Felice Brothers Deliver The Goods # 1 on DLM's Helsinki Top Ten for 2008
Soundcheck 2008
1.11.09
If I ever have to endure the false theatricality of a musician begging their audience to "raise your hands high and clap along" I may just be forced to commit an act of violence in the gentle confines of my favorite club. No, really, there is simply no way to alienate this old webbie quicker than that. Memo: Hey music person! DO NOT attempt to emulate emotion, feeling, and involvement. Either you've got it, or you don't. Either it happens or IT DOESN'T.
But... for every false note that I have heard land on the barroom floor with a resounding thud, I have found a corresponding redeeming grace in the music made by these young men. It is, simply put, sincere and transcendentally great music and art.
Standing at stage left for their performance, I was reminded of 40 years earlier. Standing similarly offstage one night in 1968, at San Francisco's Carousel Ballroom, I watched the guy I had just stood next to climb on stage and start... well, twitching. While I was wondering if this British visitor was having a fit or some kind of seizure, uh, Joe Cocker broke into song you might have heard..."Lend me your ears, and I'll sing you a song...and I'll try not to sing out of key". Ooops, the guy wasn't having a fit, just delivering, with every fiber of his being, performance as art, not artifice. Cocker, who was relatively unknown then, dealt us a hand of total involvement in the moment, and made for us explosively compelling art.
Well, this fall, I saw another artist put as much commitment, physicality, and pure heart into piece of music. Joe Cocker has met his match...in spades.
If I ever again endure the artificial bathos of "come on everybody..etc.", tell you what, I am gonna drag that wanna-be to YouTube and make them catch a glimpse of the real deal. You can't fake it when you want the proscenium arch to disappear and to become one with your audience. You can't MAKE the audience feel your soul, but with skill, and art, and daring you can deliver us all to someplace else. Someplace timeless. Simone Felice stands on stage night after night, as does all the band, and they make us FEEL.
The Felice Brothers' art takes "three chords and the truth" to new levels.
Mercy
G D
Show me mercy
G D
Show me mercy, Mary girl
G A G D
Bury this here gun and play my widow
G D
In the kitchen window
G A D
In the last of the falling sun
G D
Show me mercy
G D
Won't you nurse these wounds of mine
G A D
Rinse and sew me up
G D G D
Baby your eyes are like a pale blue Chrysler
G A D
Drive us to the sun
Sure am thirsty
Show me mercy, Molly girl
Lift your pitcher to my mouth
Close your eyelids in the smoky silence
With your black hair falling down
Show me mercy
Show me mercy, Mary girl
Bury this here gun
With Jesus laughing, now you see what happens
When devils fall in love
Show me mercy
Smokestack curse the churchyard air
Where a virgin weeps for us
With Jesus laughing in the breezy blackness
Where devils fall in love
6/23/2009 This song is called Mercy. Christmas Song is a totally different song (the one where his hat blows off and he saves a girl from drowning)
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