The dangerous book for boys: fiddlin’ around with a band of brothers
By Tara Murtha
Published: March 6th, 2008 | 12:50pm
A roots rock revival is a-rumblin’, and it’s the Felice Brothers who are poised to inherit Americana’s crusty crown. After self-releasing a few albums and following those up with a hard-to-find, tour-only, word-of-mouth LP, The Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1, the band’s eagerly awaited U.S. label debut, The Felice Brothers, is finally set to release March 4, 2008, on Conor Oberst’s Team Love Records.
The Felice Brothers rattles with rickety, mostly joyous ballads of pistols, whiskey, and lopsided love alongside hand-clap anthems laced with dark ribbons of organ. The songs are ghosted with girls named Lucille, Odetta, Little Annie and “Ruby Mae from the cabaret.” These are primarily off-kilter ballads of love and loss that leave a taste on the teeth of rusty pipes, brass horns, and broken halos with wheezing accordion and harmonies as wayward as a bumblebee buzz.
The three vocals-sharing, multi-instrumentalist brothers — James, Ian, and Simone, joined by dice-tossing bassist Christmas — aren’t much for crunching their concoctions through the digital mill. James says they recorded both The Adventures and The Felice Brothers on a two-track in a chicken coop.
Like all Americana singers with a certain gravelly lilt, Ian’s voice has been likened to Bob Dylan. James estimates the comparison has come up “somewhere between 10 and a billion” times so far. But I’m calling it now: it’s spot-on for Keith Richards, most eerily his cover of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” recorded after his infamous Toronto heroin bust in ’77.
Canadian-American rock group the Band is also liberally peppered in print around the Felice Brothers’ names, both because the brothers are from the same area in the Catskills Mountains, New York, and because of the sound: the Brothers have got the same New-Orleans-at-night brass pageantry that Allen Toussaint brought to the Band.
In the made-for-cable movie about the Felice Brothers (James votes for Treat Williams to play his part), the rags-to-riches montage goes like this: the three brothers attend church on Sundays, grow up, and split ways to do their own thing. Good family boys, they return to Mom and Dad’s every Sunday to char some meat and jam on the porch. Zoetrope-flip through the years as instruments change, 5 o’clock shadows push through, and Ian throws down the gauntlet: We’re gonna quit our jobs for music full time and do this.
The timing was ripe and there was little to lose. According to James, Ian had just broken up with a girlfriend and was living in a tent in the woods. Simon was shacking up somewhere upstate with his girlfriend, and James was living in his car and working at a taco joint. Post-gauntlet: The four boys move to a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and spend days busking in subways and howling on street corners. Somewhere along the way a Vice magazine writer “discovers” them. Next thing you know, they’re at Radio City Music Hall and touring with Bright Eyes.
James is telling all this from the back of their infamous “short bus” where the band is L.A.-bound to play the Avalon with the North Mississippi All-Stars. He’s talking about what it’s like to go from jamming on the family porch to traveling the world, playing legendary gigs like Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble. Velocity being what it is, it can be strange to perch on top of the buzz band heap.
Of the sudden interest in this little family band from the mountains, James takes the tack of similar birdmen flying close to the sun: he says they’re trying hard to not get too wrapped up in what the blogs say, especially because they’ve got a lot work to do yet.
The work right now is all about getting it right each night onstage. The boys are one month deep into an intense seven-month tour bender that zigs them all over the United States before zagging them out to Dublin, London, and Barcelona for the Primavera Festival. They’re set to hit the U.S. fest circuit big-time with appearances at Langerado, Bonnaroo, Mountain Jam, and All Points West. James says they tend to do more writing at home, where he can secure a little privacy to work through songs as dense, clear, and clever as they’ve written so far.
The closest song to a single on the new album is “Frankie’s Gun!,” a backwoods, bar-buddy anthem you expect to blast from a jukebox long after closing time on those good nights when you’re locked inside a bar instead of out. “Helen Fry” is like a waltz-y take on Tom Waits’ “Walking Spanish.”
The singsong sing-along “Take this Bread” kicks off with a recording of the Felice Brothers’ father leaving a voicemail message to the boys the last time they were on their way to the L.A.: “I was just listening to the news man, and the whole fucking California is on fire over there …. Anyway I know you’re busy. Just call when you get a chance. Let me know how you’re making out …. We love you, bye.” It’s a gruff, tender moment. It was one of the first times the boys were far away, and warning his boys of the natural disasters that lie ahead was the most a worried Dad at home could do.
They’re already learning plenty about natural disasters. James is readingWar and Peace and waxing philosophical about whiskey and women. “Love can be a beautiful thing, but it can get you into trouble,” he says.
As the brothers float farther and farther away from their safe homestead in New York, there are ever more concerts, interviews, albums, women, and whiskey on the horizon.
There are no fires in LA tonight. They are rising higher, and the world gets wider.
