The Felice Brothers' music is steeped in family and tradition

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

They didn’t have much growing up in rural New York, but they had each other.

Not much has changed for The Felice Brothers — Simone, Ian and James — except for the fact that, instead of falling asleep in the woods surrounding their upstate New York home (as they did when they were kids) or flopping down on the floor of a stripped-bare special education bus (as they did when they were starting out as musicians), they get in a night every now and then in a real bed.

Instead of playing for the New York subway rush, they’re performing for crowds gradually increasing in size at bars and beer halls around the country. Instead of wondering how, exactly, they’re going to scrape up enough cash for a new set of guitar strings, they’re pleasantly surprised that some bills are paid, the gas tank is full and there’s money left over for a cold beer.

They’re not sitting in the fabled cat bird’s seat, nor do they ever really want to be. They don’t have a long-range plan, and they don’t worry too much about selling a gazillion records. They just want a little peace of mind, and they get it when they climb on stage together.

“The future? I never think about that; I don’t want to think about that,” James Felice told The Daily Times this week. “I could be dead for all I know. I mean, I’ve got teeth rotting out of my head and debts to pay off, so I need to make a little bit of money to go to the dentist, but if I can just be on tour and playing music, then I’m psyched. As our father said, ‘God willing and the creek don’t rise,’ we’ll keep doing this as long as we can.”

The three Felice brothers are the oldest of seven children, born and raised in New York’s Catskill Mountains. They didn’t have much growing up, James Felice said, but they had fun — and they had music.

“Most people are products of their environment in a lot of ways, and we all grew up in the country, up in that part of New York, so it influenced what we do in a lot of ways,” he said. “When I think back about growing up, I think about building tree forts in the woods. I think of running through the woods, of jumping off cliffs and into creeks and ruining our clothes. We didn’t have much of anything back then, so that was our fun.

“And I think about the first time my little brother Ian gave me my first Neil Young tape. And when I was 6 or 7, and my dad bought that Bob Dylan album, ‘Slow Train Comin’.’ I remember listening to ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and thinking that was so cool. That album definitely woke something up in me.”

Eventually, he said, the three brothers decided to start a band. They were destitute anyway, and none of them had the heart to commit to a career like their father had. They had all left home and come back and left again, and finally, when they ran across a 19-year-old runaway who called himself Christmas, they decided to give it a go, come hell or high water.

“It was just that things were in the right place at the right time, and no one had anything going on,” Felice said. “It was just a goal from the beginning to do something, because none of us wanted to have a real job anymore. Ian was living in a tent at the time, and I was living in my car — none of us had anything, and we didn’t want to have to get real jobs.

I mean, our father is an amazing man and a hard-working guy — he worked 70 hours a week for 35 years or something like that, and we respect him, but we didn’t think we could do it. We just couldn’t handle that. We decided to play music, and if it didn’t work out, at least we had tried.”

So the four boys picked up and headed to the Big Apple, where they lived hand-to-mouth and set up shop on street corners, in subways and in parks. It was a fast education, learning to play to the scurrying masses who barely slowed down to give them a second glance, but eventually, the guitar cases started to fill up with money, Felice said.

“No one really cares unless you’re showing them something and actively trying to capture their attention,” he said. “Maybe if you’re a virtuoso violin player, you can capture people’s attention, but none of us are virtuosos by any stretch of the imagination. So we had to give them something to get them to stop and listen and maybe throw a quarter down. That’s how we learned to play to people.”

The boys’ showmanship combined with their developing style — an earnest combination of Old Time and roots-based folk that calls to mind string bands and jug bands of old but sounds like something new and fresh entirely — to get them noticed. A freelance music writer discovered them at a farmers market in Brooklyn, and one thing led to another. At first, they made a splash across the pond, releasing “Tonight at the Arizona” on the UK-based Loose Records label. A tour of Britain and Europe led to a fond following before they came home for their first American tour last summer.

They shared the stage with such neo-folkies as Bright Eyes and Levon Helm, releasing “The Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1” as a bootleg for sale only at their shows and a proper self-titled debut that washes over the soul like the slow silt-rich flow of a brackish backwater river. It’s an excellent blend of songwriting prowess and instrumental firepower that’s an homage to the blue-collar rock of Springsteen, the folk of Guthrie, the soul of The Band and the effervescence of Marah.

In the end, though, none of those accolades, from national critics or local ones, mean a whole lot to the boys themselves. They continue to do what they enjoy best — singing and playing and winning folks over, a fan at a time. Last fall’s show at Barley’s Taproom, where they’ll perform on Saturday, drew a mere handful of people, Felice remembers; hopefully, this weekend’s show will be better, but even if it isn’t, that’s OK too.

“All the attention, I’d like to attribute it to just a bunch of good songs and a few decent records, but we try not to pay attention to too much of that stuff,” he said. “It can get a little overwhelming and confusing, and make you think you’re something that you’re not. The best thing about it is that all that stuff means there might be more people at the shows who come to see us play.”