Little Feat may be best remembered, if it’s
remembered much at all, as a kind of proto-jam band, a bunch of competent
West Coast session players combining smooth, laid-back New Orleans-style
R&B and light funk with Southern rock. There’s a good case for
this version of history: The band has spent more time as a revival act than
it lasted in its brief, classic Lowell George-led incarnation in the
’70s, and the group has devoted most of the last two decades working
the festival circuit as a nostalgia act. Since reuniting in 1989, Little
Feat has released nearly as many live albums as studio discs.
This legacy, however, can’t overshadow the
band’s remarkable early years and its peak period in the
mid-’70s. George, a veteran of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of
Invention, provided a skewed — and sometimes surrealistic —
perspective, a whiskey-soaked baritone, and incendiary slide guitar that
raised Little Feat above the pack. George’s particular genius
dominates the first two albums (each of which contained a version of
“Willin’,” one of the all-time great truck-driving
songs). On these two rough but promising records, the group resembles
Captain Beefheart, with nods to the country blues of the midperiod Rolling
Stones, as much as it does the Allman Brothers.
Dixie Chicken, the third
album, from 1973, defines Little Feat’s style. It’s a
collective effort, with substantial contributions from guitarist Paul
Barrére and keyboardist Billy Payne. Dixie
Chicken is loose, elegant and soulful,
tasteful and wise, expertly played by musicians as exuberant as they are
proficient. (It’s also a classic California cocaine album, with hints
of paranoia and the Apocalypse.) It’s the record the band has spent
30 off-and-on years trying to recapture.
George died in 1979 of a heart attack. Little Feat was
through, until the band regrouped in 1989. The ensemble playing the
SummerFun Festival bears little resemblance to the drug-addled masterminds
who made Dixie Chicken, but the songs — “Dixie Chicken,” “Roll
Um Easy,” and “Fat Man in the Bathtub” — are still
there.
Little Feat performs Saturday, July 29, as part of
SummerFun on the main campus of Lincoln Land Community College, 5250
Shepherd Rd. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 when the gates open at 6:30
p.m. Tickets are available at Recycled Records, Cub Foods, Schnucks on
Sangamon Avenue, Qik-n-EZ, and United Community Bank locations.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2005.
