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Little Feat Reflects on Waiting for Columbus : Relix Revisited (1979)

This February 1979 article checks in on Little Feat following the release of Waiting for Columbus

Those who know of Little Feat will swear by them. Superlatives will spew forth from the mouths of their ardent fans, and critics will argue over whether there’s a band that can match them. Yet, Little Feat is a heard-of band. And it is only recently that their audience has begun to include members of the general rock population, instead of just the Feat-fanatics who’ve kept the band going through their long and hard nine year struggle for recognition.

“Yeah, to quote the great master,” says Feat keyboardist Bill Payne before a show at Passaic, New Jersey’s Capitol Theatre, “it’s been wild and crazy. This tour especially has been really nuts. I’ve never known our audience to be quite as vocal as they are now. And it’s good for us,” he explains, while staring out his hotel window at New York City in the distance, “because you get jaded after years of touring places like Chicago and Detroit, where we have pockets of fans. But when you start selling out in places like, not necessarily Passaic, but like Millersville, Pennsylvania, now that’s gratifying.”

Payne attributes the growth of Little Feat’s popularity to the fact that the band is now constantly touring. “I think we’ve had ample opportunity in the past nine years to do a little more touring. There are people who argue with me that touring doesn’t add that much to success, and I would agree that if you’re Steely Dan and you’ve had ten hit records to your name, you might not have to tour. But in our case touring is very important because it’s always been a grass roots growth until recently. This band is a playing type of band. We just sound better live than we do on records.”

Going on that sentiment, it would seem obvious that a live Little Feat album would be a wise move, and sure enough, the Feat’s most recent LP, Waiting For Columbus, is the band’s best-selling to date. Columbus captures if not the actual feeling of being at a Little Feat concert, the versatility of their live performance. But there was another reason for releasing the live Little Feat record, and that was to stop the endless flow of Feat bootleg albums which the band feels have cut down on sales of their legitimate albums.

While the bootleg situation might not hurt a platinum-selling artist like the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan, it can do severe damage to a band like the Feat, which needs every royalty check it can get. Payne says he doesn’t know of any exact statistics, but the band figures that putting out an official live album must have helped to control the problem somewhat. “I don’t know how much it really hurts sales,” Payne says, “because Little Feat fans are fanatics who will buy anything that comes out. But we’re not allowing it to happen anymore. For instance, a radio station in New York wanted to do a live broadcast of the Capitol show. It might have helped us because more people would hear us, but we couldn’t do it because it would probably be bootlegged.” Payne says the bootleg mania began because of the persistent rumors that the band was breaking up. “People kept thinking that this may be the last time we ever see these guys,” he says, and for that reason the tape fiends felt a compulsion to capture the performance for posterity.