Little Feat

Little Feat hailed from Los Angeles, but by its mid-'70s prime this funky, bluesy band was embraced by fans below and beyond the Mason-Dixon Line as one of the finest purveyors of the era's popular Southern-fried boogie. Led by ex-Mothers of Invention guitarist Lowell George, Little Feat's overlooked first album introduced a weirder, wilder, West Coast version of the Band, blending and blurring American musical styles like Captain Beefheart leading a garage-rock combo along with Hank Williams, Howlin' Wolf, Duane Allman, and Jack Kerouac. George's warped, travel-weary storytelling on songs like "Truck Stop Girl," "Willin'," "Crack in Your Door," and "Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie" immediately distinguished this outfit from your average California jam band.

Although Little Feat's album art would get even more surreal on subsequent releases, beginning with Sailin' Shoes the group began honing its raw, avant-country-rock tendencies into a tight, eclectic blend of lean country, blues, rock, and New Orleans-style funk. In 1972, Lowell George was the missing link between Gram Parsons, Frank Zappa, and Allen Toussaint, and this stylistic recipe would pay off for the band, both critically and commercially. From the raw "A Apolitical Blues" to the shuffling "Tripe Face Boogie" to the full-on rock & roll of "Teenage Nervous Breakdown," Little Feat had found its voice.

With Dixie Chicken, the band found its audience. Following a lineup change that replaced bass player Roy Estrada and guitarist Ron Elliott with the more funk-friendly Kenny Gradney and Paul Barrere, as well as conga player Sam Clayton, George and company expanded their rhythmic vocabulary, delivering laid-back, groove-heavy tunes that would be hallmarks of Little Feat's live performances: "Fat Man in the Bathtub," "Two Trains," and the rubbery strut of the title track. It was here that Little Feat -- as a razor-sharp unit and not just a vehicle for George's crazy songcraft and slide guitar -- reached its apex. By the time of the aptly named Feats Don't Fail Me Now, the band had locked into a serious groove. If George's songwriting had begun showing slight signs of fatigue, the band's powerhouse funk was as strong as ever, due in no small part to Little Feat's constant live performing. For better and for worse, percussionist/keyboardist Bill Payne's rocking "Oh, Atlanta," Barrere's funky "Skin It Back," and George's moaning "Spanish Moon" provided the formula for the band's subsequent albums.

For all intents and purposes, Feats Don't Fail Me had been Little Feat's final moment as a boundary-pushing rock band, and when The Last Record Album appeared it confirmed that George and company were running out of new ideas. Here the group comes off as little more than a laid-back, middle-of-the-road fusion band, although tracks like "All That You Dream" placed them a notch above similarly inclined contemporaries such as the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Little Feat had lost much of its inspiration by Time Loves a Hero. With leader George fighting his addictions and turning his attention toward a solo career, Barrere took the reins and steered Little Feat further into a synthesizer/fusion direction. The title track and "Old Folks Boogie" were the highlights of Time, but even those songs sounded more inspired on the band's live album, Waiting for Columbus. Fueled by Tower of Power's barrelhouse horn section, Columbus was a good document of Little Feat's jam-heavy perfor-mances, but by the time of its release the band that Lowell George had built was on its last leg.

George was on tour in support of his exhilarating solo debut Thanks I'll Eat It Here when he suffered a fatal heart attack on stage in Virginia. Little Feat had been recording Down on the Farm at the time of his death, and the album sounds as patched together as it was. It's clear that George had reserved his best vocal performances for his solo album: Down on the Farm's "Kokomo" was one of the finest songs that Gregg Allman didn't write, but for the most part the album was (understandably) a spotty, uninspired affair, typical of the slick, mellow country rock sounds coming out of California by the late 1970s. For nearly a decade, Little Feat remained dormant.

In 1988, Barrere, Payne, and the others reunited Little Feat, with former Pure Prairie League founder Craig Fuller replacing George on lead vocals. Though it lacks the songwriting edge of the George-era Little Feat, Let It Roll is a funky musical feast that finds the band returning to the pre-fusion sound of Feats Don't Fail Me Now. Not only that, but the album gets a serious vocal punch from guest spots by Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt. The reunited Little Feat could not sustain its renewed passion, though, and subsequent releases by this lineup were at best uneven. The band got a brief third wind in the mid-'90s when they recruited the Bonnie Raitt-sound-alike Shaun Murphy for Ain't Had Enough Fun, but again, subsequent releases suffered from too much filler and not enough killer. Little Feat continue to tour as one of many jam-band replacements for the Grateful Dead, and on a good night they can crank out competent if pedestrian performances of their old chestnuts.

Most of Little Feat's compilation CDs are strong. Hoy Hoy collects some of the band's best overlooked songs with rarities and live tracks, but it's hardly an adequate career retrospective; for that, look to As Time Goes By. Avoid the slick, live Extended Versions -- it's a set of mostly classic songs performed by the reunited Little Feat. The four-CD Rhino collection Hotcakes and Outtakes presents a Lowell George-heavy portrait of the band in all its funky, envelope-pushing glory. A top-notch boxed retrospective. (MARK KEMP)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide