Wake Ooloo

(from You Could Do Worse Zine #2)

by Rob Galgano

Sometimes, when a band splits, the members will disappear. They head back to their day jobs and put away their dreams. Happily, that is not the case for four-fifths of the Feelies. Brenda Sauter has a new band, Wild Carnation; Stanley Demeski drums for Luna and Dave Weckerman and Glenn Mercer have formed Wake Ooloo. (I hear that Bill Million is now a locksmith at Disney World. Really!) WO have released their first album on the Pravda label, called Hear No Evil. It's no letdown, considering that I had come to rely on the Feelies to produce album after album of good music. Things have changed a little bit over time, but the elements are still there...

YCDW: Rob Galgano

YCDW: What happened to the Feelies?

GM: Well, Bill decided he didn't want to do it any more. We never really had much discussion about it. There's a lot of reasons, but I don't really want to go in to it. A lot of them are personal. We never had any disagreements about the music. I know he was really happy about the way the last record (Time For A Witness) came out. If anything, that probably contributed to it, the fact that we worked really hard on it, we were really proud of it, and it didn't sell as well as we had hoped. A big problem was that A&M had gotten bought out by Polygram. All new people came in who weren't familiar with the band, and didn't know our past at all. It was a bad time in general for alternative bands. Record sales were down, concert attendance was down.

YCDW: So how did it turn into Wake Ooloo?

GM: We all went our separate ways. Dave and I stayed in contact. The two of us just started playing songs that we had played together in bands prior to the Feelies. Russ is an old friend of mine and he came down. It was more of a social thing, just playing covers. Just like a weekly poker game, for fun. Simultaneous to that, Troy (Meiss) was coming out from Iowa to do some demos. In between working on some of his stuff, we'd jam on some of my new songs, so that developed into a trio. With Russ, we were playing covers, and we decided to have all of us play together. Troy's not in the band amymore, he now plays backup guitar for the Meat Puppets. The new bass player is John Dean.

YCDW: Do you get any name recognition?

GM: It's not comparable to starting over, but it's not starting from where the Feelies left off, either. It's in between there. It varies from town to town. We do pretty well in the Midwest since our label is based in Chicago.

YCDW: So, all things considered, do you think it's been going all right?

GM: We were just talking about that the other day, how in the long run, the way the Feelies established an audience, a little bit at a time, is the best way to do it.

YCDW: ìNobody Heard,î from the new album, sounds like a Feelies song. Do you find yourself falling back into old patterns of songwriting?

GM: Well, to say that is to say there's a new pattern. I don't really distinguish writing for one group as opposed to another. The song is written and it becomes something, depending on who else is playing it.

YCDW: Now you have a keyboard player, but on the album, the guitars still dominate. It seemed like the keyboards were secondary, and you can't hear them some of the time. Did Russell play guitar also?

GM: He doesn't play guitar right now, but he has in the past. He prefers the keyboard parts to sound the way they do. They're there to flesh the songs out. Russell's got a very good intuitive sense of what fits. That's what's good about this band. We don't have to hash stuff out in rehearsal. We basically just play the songs, and I don't have to tell anybody to play any parts.

YCDW: I saw the Feelies in Boston a few times. I remember that Dave used to play percussion in the back and be really low-key. What got him behind the full drum kit?

GM: He's always played kit durms. He was the original drummer for the Feelies. The drummer who replaced him changed parts around, we found that there was a lot of space in the songs, so we asked him back to play percussion.

YCDW: Did he play on Crazy Rhythms?

GM: He wasn't on the album, because we wrote all the parts, so rather than teach him, we played them ourselves.He was playing with us live at the time, however.

YCDW: It seemed to me that he had more of a percussionist's role than a drummer's role in the Feelies.

GM: That was what the role was. I think the fact that there were two drummers dictated that what they would play would be simple, or it would sound bad. Now that he's the only drummer, he's freed up to be more dynamic.

YCDW: Have you got any new songs?

GM: There were a couple that didn't make this record. I usually look at a record as writing, arranging, recording, and promoting, so I don't really start to think about the next record until we've done some promotion. We'll probably start writing this summer.

YCDW: Is there any particular reason that Wake Ooloo sounds heavier than the Feelies did?

GM: It was the direction we were headng in on Time For A Witness. We had started using more distortion. There's the need to fill up the space, because when we started, it was just me and Dave.

[At this point, Glenn had to go set up, so he handed me over to Dave Weckerman]

YCDW: I wanted to ask you about Shore Leave [the album done by Feelies spin-off band Yung Wu. It was pretty much the same lineup, except Dave did he singing.-ed.] . I like that album, and I was really surprised to find out that you were a songwriter. What was it like making that album?

DW: We had a bunch of songs laying around and we had the opportunity to record them between Feelies projects. It was fun.

YCDW: How do you like being in Wake Ooloo?

DW: It's a lot different. With just the keyboards and one guitar, it's pretty straightforward. It doesn't have the dynamics that the Feelies had, but it's got a sound of its own. It was fun to record the album, because we didn't have the budget that the Feelies had, so we had to do everything real quick, with the pressure on. Most of the songs were done in one take, except for overdubs. The Feelies used to spend a day in the studio tuning one guitar string.

YCDW: It does sound a lot like the Feelies.

DW: In the studio, it's easy to do that, because Glenn can overdub guitar parts. Live, it's kind of stripped down. We still do some Feelies songs, but there's a lot we can't do, because they rely too much on the double-guitar interplay.

YCDW: What's it like starting over?

DW: It's fun and exciting, because you don't get bored. If the Feelies were still together, we'd probably be bored by now, because we'd be making the fifth or sixth album. We don't know if Wake Ooloo will attain the popularity the Feelies had, but you never know.

YCDW: So you're enjoying yourselves so far.

DW: Yeah, that's why we played in the Feelies, because we enjoyed doing this. We didn't know how much we actually enjoyed it until we started going out and playing more college-type scenes around the country. The Feelies only used to play five times a year in the New York area.

YCDW: I was so surprised to see you in the movie Something Wild.

DW: The first time I saw it, I really didn't think there was much to it, but then I watched it three times, and found a lot of subtle, funny stuff in it.

YCDW: How was your experience making the reunion scene in the movie?

DW: All we had to do was to be ourselves. He (director Jonathan Demme) always liked the Feelies because we had no attittude or image, it was just a bunch of people who dressed normal and played in a band. He didn't want the typical reunion band in matching suits.

Portions Copyright 1994, 1995 Ether pty ltd.

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