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Little Feat still kicking |
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Written by Glenn BurnSilver
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Wednesday, 01 August 2007 |
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 To reach Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne by phone, you must know his secret alter ego. That won’t be revealed here, but for Payne, it does prevent those 9:30 a.m. wake up calls that are “about 12 hours before I have to go to work.”
He makes light of the fact that were talking about Little Feat, not Radiohead, but when you’re with a band for 38 years — a band that’s sold millions of albums — some people think you might want to party all night (and morning) long.
“I don’t think of myself as a star, but apparently other people do,” Payne said with a laugh from a Milwaukee hotel at the reasonable hour of 11:30 a.m.
Many people would be envious, but like much of the Little Feat musical catalogue, there is a laid-back, easy-going vibe to Payne.
Payne formed Little Feat with guitarist Lowell George in 1969. George was in Frank Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention. Payne migrated to Los Angeles to try and join The Mothers. So it was only fitting the two were soon writing songs like “Dance of the Nubile Virgin Slaves,” a 15-minute instrumental that “Stravinsky himself might not have been able to read,” Payne said with a laugh.
But it is this eclecticism that has sustained Little Feat over the years. There’s the country-flavored “Willin’,” the boogie-blues of “Dixie Chicken,” and funky rock send-ups like “Fatman in the Bathtub,” and “Easy to Slip.”
“Our eclecticism is what’s kept us going all these years,” Payne said. “If all we were playing was ‘Dixie Chicken’ and songs like that, this thing would have imploded years ago.”
Little Feat did implode, temporarily anyway, after George died of a drug overdose in 1979. Payne saw the potential for George’s demise before it happened, but he was unable to do more than keep the band moving forward.
“It was around 1976-77,” Payne recalled. “Lowell was … doing too many drugs. He would disappear for weeks at a time. So here is Lowell, ‘leader’ of the band, and he wasn’t leading anything. We’d take three steps forward and five back. It was nonsense, very frustrating. I did what I could to hold it together. It was a difficult time. This was Lowell George — we needed him. He was still the leader whether he wanted to lead or not.”
The band was resurrected in 1986 when a jam session pulled the surviving members together again. “Let it Roll” in 1989 was the band’s official return. Though there hasn’t been a lot of new studio material since the reformation, its the band’s live output that keeps Little Feat going.
“The jamming element keeps it fresh, but we jam in a different way than a lot of jambands do. There are more complicated changes to our music. There are not a lot of bells and whistles up there on stage. We don’t bring out any dancers,” Payne said. “Basically, we just let it roll.”
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TO GO TO THE SHOW
Little Feat
Doors open at 6 p.m., Show at 7 p.m.
Friday Aug. 3
Thunder Mountain Amphitheatre
4250 Byrd Drive, Loveland
292.0400
Tickets: $20
More information: www.littlefeat.net
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LIL' FEAT FACTS
Under the influence
Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones are two bands, according to Payne, that cite Little Feat as one-time influences. Led Zeppelin also offered Little Feat $50,000 to join them for a European tour in the mid-1970s.
Get behind me
In the early 1970s Little Feat was the unofficial back-up band for Bonnie Raitt. Lowell George also gave Raitt slide guitar lessons, according to Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne.
Glenn BurnSilver
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