I remember the exact time and place when I first heard The Felice Brothers. There’s something special about the fact that I can recall that, I can’t really think of any other band where that’s the case. It was New York City, the year was 2006, and I was staying at the apartment of my college roommate in SoHo. At the time I was on a break from graduate school, and while a large portion of my classmates were using the free time to study up for impending exams, I was traipsing around New York doing my best burn-out impression. In retrospect, it seems an ideal time to have discovered a band that would hence forth play into my earphones night after night as I slowly came to the realization that what I was currently toiling away at in school was not what I should hope to toil away at in life.
Well, as the story goes, my friend was playing a tune, The Ballad of Lou the Welterweight, and he says to me, “do you know who this is?” and I says to him
“it sounds like Bob Dylan.”
All the while fully hesitant about making that statement, because I was almost certain that it wasn’t Bob Dylan, but damn if it didn’t sound like him. As expected, my friend, who at the time was a good bit more knowledgeable in the area of music than myself, gave me a typical New Yorker smirk and explained to me that it was a band called The Felice Brothers, and “no, definitely not Bob Dylan.”
Well, as I said earlier, this band hence forward became a band that was on repeat in both my head and my stereo system for quite some time after, their music got me through some shit, if you will. So in time I became even a bit more ashamed of my original guess, as I came to realize that they don’t sound like Bob Dylan at all. Imitation is cheap, and these dudes are no impersonators. They sound like The Felice Brothers, and they are one hell of a band…