they shared dinner with him before most of their concerts together. “There was one show,” the guitarist recalls, “where his soundcheck was running longer. They informed him that they would have to probably skip our soundcheck, and he just said, ‘If the Feelies don’t get a soundcheck, I’m not playing.’ So, that was our relationship with him.”
The young Feelies at Hurrah in New York City on September 11, 1980. From left: Mercer, Weckerman, Million, and drummer Anton Fier.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
It’s by pure kismet that after years of covering the Velvet Underground, and decades after playing the songs alongside Reed, the Feelies have come to pay tribute with Some Kinda Love. They received an invitation from the curators of The Velvet Underground Experience (the 2018 version of the 2016 The Velvet Underground: New York Extravaganza exhibit in Paris), and Mercer explains, “Their idea was to get a bunch of bands that were inspired by or influenced by the Velvet Underground to perform. They contacted us and we thought it would be cool to do.”
But it wasn’t to be. “They were a little bit delayed in moving the exhibit, so that in the interim, they lost their lease and had to find a new venue.” When that venue didn’t have space for a live rock band—though Mercer did end up performing—he says, “We were already kind of semi-rehearsed and getting excited about doing it. So we said, we’ll just do a concert on our own at a different venue.”
On October 13, 2018, the band played the Velvets set that would become Some Kinda Love at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey. (They also played a second set of Feelies songs and delivered three VU-less encores.) The record clocks in at 71 minutes, so it was a long night. And a thrilling one, no doubt. Because the Feelies deliver every song on the record—from their funky “There She Goes Again” to the driving, percussive strums of “Who Loves the Sun” to the droning, gothic “All Tomorrow’s Parties”—with the same natural vibe that they seem to bring to everything they do.
“We kind of use their arrangements as a little bit of a template, basically just to put in enough to evoke the original recordings,” says Mercer. “We weren’t like, super obsessed about it or anything.”
In contrast to every stylistically varied version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” considered here, the Feelies prove the VU’s music, like all truly great rock ’n’ roll, seems to demand nothing more than simplicity and honesty. Nothing more and nothing less.
The Feelies live in that world. It’s not complicated. And it’s not intellectual. It’s elemental. And once you tap into it, it’s inescapable.
And as Some Kinda Love proves, that attitude, that approach, might just make the Feelies the greatest interpreter of the Velvet Underground anyone could wish for.
YouTube It
The Feelies perform their groovy, percussive cover of “Run Run Run” that appears on Some Kinda Love.
Jesse Dayton
A: The 20th-century guitarist I pick for not getting enough credit would have to be Hank Garland. Others like Link Wray and Cliff Gallup, even up to Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, are all very well-documented, but Hank Garland was a huge influence on all these guys! He was a monster studio-session guitarist who played on more hit songs in rock ’n’ roll, country, jazz, blues—you name it—than anyone in history.
Current obsession: My current musical obsession is this particular East Texas blues-guitar style called “droning,” started by Blind Lemon Jefferson, then passed on to Mance Lipscomb and Lightin’ Hopkins. They keep the open root string resonating (whatever key it is—could be the E or A string tuned down to D) while they play lead. If you want to try something new to make your guitar parts sound big and full, listen to these recordings and try it out!
Charles Saufley Gear Editor
A: Though a giant, I think the way Roger McGuinn’s style lives in so many songs written to this day makes him every bit as influential as many more extroverted and flamboyant players. Respect, too, to Vini Reilly, Maurice Deebank, Gabor Szabo and the other quiet, melodic, and restrained 20th-century stylists that may yet have great influence in this century.
Current obsession: I planted my garden a little more densely this year with colliding colors and textures. Perhaps that reflects an obsession with contrast. Contrast, quiet, melody, and restraint. That’s where my musical mind is these days.
Nick Millevoi Senior Editor
A: It would be hard to overstate Robert Quine’s influence. Known mostly for his work with Richard Hell, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, John Zorn, and a host of others, his playing—incisive but sensitive and nuanced, well-rooted but iconoclastic—caused ripples throughout the landscape of punk, rock ’n’ roll, power pop, and the avant-garde. But Quine’s still essentially an underground figure, and there are plenty of lessons in his playing still to be learned.
Current obsession: I’ve been engrossed in Dan LeRoy’s new book Dancing to the Drum Machine: How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World. It’s a deeply fun, well-constructed journey through an important and fascinating part of musical history, fit for gear nerds. The chapters on Roger Linn’s creations alone are worth the cover price. Bonus: My summer playlist has been expertly curated.
Phillip Smith Reader of the Month
A: James Gurley from Big Brother and the Holding Company is the first name which comes to mind when it comes to underrated guitarists whose influence runs deep. Gurley’s imprint on psychedelic rock has been enormous. Listen to “Summertime” from Big Brother’s 1968 release Cheap Thrills, and let it speak for itself.
Photo by Nelson Chenault
Current obsession: I’ve been listening to deFrance a lot. Led by Drew deFrance, the band’s musical stylings have a strong Tom Petty influence. I had the opportunity to catch deFrance perform in concert a few weeks ago at a music festival in Newport, Arkansas. They were tight as hell, and sounded great.
