LITTLE FEAT’S FIRST STEPS
After serving in Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, LOWELL GEORGE – an all-rounder and prime mover from Hollywood – resolved to sample every flavour in the roots songbook. Cue the rolling, smoking Americana of LITTLE FEAT and their self-titled “stream of consciousness” 1971 debut. After much serendipity, “vicious” studio fights and emergency help from Ry Cooder, the group’s path was set. “It was this amalgam of throwing things against the wall,” remember principals and friends, “looking at it and saying, ‘Yeah, I like that…’”
play Indian music now.” Then the next thing I know he’s singing in The Standells… and then he was playing with Frank Zappa and the Mothers [in 1968]. (Laughs) He was all over the place. But that was Lowell.
Russ Titelman: I met Lowell at the Shankar school. We just started talking and hit it off right away. I saw him play with the Mothers at the Shrine once, and they were so great. He was one of those guys; he just had it. He could play anything he picked up. He played slide guitar, he played the flute, he picked up the shakuhachi. He was a good drummer. And he had such a curiosity about music.
Lowell George [in ZigZag, 1975]: Russ Titelman was starting a publishing company and asked me if I wanted to co-publish [Willin’] with him and see what he could do with it. So I recorded it and went on the road the same day with the Mothers, and was gone for about five weeks I guess. Then I came back and nothing had happened. But somehow a demo of the tape got out and it was the rage of the Troubadour.
FT: The story you hear is that Zappa fired Lowell [in May 1969] after he heard Willin’, because it had drug references in it. But I don’t think that’s true. I mean it’s true that Frank didn’t like drugs. Frank would tell the band on the road, “OK, now they’re gonna search us at the airport, so you guys better not be carrying anything.” And Lowell would say, “Oh don’t worry, we did it all last night.” (Laughs) But I actually think Zappa was really encouraging of Lowell. He heard Willin’ and said, “Lowell, you need your own band, you need to do your own thing.”
Bill Payne: I had been playing piano since I was five, started playing in my first bands at 15. I came down to Los Angeles from central California originally because I wanted to meet Frank Zappa. Zappa had two labels, one was Bizarre and one
“I WAS NAÏVE ENOUGH TO THINK, MAYBE WE’LL BECOME THE BEATLES.” Bill Payne
was Straight. So, naturally, I called up Bizarre. I didn’t get to meet Frank then, but eventually I sort of got directed to this guy, Lowell George.
RT: I was working on the Performance soundtrack [released September 1970], which Warner Brothers was putting out. I brought Lowell in to work with the rest of the core musicians, which was me and Ry Cooder, Jerry Scheff, Gene Parsons and Randy Newman. Lowell and I got really tight around that time, which is when he was putting together Little Feat with Billy Payne.
BP: I drove to Lowell’s house. It was summer, and the door was wide open. I walk in and this beautiful blonde is sitting on the floor crosslegged listening to Erik Satie. She says: “Oh you must be Bill. Lowell is expecting you… He’ll be back in four hours.” (Laughs) I said, “What does he do if he’s not expecting you?”
So I walked into Lowell’s home, and on the back wall is a samurai sword; he was a brown belt [in Okinawan martial arts]. And in the corner of the room is a sitar. While I’m waiting I start looking through his book collection and his record collection. There was Smithsonian Blues compilations, records by Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Lenny Bruce, books by Carl Sandberg, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. By the time he showed up – which was indeed about four hours later – I already had a sense of who he was. I liken it to when Che Guevara and Fidel Castro first met – they talked about everything under the sun. Our philosophical discussions became about, what kind of band do we wanna be in? We’re not gonna be a blues band… but we’ll play some blues. We’re not gonna be a country band… but we’ll play some country. The idea was that it was supposed to be eclectic and not any one thing.
LG [in Melody Maker, 1974]: Mostly we wanted to play what I would call music with a stream of consciousness. We wanted to explore all sorts of areas together and we just took it from there.
BP: Eventually, Lowell brought in [drummer] Richie Hayward [who’d played with George in The Factory]. Then we went through 13 or 14 bass players, before Roy Estrada came in from The Mothers Of Invention. After many months, we had the songs and a plan to make a record. We talked to [Byrds producer] Terry Melcher about it, but that was right when the Manson Family was looking for him. We took our music to Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. He listened and said, “Boys, it’s too diverse.” At the time we had even weirder songs: Ten Thousand Whips, Dance Of The Nubile Virgin Slaves. It was much more Zappa-esque. But if you just look at the titles on the first record – Brides Of Jesus, Hamburger Midnight, Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie – you still wouldn’t know what kind of songs or music this was. It was still outside.
RT: At one point, Lowell wanted the band to sign to Lizard Records, [Steppenwolf producer] Gabriel Mekler’s label. And I said, “No, let’s go see Lenny Waronker at Warner Bros Records.
” We went over to the office in Burbank. Lowell brought his guitar and there was a spinet piano in the office that Billy played, and they did like five songs right there. And Lenny said, “OK, go upstairs and see [Warner president] Mo Ostin and make a deal.” He didn’t even see the band! He heard the songs, he heard Lowell sing, and it was good enough for him.
Lenny Waronker: The typical A&R approach is to suss out the band, see them as much as you can. But I always believed if the music is great, that was really it for me. In those days it was much more about believing in something and doing it.
RT: There was a home at Warner Bros and since I brought them, I became the producer. I hadn’t produced a record before. Lenny said, “Go in and make some demos” [in late summer 1970]. Some of those ended up on the finished album
– like Truckstop Girl and I’ve Been The One, Willin’ also, those are all demos. But then we finished them, did some overdubs, and then cut some other stuff. I wanted this record to feel like The Band in spirit, but they didn’t really sound like The Band. Little Feat had these unusual pieces, lyrically and melodically. And Billy’s chord changes are so different, they were stretching the form. Billy had written Brides Of Jesus. Just wonderful stuff, but the material was rock and country and gospel and some of the Mothers/ Zappa influence was still in there, in things like Hamburger Midnight.
BP: We were listening to Dylan, listening to The Band, but Lowell and I were also watching the Marx Brothers’ movies and listening to the songs in them. All that stuff is in the mix on the first record. That was what I loved about Little Feat and that record in particular. It was this amalgam of throwing things against the wall, looking at it and saying, “Yeah, I like that.”
VDP: And you can’t forget the blues, the pinnacle of which for Lowell and I was Howlin’ Wolf. That’s why the Wolf [medley of Forty-Four Blues/How Many More Years] is on that record.
BP: Lowell was into building model airplanes. We’d take them over to Griffith Park and fly them around. He’d let the goddamn thing go until it ran out of gas and he crashed it. Anyway, Lowell was working on a plane and had this [vice] that held the motor in place. Well the thing snapped, and the engine flew off at Lowell’s face. He put up his hand – he had quick reflexes – thank God, so it didn’t go right into his face, but it ripped up his hand.
RT: He showed up to the session with his hand all bandaged… so Ry Cooder came in and played slide on Forty-Four Blues/How Many More Years. We cut that shit live. Lowell was singing on a mike we put though a guitar amp, that’s how we got that sound. He did that Howlin’ Wolf stuff so good. It was like the real article. Even with Beefheart when he did Wolf-style stuff, you could hear him trying. For Lowell it just flowed out of him. He was a great singer, good as anyone you can think to mention.
FT: Lowell was a natch – a totally natural singer. He took a lot from Indian music, the melismatic singing, and brought that to the blues and had his own thing going.
BP: The thing he had in his voice – his timbre, his phrasing, all the things that drew you in – that’s where I put his genius, truly.
RT: The first Little Feat record was very much cut live with me saying, “Play… OK, that’s the take… next!” It wasn’t overwrought or overproduced or over-anything. I loved that, but at some point Lowell wanted to make a more involved or sophisticated record. He was not happy with what we had. But he made that decision toward the end of session and we’d used up the budget. I felt like what we had was good. So me and Lowell really got into it and… it wasn’t nice.
BP: When we were done with that record, I felt like someone had shoved me into a dryer because of the conflict between Russ and Lowell. It didn’t get physical but they had vicious fights. It was like being in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? It was tough because they had been close. I took Lowell’s side then, but later on I told Russ I might have been wrong.
LW: I don’t think the problem was the quality of the work that Russ wanted to hang onto. But as with most strong artists – who are the best ones, obviously – the first record can be really tough. Knowing when to let go, knowing when to say it’s OK. It’s a difficult situation. But I tried to say to Lowell, “Look, this is the record you’ve made right now. Just believe in it and don’t worry.”
RT: When it came out [in January 1971] the reviews were really amazing. But… it didn’t sell a lot [only an estimated 11,000 copies, initially].
BP: I was naïve enough to think, Maybe we’ll become The Beatles (laughs). I felt like it would do pretty well. But the reality, once we were out there and were playing these songs… we would get up in front of people in the Midwest, in say, Cleveland, opening for the Vanilla Fudge, and people are yelling “Bring on the Fudge!” the whole time. So it was hard to get those songs across.
LW: That record is a kind of starting point for the band and Lowell, for what they would do and become. He would go on to cover a lot of ground, which was inevitable. He knew a lot about different genres, whether it was country or blues, New Orleans, Allen Toussaint music. He gobbled up anything that was appealing to him. It’s what made it him special and what made Little Feat special. The notion that anything was possible.
BP: That’s true. It’s what initially captured people’s imagination and continued on… and it continues to this day. Little Feat had a sort of fearlessness, and you can hear that on the album. M