In the past few years, Little Feat has experienced a dramatic elevation in its public profile. But it hasn’t just happened: the group has slowly but surely nurtured its reputation, long-term and short, through increasingly regular touring that, in 2022, took the form of celebrating the 45th anniversary of the epochal Waiting For Columbus with full performances of the live album’s music.
With the passing of guitarist/songwriter Paul Barrere in 2019, the current Feats–keyboardist/vocalist Billy Payne, guitarist Fred Tackett, bassist Kenny Gradney, percussionist Sam Clayton– enlisted a guitarist, Scott Sharrard (of latter-day Gregg Allman & Friends units), plus a new drummer in the person of the steadfast Tony Leone (who had most recently distinguished himself with The Chris Robinson Brotherhood). Appropriately stabilized, the group continues to pay attention to archiving its recorded catalog with expanded two-CD sets of their second and third albums, Sailin’ Shoes and Dixie Chicken; featuring remastering, outtakes, and live content that serves the enlightening purpose such enhancements should, these efforts highlight the ingenuity and durability of the works on their own terms and within the proper historical context of Little Feat’s fifty-year plus career.
*****
Sailin’ Shoes CD 1: It strains credulity that “Easy To Slip” never charted at all in its release as a single. And not just because it was positioned as the first track for optimum accessibility to radio deejays: the track was arranged exactly right to maximize airplay of a quintessential rock and roll pop tune. Still, in the context of this long-player, it functions as an attention-getting gateway to ten more tracks the original four-man Feats renders in an astonishing variety of styles: legitimate blues derivatives (“Cold Cold Cold”) an amalgam of country and folk (“Willin'” in its reappearance from the debut LP) and dirty boogie (“Teenage Nervous Breakdown”). The surety of drummer Richie Hayward’s loose-limbed drumming is more evident than ever in this remastered form, as are the various components of ingenious arrangements which belie the predictability of at least some of the material; like “Tripe Face Boogie,” “Texas Rose Cafe” benefits from the sonic separation while “Cat Fever” sounds even more amorphous. In general, though, this music billows with the same cryptic mash of colorful images as Neon Park’s cover art (as is also the case with its companion piece’s graphics). 184w
CD two: Candid interviews with Bill Payne and producer Ted Templeman within the enclosed twenty-four-page booklet elucidate at least most of the logic surrounding the baker’s dozen outtakes and alternates on this expanded package. Their dual insights don’t wholly explain why this close cousin of “Willin’,” a composition called “Doriville, ” was left off the official release of the 1972 LP, but their recollections are as evocative of the band’s multiple personalities as the black and white photos of the quartet inside both of the triple-fold digipak. And lest it appears this music came easily to the four Feats, hear the halting, gospel-inflected demo of this album’s title song. Elsewhere, alternate takes of “Easy To Slip,”–including one for the Doobie Brothers (whom Templeman also produced–include outre touches like tabla, but those fillips only enhance how inherently infectious is the song itself. Still, it’s hardly of a piece with the eccentric take on electric blues comprising the complete live set, Thanks I’ll Eat It Here, from August of 1971: alternately fiery and fluid (and sometimes both simultaneously), the ten takes belie the ambivalence his bandmates sensed in bassist Roy Estrada.
*****
Dixie Chicken: CD one – Closer to perfect than more than a few landmark LPs of its era–Harvest and Who’s Next come to mind– Dixie Chicken arrived after two excellent if stylistically-indefinable Little Feat albums. As told with no little verve by author Dennis McNally in his essay, the sequence of events involving the group’s reconfiguration of itself as a sextet for its third album ultimately led to the heavily rhythmic, New Orleans-influenced style with which the band is so closely associated today. And rightly so: produced by Lowell George (at the time Little Feat’s principal songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist), the six-man bond was uncanny in its chemistry, so much so that the two defining cuts of this record, its title track and “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” reside in ever so complementary a fashion next to a folk ballad (“Roll Um Easy”), two dense, dark mood pieces (“Kiss It Off’ and Allan Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down”) plus a quasi-soul tune (“Juliette”) and a languorous, bluesy instrumental closer (“Lafayette Railroad”). Ten tracks so diversified but equal in quality of composition and production shouldn’t hold together, but they do.
CD two: Not quite so revelatory as the concert cuts on the companion package (titled after Lowell’s solo album), these seven live tracks from Paul’s Mall in Boston on 5/1/73 nevertheless offer some valuable insights into the evolution of Little Feat Mark II. And that’s taking into account the original Columbus LP and CD release, the expanded two-disc version of the latter as well as the even larger Super Deluxe eight-CD box (plus what is arguably the definitive document of that early to mid-Seventies era Electrif Lycanthrope). The reconfiguring of “Got No Shadow” from the sophomore Feats sounds tailor-made for the larger ensemble, which only reinforces the verity of the other half-dozen live tracks: the shared instincts of this six-man band gave rise to nuances aplenty, the likes of which are all the more evident in such enhanced audio overseen, as on the other title, by Dan Hersch and Bill Inglot. The miracle of the nine previously-unreleased outtakes and alternates, including a skeletal take on “Two Trains.” is that, in the studio or on stage, at this juncture of its career, Little Feat’s musicianship never sounded too busy for its own good.
