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Little Feat: Time Loves A Hero (Relix Revisited)

“I think the Deadheads have a lot to do with it,” says Payne about their new popularity among younger fans. “They’re Feat Heads as well.”

“There’ a similarity between us and the Dead,” adds Barrere, “in that, even though we play the same songs in consecutive shows we never play them the same way twice. We kind of approach the music in the way the old jazz combos did back in the ‘50s. You have a set arrangement but within that arrangement you have freedom to blow.”

Actually, if there is any criticism of the recent Feat shows, it’s that they were almost too tight, that their mature chops and less volatile lifestyles didn’t allow them the looseness which marked the Feat concerts of the ‘70s. But Payne and Barrere don’t think that the band has lost any of its ability to surprise when they improvise. “In the old band,” explains Payne, “the music we were playing lent itself to stretched-out jams. If we were playing ‘Day Or Night” or “Day At The Dog Races,’ in those types of songs we let it loose. I think the band is playing better; there’s no question about it in my mind. Over the next few years there’s gonna be a lot of room to include other pieces of material, old and new.”

Unlike many other bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s that decide to give the world another taste—usually unwanted by today’s audiences—Little Feat is a band acutely aware of its own history, its place in the rock ‘n’ roll family tree and its own strong points and mistakes. Lowell George’s death shocked them but it didn’t shock them—they now know they should have seen it coming. And they knew it could’ve happened to them too—drugs and alcohol were always on the Little Feat dessert menu in those days. So they’re thankful to be around to have this second life, and they don’t plan to blow it.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the formation of Little Feat, a saga that’s nearly as interesting and convoluted as the band’s music. Lowell George got his start in show business when he performed a harmonica duet with his brother on television’s Ted Mack Amateur Hour, losing to a young tap dancer—among the other competitors that fateful day: a young puppeteer named Frank Zappa; more about him later.

In high school, in Hollywood, George played flute and, it’s been rumored, could also be found reading poetry in beatnik coffee houses to the accompaniment of black-turtle-necked guitarists. In 1965 George formed a folk-rock band called the Factory, among whose members was drummer Richie Hayward. A year later they shared a bill in L.A. with—guess who?—Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.

The Factory only recorded one single in 1967 and then the group broke up. George briefly joined the Top 40 punk-garage band the Standells, who’d had a big hit with “Dirty Water” but were already past their prime. When Zappa asked him to join the Mothers the following year, he was more than happy to accept.

George didn’t last long with Zappa, either, only about a half year. But it was enough time for him to play on the Weasels Ripped My Flesh album and Zappa’s solo Hot Rats. At about the same time—keep this in mind if you’re following the time line here—the ex-members of the Factory were metamorphosing unto the Fraternity of Man, a band whose one claim to fame would be the dope lullaby in Easy Rider, “Don’t Bogart Me” (better known as “Don’t Bogart That Joint”).

Why George quit the Mothers is a tale already well documented. Briefly, he’d offered Zappa a song he’d written called “Willin’” and Zappa said no thanks. Zappa also suggested that George put his own band together, so he did, taking with him Zappa’s bassist, Roy Estrada. On the drums, George recruited Hayward, and on keyboards Bill Payne, a Santa Barbara army brat who’d tried, but failed, to play his way into the Mothers. At the suggestion of Mothers drummer Jimmy Carl Black, who seemed to find something amusing in Lowell George’s small feet, this new quartet became known as Little Feat.