Little Feat frontman Lowell George died on June 29, 1979. Since the 40th anniversary of his passing is coming up this week, I thought I'd put together something about one of my favorite bands, who mean more and more to me with each passing year. George's deeply original songwriting and distinctive slide guitar (played with a Sears and Roebuck socket wrench case as a slide), backed by incredibly versatile musicians like pianist/keyboards Bill Payne and drummer Richie Hayward, made Little Feat stand out even in the crowded field of '70s California bands blending rock, country and blues. They toured with The Who and the Grateful Dead, and were given high praise by Zep and the Stones and Clapton, but never really reached household name status in their own right.

Little Feat deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Strawberry Flats
2. I've Been The One
3. Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie
4. Sailin' Shoes
5. Cold, Cold, Cold
6. Teenage Nervous Breakdown
7. Fool Yourself
8. Two Trains
9. Roll Um Easy
10. Feats Don't Fail Me Now
11. Skin It Back
12. The Fan
13. Long Distance Love
14. Mercenary Territory
15. Hi Roller
16. Red Streamliner
17. Fat Man In The Bathtub (live)
18. A Apolitical Blues (live)
19. Be One Now
20. Front Page News
21. Hangin' On To The Good Times
22. Feelin's All Gone

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Little Feat (1971)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from Sailin' Shoes (1972)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from Dixie Chicken (1973)
Tracks 10, 11 and 12 from Feats Don't Fail Me Now (1974)
Tracks 13 and 14 from The Last Record Album (1975)
Tracks 15 and 16 from Time Loves A Hero (1977)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Waiting For Columbus (1978)
Track 19 from Down On The Farm (1979)
Track 20 from Hoy-Hoy! (1981)
Track 21 from The Let It Roll (1988)
Track 22 from Representing The Mambo (1990)

Since Little Feat were a cult band who won over more fans with their concerts and albums than with singles, it's more difficult than usual to distinguish between 'hits' and 'deep cuts.' I couldn't justify including the band's most famous song, "Willin'" (which I wrote a lengthy Stereogum piece about in 2017), even if it was never a single. I also avoided songs that were released as A-sides that I would consider essential to any Little Feat best-of collection (including "Dixie Chicken," "All That You Dream," "Easy To Slip," "Spanish Moon," "Oh Atlanta," "Spanish Moon," "Time Loves A Hero," and "Hamburger Midnight"). That said, if this playlist is your introduction to Little Feat, I'd say it's a good one, with a lot of what would be considered their signature songs, like "Fat Man In The Bath Tub," "Feats Don't Fail Me Now," "Sailin' Shoes," "Two Trains," "Roll Um Easy," and "Teenage Nervous Breakdown."

Lowell George played in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention for 6 months in 1968 and 1969. And with Zappa's help, he ended up with his own band signed to Warner Brothers, and led Little Feat for 7 studio albums, before dying at the age of 34. His last album with the band, Down On The Farm, was completed and released a few months after his death.

Little Feat's self-titled debut is kind of an outlier, starting with its cover art, which doesn't feature the kind of distinctive Neon Park illustrations that are on the covers of all the albums at the top of this post. With dry production and a smaller quartet configuration than the classic 6-piece lineup they had from their 3rd album onward, Little Feat positions the band as something of a west coast answer to The Band. I've always been fond of the album's odd little closing track "Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie," which packs a whole lot of words and musical twists and turns into under 2 minutes. To my surprise, rehearsal tapes of the early months of Little Feat have surfaced in which "Willie" is 14 minutes long, with many many more lyrics and musical tangents that follow from where the album version cuts off. It might be the most Zappa thing the band ever did, before George fully established his own musical identity out of the Mothers' shadow. The same rehearsal tape also features an early version of "The Fan" -- by the time that song had made it onto an album they'd changed the opening lyric "heard you got an infection from a guitar player of great renown," which makes me wonder what rock star it may have been referring to.

The next few Little Feat albums after their debut are simply fantastic, some of the best albums of the '70s. Dixie Chicken may be the consensus pick, but Sailin' Shoes is probably my favorite (dig the primitive early drum machine heard on many of Lowell George's demos that drummer Richie Hayward thumps over top of on "Cold, Cold, Cold"). But I also have a lot of fondness for Feats Don't Fail Me Now, the album that Little Feat was recording in Baltimore County when my father met Lowell George and briefly visited the band in their Hunt Valley studio (Baltimore, of course, gets a famous shout out on the title track). Feats is the most relentlessly upbeat and electric Little Feat album, with no ballads and possibly not even a single acoustic guitar strum.

1975's The Last Record Album was not a farewell or record or even an intended one; the title was simply a reference to the 1971 box office hit The Last Picture Show. It's not their best album, but I heard it so many times in my dad's car and love every minute of it, it's kind of the album where you get the best balance of the best of the band's three most prolific songwriters (George, Payne, and guitarist Paul Barrere). Little Feat toured the UK for the first time in support of that album and were well received; iconic radio DJ John Peel made his first Festive Fifty list in 1976 and it included both "Willin'" and "Long Distance Love" (the latter of which also inspired the title of "Of Missing Persons," Jackson Browne's 1980 song dedicated to Lowell George). Like many '70s bands, the double live album was a tipping point for Little Feat, and it's sad to think that the band never really got to capitalize on 1978's Waiting For Columbus so perfectly packaging some of the band's best songs into one great live record and bringing in new fans.

Lowell George really had a great way of writing lyrics that could be bluntly plainspoken in one breath and strikingly poetic or intellectual in the next -- "eloquent profanity, it rolls right off my tongue," as he would say in "Roll Um Easy." There are so many turns of phrase in these songs that rattle around in my head -- "haven't slept in a bed for a week and my shoes feel like they're part of my feet" ("Strawberry Flats") or "some kind of man, he can't do anything wrong/ if I see him I'll tell him you're waiting" ("Mercenary Territory"). "Teenage Nervous Breakdown" is probably the band's fastest song but features tongue twisters like "unscrupulous operators could confuse, could exploit and deceive/ conditional reflex theories and changing probabilities."

Little Feat never had a Hot 100 hit, but they were popular enough on AOR radio that I wonder if they may have charted in the '70s if there was a rock singles chart at the time. When Billboard did roll out the Rock Tracks chart (now the Mainstream Rock chart) in 1981, Little Feat finally charted with 1974's "Rock And Roll Doctor," re-released in support of the Hoy-Hoy! compilation that mixed together rarities with the best of the Lowell George era of the band. My pick from Hoy-Hoy! for this playlist is the original Feats Don't Fail Me Now era version of "Front Page News," a song that the band recorded for at least 3 different albums before it finally landed on Down On The Farm (the 1975 version appears on 2000's Hotcakes & Outtakes box set). Bill Payne wrote some great songs for Little Feat, and I think that was one that Lowell George was wrong to keep tinkering with, it was at its best in its first incarnation.

The surviving members of the band reformed Little Feat in 1987, and their first two albums were arguably the most commercially successful records of the band's career, with several rock radio hits including the #1 singles "Hate To Lose Your Lovin'" and "Texas Twister." Payne and Barrere had become increasingly confident songwriters over the course of Little Feat's original run. So their later reunion albums, while more slick and sometimes missing Lowell George's eccentric touch, are still pretty excellent records. I might've used more of their later records for the playlist, but the independent albums after Representing The Mambo aren't all available on streaming services. Craig Fuller, best known as the voice of Pure Prairie League's classic rock staple "Amie," joined Little Feat for their first few reunion albums, and he's got a similar vocal range to Lowell George and fills out their sound well. On "Hangin' On To The Good Times," which he co-wrote with Payne and Barrere, Fuller sings about Spotcheck Billy and Juanita, the characters from George's song "Fat Man In The Bathtub," and I go back on forth on whether it's a welcome callback to the band's origins or an odd way of kind of continuing a story without the person who started it.

There are some notable cameos on these songs, including Bonnie Raitt (backing vocals on "Two Trains"), Michael McDonald (backing vocals on "Red Streamliner"), Emmylou Harris (backing vocals on "Front Page News"), Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor (on the Waiting For Columbus rendition of "A Apolitical Blues"), and the Tower of Power horns (on "Hi Roller"). And some of these songs have been covered notably. Van Halen's 1988 album OU812 had a cover of "A Apolitical Blues" (incidentally, Ted Templeman produced the original Sailin' Shoes version of the song as well as most of Van Halen's albums before OU812). The Golden Palominos' 1986 album Blast of Silence opens with Syd Straw singing "I've Been The One," and closes with her singing another song from Little Feat's debut, "Brides of Jesus." Phish covered "Fat Man In The Bathtub" and all the other songs on Waiting For Columbus for one of their annual Halloween shows where they cover an album in its entirety. And of course, the first couple of bars of "Fool Yourself" were looped on many many '90s hip hop tracks, including A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebaum" and The Fugees' "Killing Me Softly."

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 23, 2019 at 11:34 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.