When Little Feat cut the albums “Sailin’ Shoes” and “Dixie Chicken” in 1972-73, they figured they’d have some fun, make some timeless music, and score a big hit single. Two out of three ain’t bad.
The albums have indeed proven timeless, and the current incarnation of Little Feat plays them both at the Wilbur on Monday and Tuesday; doing one album plus bonus tracks each night. The band has weathered some major losses, including the death of founder Lowell George in 1979 and the more recent passings of drummer Richie Hayward and guitarist Paul Barrere. But Little Feat is now recognized as the precursors of Americana and the jam-band movement. And after all these years, they’ve still never had a hit single.
“That’s probably a blessing in disguise,” says Bill Payne, the band’s keyboardist and cofounder. “I know Lowell had grand hopes for ‘Easy to Slip’ as a single, and I thought that one sounded great, but it didn’t happen. We were in an age of albums, and we came up in a time when people were promulgating the whole album and not the single. That made it difficult for us commercially, but I think it’s allowed us to last 50 years. We weren’t the Doobie Brothers (another band Payne has played with). They’ve lasted 50 years as well — but I’ll put it this way, we had a wider vocabulary.”
The “Dixie Chicken” album brought two New Orleanians into the band (bassist Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton, both still aboard) along with that city’s musical influence. “It was a grand experiment and a fun one at that,” says Payne. “My parents were married in New Orleans, which probably explains a lot. We always loved trading our different influences with each other. Little Feat is really a platform that invites inclusion, but it’s also something of an exclusive club. We’re like an Appalachian family that lets a few people through the door every now and then.”
Payne admits that continuing the band without George, and now without Barrere and Hayward, has been a challenge. (The new frontman is Scott Sherrard, late of the Gregg Allman Band). “Put it this way: Back in 1966 when I was in high school, I went with my friends to see the Yardbirds, and I was there specifically to see Jeff Beck. We were all pretty ticked off that he wasn’t there, until the other guy started to play guitar — and it was Jimmy Page. So I took my impetus from that concert years later when we were putting Little Feat back together without Lowell. Same thing with Scott now — If it wasn’t working I would have been the first to say, ‘Just let it go, our legacy’s too important’.”
The two albums getting played this week include a handful of Feat standards, along with a couple songs that have never been played live before. “We’re going to do the experiment in terror and play those. It’s challenging, but it’s not like we’re copying Stravinsky or trading licks with Charlie Parker. My frustration with Little Feat from time to time is that we’ve compromised our vocabulary a little too much for my taste. So I’m very happy to be exploring the catalogue with players who can do just about anything. That’s the essence of what we’ve always been, a group that has found its challenges by the platform that we live by, which is our songs.”
