Decades on, they're still feeling the music

The Feelies (from left: Brenda Sauter, Bill Million, Glenn Mercer, Stanley Demeski, and Dave Weckerman) have reunited. ''Our profile was kind of coming up a bit,'' Mercer says. (Rob Bennett for the New York Times)

In "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley envisioned a tactile form of motion pictures he called the Feelies. "Nothing but pure sensation," as one character described it.

The New Jersey band that borrowed Huxley's coinage for its own name always approached rock 'n' roll like a pure sensation. No frills, no posturing, no distractions for the unassuming Feelies. Just a hypnotic swirl of guitars and percussion that quietly, but relentlessly, pushed garage-band psychedelia toward the mystical.

Thirty years after the Village Voice declared the group "the best underground band in New York" (and half as many years after pulling their own plug), the Feelies have reformed, in typically modest fashion. In early July they played a few tuneup gigs at their old Hoboken haunt, Maxwell's, before opening for Sonic Youth at an outdoor concert at New York's Battery Park on the Fourth of July. This weekend they return to Massachusetts, a home-away-from-home for the band in the 1980s. They'll play Northampton's Academy of Music tonight and the Roxy tomorrow.

The Feelies reunited in part because co-founders Glenn Mercer and Bill Million were in closer contact than they'd been in years. Licensing requests - for a Volvo commercial, a network drama, the film "The Squid and the Whale" - were beginning to put more green in their pockets than the band had ever made on the road.

"It seemed like our profile was kind of coming up a bit," Mercer says from his New Jersey home. For the bandleader, whose workaday singing style always kept the group's emotions in check, minimalism seems as much a personal code as an artistic approach. Unfailingly polite, he says no more than necessary.

Humility being about as common to rock 'n' roll as abstinence, the Feelies' shy, bookish intensity set them apart in the CBGB's era. On "Crazy Rhythms," their 1980 debut, they covered some of the same youthfully awkward ground as their contemporaries Devo, albeit with none of the irony (and certainly none of the absurd theatricality). "I was raised by different standards," a peach-fuzzy, preppy-sweatered Mercer sang on a song called "Loveless Love," lamenting a racy girlfriend.

Like that of their spiritual forebears the Velvet Underground, the Feelies' singularity would amount to greater influence than album sales. Peter Buck of R.E.M. famously credited "Crazy Rhythms" as a particular inspiration (and helped produce a subsequent Feelies album). In the 1990s, former Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham hired once and future Feelie Stanley Demeski for his band Luna; in his recent memoir, "Black Postcards," Wareham called "Crazy Rhythms" "a perfect record" and the group that made it "an amazingly precise musical machine."

"No band, with the possible exception of the dB's, had a greater impact on Yo La Tengo," says that Hoboken band's co-founder, Ira Kaplan. Kaplan and his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley, were big fans. They made their first recording at Million's house, and Mercer joined them onstage at their first gig.

It was six years before the Feelies released their second album, "The Good Earth." Originally signed to the British punk label Stiff, by the late '80s the band was enjoying a low-key relationship with major label A&M, touring steadily on the newly legitimized college circuit and recording two more deceptively forceful, increasingly adult-sounding albums before stepping aside.

Outwardly, at least, there was no drama. They simply grew tired of the grind. Bill Million (whose adopted surname, Mercer says, came from watching Tom Snyder address his "Tomorrow Show" cameraman - "Mr. Million") moved with his family to Florida, where he took a job working in computer security for Disney World.

"I guess we just felt we had reached a certain level," says Mercer, "and to go to the next felt uncomfortable. It would've been extra pressure in a lot of ways. I don't really feel like we missed out on anything, to be honest."

With the exception of Million, who gave up playing guitar for years, until his son picked it up, the rest of the band continued to make music. The Feelies sprouted several side projects, and Mercer released his solo debut, "Wheels in Motion," last year.

For years, all four Feelies albums have been out of print, with used copies commanding a premium online. The band's third album, "Only Life," was recently reissued, and Mercer says the group is close to signing a deal to reissue the first two.

That should help turn a new generation of rhythm-fixated indie guitar bands onto the Feelies, if they're not already familiar. Even out of print, the band has a cult appeal that's traveled well. "Think of a band you like and they probably like the Feelies," claimed the tastemaking website Pitchfork when it reported on the summer reunion shows.

If bands such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Vampire Weekend are aware of the debt they owe the Feelies, Mercer says he doesn't always hear it. On tour, fans were always telling him how much some new band reminded them of the Feelies.

"I usually hear the differences first," he says. He remembers one well-meaning small-talker who urged him to check out a new band called 10,000 Maniacs, which turned out to have a female singer and a keyboard player.

"The only similarity," says Mercer, "was that we both used minor chords."