Little Feat were the archetypal cult band: inspired, turbulent, smart, experimental, deserving – and accident-prone. Their modest ambition was to warp and syncopate mere reality, using stop-start rhythms and slapstick-surreal lyrics. Out of an internal chemistry that led to almost as many breakups as albums, the group invented a zany South-West synthesis, via New Orleans, Memphis, Macon, Houston, Nashville, Tijuana and their native Los Angeles. Little Feat wrote witty, soulful songs and performed them better than anyone who dared attempt cover versions. Deejays and concert audiences loved them. Fellow musicians praised and imitated them.

Yet Little Feat's best LPs, Sailin' Shoes (1972) and Dixie Chicken (1973), hardly sold at all, and only a live double set, 1978's Waiting for Columbus, broke 500,000 in sales. By then, the band was already in decline. Keyboardist Bill Payne and guitarist Paul Barrère were writing tunes that tipped the group toward a less distinctive jazz-rock fusion (closer to its prime emulators, the Doobie Brothers), while Lowell George – Little Feat's founder, singer, slide guitarist and chief spirit–made a slow fade. In 1979, during a tour with his own band to promote an endlessly-in-the-making solo record, George died of a heart attack that may have been related to heavy drug use. The rest of Little Feat finished up some tapes that were in the works, released them as Down on the Farm and retired the Little Feat name.

Like most Seventies groups, however, Little Feat were well-documented with demos, live broadcast tapes and studio outtakes. Since the band's following has, if anything, grown since George's death, it's only logical that a from-the-archives album would appear. Hoy-Hoy!, compiled by Barrère, Payne and Little Feat engineer George Massenburg, isn't a best-of or a reunion, though it does include a new number each by Payne and Barrère. It's mostly a fond, trivia-laden memorial that adds more evidence to George's contradictory madman-perfectionist myth.

To a cultist, the discarded outtakes illuminate the way Lowell George worked. Except for a live "Red Streamliner" that beats the studio track on Time Loves a Hero, the takes George chose for Little Feat LPs were less cluttered and more kinetic than the alternates. He knew what he wanted: the kind of space that sets each part of a song in relief. Instead of using a horn section to pound home the hooks, as the Tower of Power boys do here in a live "Skin It Back," George used silence and rhythm. What make the alternate takes worthwhile are the clearer lyrics ("The Fan"), the singing ("Rock and Roll Doctor") and the slide solos ("Two Trains"), which suggest that Lowell George never wasted a note anywhere. George also sings four tunes that never made it onto Little Feat records: Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller's "Framed," Hank Williams' "Lonesome Whistle," a deranged early version of "Teenage Nervous Breakdown" and a gospel-style tribute to heroin, "China White." They only add up to something morbid if you insist on making connections.

Cultists always want more, of course. I'd rather hear more demos and more early Little Feat instead of three previously released album tracks ("Strawberry Flats," "Easy to Slip," "Forty-Four Blues") or Linda Ronstadt's brave attempt at "All That You Dream." And there are rumors of Little Feat songs so unsavory that they still haven't made it to vinyl (e.g., "Bag of Reds"). But Hoy-Hoy! intends to be affectionate, hardly definitive: not a last gasp but, in the Little Feat tradition, a last laugh. (RS 355)

JON PARELES