Original subtitles

At the beginning of the 1970s,

a band emerged from Los Angeles.

It was a band so eclectic and unusual in style and sound

that almost no one could say where it had come from.

It was a band that instantly captured

the admiration of rock stars, producers, music writers,

a band that radio DJs rushed to play.

It was a band that struggled to sell any records,

that seldom troubled the charts,

that was rarely seen on television,

that was never called to award ceremonies.

But it was a band that was loved with uncommon fervor

by all that heard its music.

The band was called Little Feat.

- Yeah, they were an incredible live band,

but that other thing that they were putting across

while they were being a great live band is what

made people just go absolutely gaga over them.

And gaga is not a bad word

for the feeling that Little Feat was able to generate

while Lowell was alive.

At the center of the Little Feat story

is Lowell George,

the group's front man and principal song writer.

Over the course of a decade leading the Feats,

George wore the unique tapestry,

a singular artistic vision that ended tragically

with his untimely death in '79,

but that left an indelible mark on the history

of rock and roll.

- Anyone who saw Little Feat, or love Little Feat,

or new Lowell George

remembers him with enormous affection,

and loves what he stood for,

which was something really individual,

really different,

very sensual,

funky,

poetic,

surreal,

and funny.

- He was the guy you wanted to hang out with, you know?

He was someone I looked up to.

The concentration, the focusing,

the intensity with which he approached his music

was a real example.

- Lowell was

the hyperbole of anarchy

and rebellion.

He was an iconoclast.

Somehow or another, I don't get the idea that

Lowell would've accepted a Grammy.

I think that he was beyond that.

- He felt strongly that he knew

what music was sincere,

and credible,

and artful.

He thought that music could change the world,

thought that he could make a song

that would change people's minds.

Los Angeles, 1965,

and the rebirth of American rock and roll is underway.

Fired by the arrival of The Beatles

and the accompanying waves of British bands

that had overwhelmed the music scene a year earlier,

local musicians had deserted the folk clubs

and coffee houses of the early 60s,

and traded in their acoustic guitars

for amplifiers and drum kits.

A new youth culture emerged.

Its locus, LA's Sunset Strip.

Its leaders, The Byrds.

It was the era of folk rock

and music center of gravity shifted

from the gray skyscrapers of New York

to the glittering beaches of California.

♪ Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man

♪ Play a song for me

♪ I'm not sleepy

♪ And there ain't no place I'm going to

- I was endlessly fascinated

by the music that was coming out of California,

LA in particular.

For me, that dated back to the first time I heard

"Mr. Tambourine Man" on the car radio.

There was just something magical about that sound,

the 12-string guitar sound and the harmonies.

It certainly was the clarion call for a lot of people

to move in the direction of

this hybrid of folk and rock and roll.

The first few years of that,

the mid to late 60s,

you can look at it as a fairly contained

continuum with the Springfield, and love, and spirit.

It was this very diverse community, but it was small,

and everyone knew everyone else.

- It was very vibrant.

Sunset Strip had a number of clubs

that were very teen-oriented.

A few of the had no,

they didn't serve alcohol.

You know, you could get underaged kids

to go in a place called Pandora's Box,

which I had a band that played there,

and another club called It's Boss.

- The kids were up and down the street by the thousands.

There was nothing like it before or since.

I mean, it was the most magical time ever.

- There was this huge opportunity to find to talent,

to somehow, "Hey we gotta move units, we gotta sell",

because there's opportunity.

So a lot of bands got signed,

and a lot of stuff was happening very quickly.

Byrds being obviously the biggest example,

but a lot of smaller bands

were part of this local scene here.

For the brief period of time, from mid-60s to mid-70s,

it was the reason why everybody came here.

It was the reason why people from all over the world

figured if they got to LA,

they'd have a shot

at musical stardom.

The few that survived that got through,

that became these names that we know

all these years later,

were just the very tip of the iceberg.

There were hundreds of bands,

and The Factory was one of them.

In amongst the throng

of folk rock aggregations,

ersatz beat groups, blues bands, and harmony singers,

Lowell George, front man of an obscure local group

called The Factory, was trying to make a name.

- He was quintessentially Californian.

The George's had a great ranch.

They spent some time in Nevada.

They were part of the early pioneer families

that pushed west and created the frontier,

and expanded and went beyond it, moved it,

and Lowell was like that.

So, it's fair to say

that although I didn't know him at the time,

Lowell was equally influenced by this new

sense of self that The Byrds gave every

aspiring California musician.

- You know, he came from something different to most

aspiring rock and rollers

certainly in Los Angeles.

You know, LA was full of kids who come to LA to be

stars and to join bands.

And Lowell grew up there in the very heart of Hollywood.

He was a showbiz kid, you might say.

You know, and I think that gave him an interesting take on

the rock community.

You know, he'd been to Hollywood High School.

His dad was a furrier to the stars.

So he was used to the strangeness

of Hollywood Babylon I think.

And I think that sort of comes through

in some of his writing,

maybe more just in his persona.

You know, he was a sort of

Hollywood Bohemian.

- In high school,

I remember being very impressed with his singing.

One day on the quad,

everybody was singing Christmas carols,

and I was really struck by his vocal ability,

and start hanging out with him then.

We even wrote songs then.

And the thing about him,

we understood each other musically.

If I would try to sing something to him,

he would sing it back to me,

how it ought to be sung.

- Some people I think are born musicians,

and Lowell is one of those.

I think he, you know, with enough effort,

he would be successful at any facet of music.

He obviously played many instruments

and played them well,

and had a great

ability to,

to write music

and lyrics.

He was terrific.

- He played the flute in the school orchestra,

and was a stand out.

And it's interesting.

There's debate about

whether they guy could read music or not,

and I don't think so.

But,

he could play the flute so authoritively

it didn't make any difference.

There's an anecdote that he once turned the chart

upside down,

played that, and nobody, you know,

Frank Zappa would say that also,

"There's no such thing as a wrong note,

"just play it with conviction."

And he, Lowell had a natural ability like that.

He was great on the flute,

and only gave it up like many things,

'cause he figured he wasn't the greatest of all time.

- This was no ordinary guy,

this was a pretty well-read guy who listed to

you know, Erik Satie, and knew about

you know, imagist poets.

He was witty and funny and lovable,

and sort of cuddly, and women loved him.

He just stuck out.

He sort of stuck out of the crowd in a way

that a lot of musicians on the LA scene didn't.

The Factory, George's first

foray into the music business

was formed at the suggestion of his old high school friend,

Martin Kibbee.

Having enrolled in and dropped out of art school,

Lowell was working a job at a gas station,

while developing his guitar playing during spare hours.

Kibbee, meanwhile, had been studying

at the University of Berkeley,

where he collaborated with guitarist and fellow student,

Warren Klein.

On graduation, Kibbee asked Klein

to accompany him back to LA

with the aim of looking up Lowell and forming a band.

- We got in the car up in Berkeley,

drove through some riots,

there was, I think it was the Free Speech Movement

was rioting at Berkeley,

we were lucky to even get out of there,

there was just, you know, terror in the streets.

We got through that, came to LA and,

it was really quite interesting for me,

never having been to Los Angeles.

And Lowell was staying in Beverly Glen,

I think on Atomic Street in an apartment.

At first, I think right after he brought me up there,

you know, he just took out the guitar and played

some finger picking stuff, which Lowell really liked,

and invited me to stay with him, sleep on his couch,

while things percolated.

I guess he and Martin had discussed some idea

of putting a band together.

- He was enthusiastic about doing it.

I don't think he was in any other band

before we started The Factory.

But he would play gigs at coffee houses and stuff, you know,

with his Goya guitar, with his flute,

kind of beatnik, poetry stuff.

- He was playing rhythm guitar but he had a unique style,

I thought, that was different from anything I had heard.

And,

I really enjoyed it, actually.

And you know, he would also play flute,

which I wasn't sure how appropriate that was

for rock and roll but he did it,

and I think it was appreciated.

We used to play at Beado Lido's, and,

he'd play flute, harmonica, guitar,

different instruments and it didn't matter what he played,

people would appreciate it.

I thought he was a wonderful guy, I mean,

I really liked him.

Very enjoyable.

He...

was a great host.

He had a little hibachi,

made really fantastic teriyaki chicken.

- By the time we came down there after Berkeley,

it was already the heyday of The Beatles, The Stones,

Jefferson Airplane.

It was a scene happening and we very much wanted to join it.

And it virtually,

it took us like 90 days to get a record deal,

it was unbelievable.

Although in common with most young bands,

The Factory took inspiration from The Byrds, The Beatles,

The Who, and the other popular groups at the time.

Lowell was heavily influenced by black music,

and in particular, the electric blues acts from Chicago.

♪ But it just don't work on you

It was an interest that became central

to his musical personality,

and a scene that would run throughout his work.

- We discovered the blues, all his wonderful Chess records.

Howlin' Wolf was a huge influence on Lowell.

I guess his vocal style also,

Hubert Sumlin's guitar playing.

And I think the first thing any rock band plays is

blues-based, isn't it?

You learn those 1-4-5 chord changes and take it from there,

if you have that many, you know?

- We used to go see blues shows at The Ash Grove,

here in Los Angeles.

We saw Howlin' Wolf, we went backstage and chatted with him.

That was really fantastic.

We met Junior Wells.

He was complaining how uncomfortable his boots here,

and I had these incredible comfortable boots that I'd wore

and I knew right before I came and here and just always wore

and I felt bad for him.

I offered to give him my boots,

we had the same shoe size.

He gave me his boots, and they were just stiff as wood.

I mean, it was like wearing Dutch wood shoes or something,

only worse because they were higher up.

Terrible, I couldn't wear 'em.

- Howlin' Wolf was his favorite blues band,

as he was mine.

♪ Whoa, the chain that rattles

- Although he was much more familiar with the sound,

and co-opted black vernacular.

I decided not to, but Lowell did.

We both had this great respect for Howlin' Wolf.

♪ Oh, the chain that rattles

♪ Oh, they shine like gold

♪ Ooh

♪ Ooh

♪ Just like gold

- We were enthralled by that music.

Lowell's, one of his favorite lines

when we would describe a musician,

and he didn't know who this was, he'd say,

"Oh this guy's pretty good",

and Lowell would say,

"Well is he versed in the ways of Chester Burnett?"

Howlin' Wolf's name.

Meaning, was he one of us?

Did he appreciate the music the way we did?

And we'd say, "Well, yeah.

"Okay, he's cool, he can come in.

"Is he versed in the ways" was our,

that was our code, that Lowell set up as the entry level.

If he was versed in the ways, he's cool,

and if's not, eh.

♪ Don't laugh at me

♪ Don't laugh at me, baby

♪ Don't be laughin'

♪ Don't be laughin' at me

♪ You bet am I

♪ I may be fat

♪ Hey

♪ Don't laugh at me

♪ Don't be laughin' at me baby

♪ Don't be laughin' at me

♪ You bet am I

♪ It's time for everything

- We were doing mainly blues and a few songs

that we started to write.

I started to write some stuff that was kind of psychedelic.

Lowell wrote some stuff that was kind of blues-based.

I remember one thing called "The Airplane".

It was sort of a,

kind of a mixture of those styles.

When we were just

in the early stages of formulating our sound.

- We played "Hey Joe" real loud, and stuff like that.

Well, you know?

We played "Gloria" a lot,

that was one of our favorite talents.

But we didn't have too many originals.

We played at places like the Sea Witch,

and at Beado Lido's with The Doors.

The Doors, we played double bills

with The Doors all the time.

Opportunities opened up for The Factory

after the band came to the attention

of record business impresario, Herb Cohen.

A sometime concert promoter and club owner,

Cohen had moved into artist representation,

rising to prominence on the LA scene

as the manager of the iconoclastic composer

and Mothers of Invention band leader, Frank Zappa.

- We first met Herb when we auditioned for Frank,

Frank Zappa, at the Whiskey a Go Go.

They just opened up the club for the audition.

It was just, I think, Frank and Herbie there to see us,

and we played for them.

Frank really liked us, and Herbie was Frank's manager,

and who also wanted to manage us

and have us open for The Mothers,

which we did at all The Freak Outs and The Freak Ins

at The Shrine, and the Earl Warren Showgrounds

in Santa Barbara.

And,

Herbie, I know he managed some other artists also.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins was one of them.

- He said, "I can get you guys $1,500 in a week."

And he'd treat it as a lot of money in those days,

and he was true to his word.

And Frank started producing us.

And if there was any strong musical influence on us

at that point, it was Frank.

Gaining the patronage of Frank Zappa

was a transformative event in Lowell's fledgling career.

Musical autodidact, prolific composer and questing artist,

Zappa occupied his own universe in the local underground.

His headquarters in the city's Laurel Canyon

became the epicenter of the freak scene,

an anarchic collection of outsiders and free-thinkers

that orbited The Mothers of Invention

and the counterculture's lunatic fringe.

- Laurel Canyon was the seat of the heat of the beat.

It was where everything happened.

I had been in The Mothers of Invention in 1965,

with Frank Zappa, and played some real far out stuff,

outside the box, blues-oriented but also

with a great bebop sensibility,

celebrating musical genres which collided inconveniently

with great truth and beauty.

- Frank Zappa was a native Southern Californian,

and that gave him a certain slant, I think,

on the culture.

He was very bright.

He was a real virtuoso.

And he was very influenced, you know,

not just by rock and roll but by avant-garde,

classical music.

So he brought quite a high-brow element to rock and roll.

The Mothers were

very different from bands like The Byrds

or The Turtles or Sonny and Cher.

They were such a pretty heinous-looking bunch.

And,

extremely satirical, quite, almost like dadaist,

you might say.

You know, they were,

they were sort of satirically deconstructing pop culture.

♪ Oh, in the sky

♪ Oh, in the sky

♪ Oh, in the sky

♪ In the sky

- He lived at The Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon, Frank.

And that was just, you know, hippie central.

But what I'm saying is Frank was a guy who just was

interested in doing his music, his way, period,

and he cranked it out day and night.

And he sought the best players.

And he didn't like drugs or people who were, you know,

flaked out and stuff.

- In the time I spent with him,

I wasn't aware of his abilities to

conduct, like on a podium with a baton and the whole thing,

I wasn't aware of that,

until, when we did the recording sessions.

And then, you know,

"What's this?"

You know, he's up on a podium,

and there was some studio musicians on the date, and,

he sure brought them around.

He could bring authority to the situation, you know,

as required.

I said to him, I said,

"Frank, where'd you learn all this stuff?"

And his reply was, "Oh, I went to the library."

- Frank was considered the freak of the situation.

He was the freak of Hollywood, the left field.

You know, there was the hippies, flower children,

straights, of course, and the freaks.

So Frank was the ultimate freak,

and he was known as a genius immediately.

I mean, he played such a wicked guitar,

and you could just see him, he composed, you know,

out of the air.

I'd never seen anything like it.

Almost mysterious though, because you didn't really know,

get to know who he was,

because he had this incredibly freaky persona.

But everyone wanted to know him.

Everyone wanted to be at his house.

Everyone wanted to be a part of his world.

- The LA freaks had nothing but contempt

for the San Francisco hippies,

who they just thought were kind of stupid and naive,

whereas to be a freak was much more,

I think,

subversive,

disruptive,

and satirical.

So I think The Mothers of Invention

really set themselves up as,

in one sense, the kind of conscience,

the real conscience, of the hippie era.

In other words, you know,

"Don't be fooled by all this stuff.

"A lot of it is bullshit."

- It certainly felt that we had joined an exclusive club of

fairly advanced you know,

cutting edge of the

social revolution of the day, absolutely.

The Factory accompanied

The Mothers of Invention on the road,

opening for them at landmark gatherings

of hippies and freaks,

including The Freak Out at LA's Shrine Auditorium in 1966.

Zappa assumed responsibility

for advancing the band's career,

setting up auditions for the major record labels,

and taking the group into the studio,

where he produced two tracks written by

Lowell and Martin Kibbee;

"The Loved One" and "Lightning-Rod Man".

- Well, those were the first songs that I've written

that were ever recorded, and,

"The Loved One" was based on the movie of the same name,

which was in the book by Evelyn Waugh,

which was, we were big fans.

And "Lightning-Rod Man" was based on the

short story by Herman Melville, and,

Frank was not really into all that literary stuff.

We recorded at Original Sound, Art Laboe's Original Sound,

the first 10 track recorder in town.

And Frank was the most inventive guy in the studio.

He like, tuned the piano and played it with pliers.

He doubled the back beat with rolled-up towel

on a piano bench, all kinds of stuff that got us,

you know, a crazy sound.

Frank introduced us to lots of music.

♪ The Lightning-Rod Man

♪ He wants in his soul

♪ The Lightning-Rod Man comes in where it won't

♪ He'll make you feel safe

♪ Safe as can be

♪ Just long as you don't stand under a tree

- He was just such a character and such a creative mind.

If he made a suggestion, it was good, and right,

and appreciated.

- Forget Melville.

Sing it like Elvis, or sing it like Little Richard.

No, you know, Lowell would sing it this way or that way.

♪ He walks in the rain, yeah

♪ He doesn't get wet, yeah

♪ And maybe he knows it, he isn't turned yet, yeah

- In "Lightning-Rod Man", for instance,

you'll hear a few things that are reminiscent of The Mothers

that were Frank's idea, like the thing where the girl says,

"Lightning-Rod Man, you're super."

You know, stuff like that.

So there's definite Mothers touches in there that

you could attribute to Frank.

♪ Lightning-Rod Man, you're super

♪ Yeah I know

Although little came from the sessions

beyond recording experience, the competence of The Factory

was lifted drastically by the sudden departure

of their drummer, Kerry Slaven.

Slaven was replaced in the band by 20 year old

Richie Hayward, an aspiring rock drummer whose ability

made an instant impression on Lowell.

- Our original drummer was a guy who went to Hollywood High,

Kerry Slaven.

And he actually, we were going through the airport

or something like, he became a moony, okay?

Wandered off with some girl, last time we saw him.

So we put an ad in the, you know the free press, and,

"Drummer wanted, must be freaky",

and Richie showed up.

- Richie Hayward auditioned

in his house in LA,

in front of all The Mothers of Invention.

He said it was incredibly intimidating,

'cause these guys were still tight with Lowell.

And passed the audition, and that, that became the,

the core of what was going to become Little Feat.

- I distinctly remember, when I met him,

I thought he must be a narc 'cause he was wearing like,

plaid pants and just looked very strange

for a rock and roll guy.

You know, I was highly suspicious of him.

A friend of ours, an artist, Doug Etch had a party

which we all went to afterwards

and I had a conversation with Richie where

he discussed some things in his record collection

and we got into a conversation about records

that we both liked, and so on.

And I realized that my first impression of him

was completely wrong.

He was just a, you know, guy from Iowa that just

came to LA and dressed as what he thought

would make an impression on us, or something.

- To me, he was like the only guy in the band

who, compared to Lowell, in terms of

pure musical dedication and brilliance,

and originality, although,

all those other guys fault him,

"He can't play it twice the same way."

But that's the point.

Every time he plays it, it's a matter of life and death

with Richie.

With Hayward in the band,

The Factory made renewed assaults on the record business,

including publicity-seeking appearances

on the popular television shows Gomer Pyle and F Troop.

Herb Cohen eventually secured them a deal

with a new MCA subsidiary, Uni Records,

and the band put out two singles,

"Smile, Let Your Life Begin" and "No Place I'd Rather Be"

in the summer of '67.

♪ Smile, let your life begin

Both singles flopped,

and Lowell found himself deserted by his band mates,

when former Mother of Invention Elliot Ingber

invited them to drop The Factory

and join his psychedelic rock project,

The Fraternity of Man.

- Tornado, myself and Richie joined up with Elliot.

And I regretted that

greatly, in terms of my partnership with Lowell,

I did not want to

leave Lowell.

I wanted Lowell to be our singer.

I don't know why that didn't happen.

I think there was some mutual disappointment in,

you know, what had happened with The Factory.

But I,

I felt bad about it, leaving Lowell.

Following the breakup of The Factory,

Lowell joined The Standells,

a local garage rock band, with a record deal on Capital.

It proved not to be a good fit,

and he departed after only a few short weeks.

Between bands and without a project,

Lowell devoted his time to furthering his musical education,

taking classes at LA Community College,

and enrolling with Warren Klein at the newly-founded

Kinnara School, where the pair studied under the legendary

sitar player, Ravi Shankar.

- Lowell and I had both noticed that Ravi was

moving a school here.

It was almost a given that we were both, you know,

be going there.

It was an opportunity that was not to be missed.

I mean, aside from the instrument itself,

interest in the sitar, you know,

the idea of studying Indian classical music for its

musical value was very important.

I remember myself thinking,

"This will be an easy transition, 'cause I play guitar."

But the sitar is just a completely other deal and

quite painful in the beginning,

before you develop really good callouses.

Physically demanding, but just wonderful, wonderful music.

I mean, so inspiring that you don't mind the pain.

But it does require an incredible dedication,

time-wise, and physically,

and I stayed with it longer than Lowell did.

Without a gig since leaving The Standells,

Lowell was handed an opportunity by his old mentor,

Frank Zappa.

The Mothers had lost their vocalist, Ray Collins,

and Zappa asked Lowell to fill the vacancy.

Although he would ultimately end up

as the band's rhythm guitarist,

joining sessions in '68 for the studio albums

Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh.

- He wasn't a great singer, then.

He became a great singer.

He was really becoming a great singer at that time

when he was with Frank,

but I don't think he was there yet.

He wasn't Ray.

Ray was a great singer.

- I think Lowell took it as a lark.

I think he was just intrigued, like everyone was,

to hang out in that world, and to be part of that scene.

And it probably wouldn't have suited him in the long run.

Frank was a very difficult taskmaster.

He was very hard on his people.

Most of them, they say that that was a very important time

in their lives, because Frank was so hard.

He pushed them to things they didn't believe

they could ever do.

And I'm sure he was doing that with Lowell,

and it wasn't really in his nature.

And plus, he really wanted to be his own person.

He was a little stifled in the group.

- They were both very strong personalities.

And musically, I don't think

they would really see eye to eye.

They,

their tangents probably touched.

Their sense of absurdity touched.

Their sense of irony in music touched.

But I think overall,

Lowell was more of a songwriter

mentality, and Frank was more of,

for lack of a better word, an orchestral thinker.

- He was like our guru.

And I think Lowell tried to model himself after Frank,

because Frank, on one level, was, you know,

a harsh band leader, a disciplinarian, who

gets what he wants out of the group,

and they're doing his stuff, and that's it, you know?

And you're fired or, "Okay, that's good."

And Lowell

wanted to be that way.

I mean, he saw the,

you know, the point of all that.

But he was not that guy.

You know, I mean, he wasn't,

to inspire that discipline in others,

you gotta be that disciplined yourself.

And Lowell was always a little, you know,

not that organized, or on top of it, or...

But I should say, he was more inspired.

Certainly a better singer, a better songwriter than Frank.

Frank was the first one to recognize it, you know?

I think Lowell wrote "Willin'" and played it for Frank.

And Frank said, "Start your own group."

- He obviously got kicked out because he was a pot head.

He had to hide that incredibly, extremely large fact

from Frank Zappa.

So, that's why he was,

that's why he left, but musically,

Frank loved him in the band.

Though Zappa had been an important

and paternalistic influence on Lowell,

it was clear that The Mothers were not the right frame

for his career.

After the recording sessions, a few shows,

and a first attempt at production with one of Zappa's

side projects, the most important event

during Lowell's tenure with the band

proved to be a chance encounter with a young pianist

from Ventura, Bill Payne.

Payne had arrived in LA in 1969,

with designs on joining The Mothers.

He had contacted one of Zappa's labels, Bizarre Records,

in the hope of gaining an audition,

but was instead advised to seek out Lowell George,

who was in the process of getting a new band together.

The pair immediately hit it off.

- Both of them had advanced ideas about time signatures and,

you know, they wrote complicated, unusual structures.

They weren't like normal pop songs.

And they both shared that view, so they,

I don't think they had to bring one along, you know?

They both were in the same place, as far as that went.

And they both were really good songwriters.

So, I think they maybe even, you know,

like a, maybe like a little bit of a challenge in a way,

to please the other.

- Billy Payne was

a virtuoso keyboard player.

That kind of funky slip note rock and roll piano playing.

I mean, I think Billy Payne was

an incredibly important part of

what made Little Feat great.

He may have ultimately wanted to be a lot more

than a rock and roll piano player.

The fact is, he could play that almost sort of

funky tone, country, rock and roll piano that

was essential to the early Little Feat sound.

As their personal friendship

and musical relationship developed,

Lowell presented Payne with a primary assignment;

To join him in the rescue of his former band mates.

The Fraternity of Man were recording their second album,

in an atmosphere of chaos and collapse.

With band leader Elliot Ingber unable to hold

the sessions together, Lowell and Bill Payne came in

to help rescue the project.

After the dust settled, Fraternity was no more,

and Lowell had managed to poach Richie Hayward

as the drummer for his new group.

- By the time we were ready to do the second album,

the band was kind of in disarray, and,

Elliot brought in a whole bunch of other musicians.

I mean, just, you know, there were five or six other guys

that played on it.

I think the band was really falling apart at that stage.

- Elliot had a,

he was dating this girl named Airborne Michelle.

They called her that because she was a Scientologist,

and had been sighted floating five feet off the ground down

the sidewalk on Fountain Avenue.

And he tried to break up with her, and quit Scientology,

and this was all just about the time pot pills came in

or whatever, and he was taking notice.

But Michelle,

we recorded at T.T. and G. with Tom Wilson as our producer,

she drew a pentagram in the hall, on the floor,

and burned candles and was going, "Fail!

"Fail!"

And so Elliot is on pot pills and I remember he was like,

talking into his amplifier.

Tom Wilson's going, "What?"

He thought the amplifier was talking back to him.

They literally carried him out.

And so Lowell and Billy replaced him to finish it.

- I had lost command, command and control.

And then at that point,

Richie being the capable and talented drummer that he is,

or was,

loomed largely in Lowell's mind as being, you know,

something that he should, if he wanted to flesh out his,

if he wanted to flesh out his vision,

he would turn to Richie,

because evidently he hadn't run into anybody else

who could, who was that up the line, talent-wise.

When Lowell George, Bill Payne, Richie Hayward

and former Mothers bassist Roy Estrada formed Little Feat

at the turn of the 1970s, they collided with a drastic

aesthetic shift that had begun to sweep rock and roll.

The celebratory optimism of the counterculture

had by the late 60s transfigured into doubt,

and introspection, at the promise of large-scale

social change slipped further out of view.

The ongoing war in Vietnam, political assassinations,

Nixon, Manson, and the desolatry collapse

of Haight-Ashbury's hippie dream

under drug-induced depredation

had led many in the counterculture to pause,

and question themselves.

It was a condition that was reflected in music.

The large productions and psychedelic heat

of the Sergeant Pepper era

had given way to a back to roots movement

with Bob Dylan, The Byrds, The Grateful Dead

and The Rolling Stones all releasing acoustic,

roots-oriented albums.

The band emerged as the most influential group

of their generation, and their melange of country,

folk, soul, and traditional musical forms

ushered in a new popular sensibility.

- In the second half of the 60s,

you go from

folk rock to something a bit more eccentric,

a bit more druggie, I think, you could say.

So you go from kind of Mr. Tambourine Man to, you know,

Trout Mask Replica and Hot Rats.

It's a general kind of, you know,

weirdness that comes into the scene, Strange Days and

Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine.

And I think by '69 when the Manson killings occur,

this, a general

sense that music has become a bit kind of warped.

It's interesting, it's become quite interesting,

but quite sort of warped and quite druggie,

and quite heavy and quite dark.

- The back to roots movement I think

germinated from a couple of places.

One was that whole

hippie ethos of back to nature, stripping things back,

and the idea of authenticity,

which also was found in folk music prior to the

development of folk rock.

It had always been sort of an underlying factor.

You know, when The Band appeared in Credence

around the same time, it made such a strong

representation of that kind of stripped-back

direct, populist

expression of rock and roll that,

it became undeniable.

♪ Corn in the fields

♪ Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water

♪ King Harvest has surely come

♪ I work for the union

♪ 'Cause she's so good to me

♪ And I'm bound to come out on top

♪ That's where she said I should be

- It was all part of the fabric, you know,

The Band records sound like,

it has all of these influence of Appalachian harmonies and

all, different kinds of stuff.

You know, a little, tiny bit of funk stuff

where the bass would play it and,

it was soulful stuff, for white guys.

♪ The smell of the leaves

♪ From the magnolia trees in the meadow

- All of that stuff was coming from

essentially the same place.

I suppose the locus of it was the Troubadour Bar.

You would see bands come in there and do like

three-night runs.

I remember seeing The Average White Band,

and then Little Feat, the first time I'd ever seen them.

There was this kind of roots thing that,

that was clearly reminiscent of The Band,

and also a touch of kind of southern soulfulness.

I didn't know where these guys were from at the time.

I found out they were from LA.

Interest in signing Little Feat was widespread.

Zappa wanted the band to join his rock star

in Straight Records.

Former Byrds producer Terry Melcher

explored the possibility of a deal.

And local label Lizard came forward with a formal offer.

However, Russ Titleman,

a singer/songwriter who had befriended Lowell

at Ravi Shankar's Kinnara School

suggested that they approach Warner Bros.,

where label chiefs Mo Otin and Lenny Waronker

had gained a reputation for running a risk-taking,

artist-friendly business.

- They had these great songs that were

a little off-center.

So Warner Bros. was the perfect place for them.

I had been going and listening and

hearing how great the songs were and, you know,

how great the whole vibe was,

and so I said, "Look, you know, you don't want to sign to

"Lizard Records.

"Why don't we go over to Lenny Waronker's office

"at Warner Bros. and, you know, play a couple of songs,

"see what happens?"

So we did.

Me and Lowell and Billy went over there.

And they played "Willin'" and they played "Truck Stop Girl"

and one or two other songs.

And Lenny looked at me and he said,

"That's great, go upstairs and make a deal with Mo."

The Warner's deal came with

Russ Titleman attached as Little Feat's producer.

And in August 1970, sessions commenced for the band's

eponymous debut album, to be released

with the Lowell George/Roy Estrada track,

"Hamburger Midnight" as lead single.

- I mean, they were such a good band,

it was easy to record the tracks.

You didn't have to struggle.

Lowell was the leader.

You know, he was so excellent in the studio.

He knew what he wanted, he knew how to get it,

he knew, certainly one of the great players, you know?

But Billy, you know, Billy was kind of the rock.

He had the key, you know.

He had the,

the magic combination, you know,

with all that crazy time stuff and great playing,

and there was a lot of that desire to capture

what was great about the live band.

You know, "Hamburger Midnight" is kind of wild and,

you know, like all the harmonies were live.

We just did it.

And then it was kind of my idea to add strings on

"Brides of Jesus" and put the piccolo trumpet on the

"Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie".

That was kind of The Beatle part of it,

trying to orchestrate things and make it...

By that time, the band had come out.

And I was so blown away by that record.

I mean, I still think that those two records are

two of the greatest records ever made.

I kind of wanted it be kind of like a band record, only,

you know, it wasn't really like a band record,

but it was kind of like a band record.

It had that energy, first of all,

it had that energy for sure.

Some of the things that are on there were, are demos.

"Truck Stop Girl" was a demo,

"Willin'" was our demo.

- The debut album, is you might say, it's kind of less

funky, less syncopated,

it's less black,

it's more Stones-y, more bandish, I think.

You know, it's of a piece with a lot of musics being made

in that time, which is it's, there's a lot of white artists,

a lot of white bands who want to be black,

and Lowell, you know, like Dr. John, like Mike Jagger,

like so many, really was, I think he was very black.

There was something very,

very hip and black about Lowell George,

and that's already apparent on that first record, I think.

- Affluency in the blues, from a white person,

that I had experienced very rarely,

with no pretense,

naturally, clothing a white musician,

a deep understanding of the black experience

and point of view.

I'd seen it with Mose Allison,

and I saw it in Lowell George.

I saw it in Ry Cooder.

And this impulse surfaced on the album

in the form of a six and a half minute

Howlin' Wolf medley, in which Lowell showcased

the full range of his blues vocals.

- That vocal is so, I mean, Lowell at his best, you know?

And we want it sound old, you know?

So like we had the slap on the mic, which was in the room.

You know, that's how those old records,

you know, all Ray Charles' records, all those old records

sounded like that because of that, they're all live.

♪ I wore my .44 so long

♪ Lord it made my shoulder sore

♪ I wore my .44 so long

♪ Lord it made my shoulder sore

- Lowell could do a great Wolf impression,

which he did from time to time.

The end fade out of "Cold, Cold, Cold", the harmonica part,

it's right out of Wolf.

I mean,

it's the stuff that we grew up loving,

that he would insinuate into some of those early records,

and I think that his wanting to do that medley was just,

it was a natural.

It was the music that really turned us on.

This music was important to him.

It was important to everybody around him.

That was consistent with who he was,

that this was a big part of his life,

the blues was an important part of his life.

- And he had cut his hand

that day, I think.

Came in all wrapped up.

Played anyway.

The Howlin' Wolf medley

was also notable for an appearance by Ry Cooder

on slide guitar.

Lowell had injured his hand,

while building a model airplane.

But feeling competitive in the company of Cooder,

he insisted on playing.

The accident and the subsequent session

proved to be a key event in the development of

Lowell's trademark slide guitar style.

- Lowell loved model airplanes,

and he built them, and beautifully.

As a matter of fact, it was his left hand for,

when the propeller fell off the,

the clamp for the model airplane,

Lowell put up his left hand to protect his face,

because it flew into his,

flew into him, and in doing so, he injured his hand.

So this

became the mitigating reason

that he put so much devotion into just

bottleneck guitar.

And he, like Ry Cooder before him,

became an exponent of slide guitar.

- Certainly to this day,

Lowell is known as this slide genius,

which I think he was, in many respects,

'cause he really invented a sound that he wouldn't have had

without the misfortune of that

little model airplane accident.

This is his, that he gave to Elliot and I absconded with it.

This is one of Lowell's slides.

It's an 11/16th Craftsman spark plug socket wrench.

And you can, the grooves are in there,

to go in the spark plug to pull it out.

It's a spark plug puller.

And the whole idea was,

when you lost it, you go into a Sears Roebuck

and you could get another one.

So, Craftsman was the brand name, the Sears name,

and so he was playing with these.

Very heavy, too, 'cause I play a lot of slide.

It's very heavy, so it required a higher action

on the guitar, so it wouldn't hit the wood.

So his action was set up kind of high

with heavier, medium gauge strings,

or medium-heavy, I'm not sure.

But just the sheer weight of this thing

caused it to create a good, sustained sound.

And,

he was, it almost seemed like he was fully formed

as a slide guitar player.

- I don't use bottle neck.

A bottleneck is, you know, this, whew,

cut that off, and you have to find a very specific

kind of bottle.

♪ I said blow away, blow away

♪ This cruel reality

♪ And keep me from its storm

♪ Suspicion has crept in

♪ And ruined my life

♪ I'm messed up, and hassled, and worn

♪ Yes and my sweet China White

♪ She ain't here tonight

♪ Whoa and cocaine, yow

♪ Has robbed me blind

Is that difficult?

- This is a simple piece.

Two notes, bass notes, yeah?

And top note.

- Lowell's whole thing was to just hit a note and hold it.

So in order to hold that note and have it sustained,

you had to have some sort of a,

a piece of outboard equipment and make that happens to,

and that's what Lowell really brought to the table that,

as far as I know, nobody else had done before him.

I might be wrong on that,

but it's the first time I was aware of it.

Can you, can you show some more

different thing, difficult thing?

- Now, Ry plays, Cooder plays--

- Part of what Lowell did with that sound, to get it,

was this very heavily-compressed audio signal

through hardware compressors, just crankin' 'em

to where the signal is equalized,

the loudest signal and the softest signal

are the same volume.

And it creates this very even, sustained,

and it's very much a signature of his sound.

You heard him on the song "Roll Um Easy".

These notes just last forever,

and that's part of the function

of what this compression does.

- I mean, people don't point out that he,

unlike any other slide guitar player,

tunes his guitar up a step,

rather than down a step.

Okay, tuned it up to an A,

rather than down to whatever.

It's kind of dangerous, you expect the strings to break

and poked you in the eye, but,

that's why he's a step higher than any other

slide guitarist, and he has a unique sound.

I mean, he doesn't sound like anybody else.

Together with an advancing

technical virtuosity, Lowell was coming into his own

as a songwriter.

Alongside his co-writes with Bill Payne,

the album featured several George originals,

most significantly, the first version of "Willin'",

a song that fast became a standard

in American roots rock, and a Little Feat signature.

- "Willin'" showed up on that record.

That was the first of the two times they recorded it

in the studio, and that was a classic road song.

That became the calling card for the band

and for Lowell in particular,

because it was covered so frequently.

That was the message to the critics at least,

because nobody else heard it, that,

"Oh, this was a serious songwriter,

"and a writer/artist fronting this band."

♪ Out on the road late at night

♪ Seen my pretty Alice in every head light

♪ Alice

♪ Dallas Alice

♪ And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari

♪ Tehachapi to Tonapah

♪ Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made

♪ Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed

♪ And if you give me

♪ Weed

♪ Whites

♪ And wine

- That kind of proto-Americana in the original version

of "Willin'", "Brides of Jesus",

you know, the writing is very good,

the lyrics are interesting and vivid

and quite eccentric, I think.

So, it's very much

setting out Lowell's store, I think.

It's not as if you listen to that first record and think,

"Well, you know, that was an interesting first effort

"but then, you know", I think it's all there, if you like,

the groundwork is there on that record.

However, on its release in January, 1971,

Little Feat's debut was almost universally ignored.

Despite piquing the interest of some in the rock press,

sales were abysmal, and Lowell,

unhappy with the record's sound,

took issue with Russ Titleman's production.

- You know, the project started out positive and grand and,

you know, very egalitarian and very friendly.

And then, you know, to wind up like, to wind up like that.

But you know, the record, it's a great record.

You know?

I sort of felt, I argued for it.

I said, "Look, this is what it is,

"this is what this record is.

"And, you know, if we're going to cut a bunch more stuff,

"we've already spent all this money,

"they're gonna get mad at us, you know?"

I was wrong about that, but I didn't know it at the time.

But, I loved the record as it was.

And Lowell didn't.

I'm sure he loved part of it,

but he wanted it to be more sophisticated.

We got in huge fights.

So our relationship broke down.

- Little Feat never made life very easy for themselves,

you know?

They didn't write hit singles.

You know, Lowell was damned if he was going to do anything

overtly commercial, and therefore, you know,

what was this record?

It's one thing to be The Rolling Stones,

making an album like Sticky Fingers,

but that has, you know, "Brown Sugar" on it.

Little Feat has the same kind of mixture and blend

of influences and genres, but,

it doesn't have a hit single on it.

And I think, people probably just didn't know,

you know, what pigeonhole to put it in.

You know, DJs didn't know really where to place it.

And maybe Warner Bros. didn't get behind it

in the way they could have done.

Warner Bros.' primary reflex

was to consider dropping Little Feat altogether.

The band were handed a timely lifeline

by songwriter and composer, Van Dyke Parks,

with whom Lowell had developed a close, personal friendship.

Parks had an A and R role at Warner's,

and advocated fiercely for the group.

He collaborated with Lowell on a new song,

"Sailin' Shoes", which was to be included

on his forthcoming album, Discover America.

The label had been keen on "Sailin' Shoes",

and Parks used it in leverage in improving their attitude

towards Little Feat.

- About the time that Lowell had finished his first record,

which left Warner Bros. with a vacant stare,

they had no idea what to do with it,

and Lowell was abandoned basically.

And he was between projects, as it were.

I'd warmed to him, he was so bright,

he came over to my house, he'd fix Chinese food.

He was quick to tell me that he'd won a brown belt in judo.

I was aware of his physical prowess, and his intellect.

Kant,

or Nietzsche, great philosophers, Socrates,

all these dead white guys spoke to him with their theories

about how to live

a life that was instructed by principle.

Both of us were left of Karl Marx,

and we were members of the same team

within a trojan horse,

and we were determined to enter the music business,

and transform it and bring it good intent.

I loved Lowell like a brother.

So, I decided finally to jump camp, as it were.

He tested my loyalty and,

I stopped hiring Ry Cooder on dates I had produced,

and I hired Lowell George as a slide guitarist.

You could hear him on "FDR in Trinidad" in my second album.

I was

recording that album when a Japanese group

came into the studio at Sunset Sound, unannounced,

and said they wanted me to produce their,

the California sound, which had now migrated to Japan.

I left the control room for a moment,

while those Japanese people stood there,

there must have been eight,

I think three or four in addition to the group.

I told them I didn't have time for them.

And when I came back into the control room,

Lowell was standing there with his hand

around an open attache case,

and the attache case was filled with $100 bills.

And Lowell was smiling at me, broadly, and he said,

"I think we can make music out of this."

So, I gladly surrendered that opportunity to Lowell.

We did one song together,

wrote one song called "Sayonara America".

Fair to say it was a great pleasure to us

because it became the number one hit in Tokyo.

♪ Sayonara America

♪ Sayonara Nippon

♪ Sayonara America

♪ Sayonara Nippon

♪ Ya ya ya ya

♪ Ya ya ya ya

- I got 'em another record.

I did that.

I coerced Warner Bros.

I know I did that.

I coerced them.

I withheld "Sailin' Shoes".

Warner's comfort level was further raised

by the reappearance of former Factory bassist,

Martin Kibbee, who returned to LA from Europe

with a new song, "Easy to Slip",

and began a writing partnership with Lowell.

Taken together, "Sailin' Shoes" and "Easy to Slip"

persuaded the label that there might yet

be some commercial potential in Little Feat,

and they agreed to finance a new album.

- They were on the verge of being dropped by Warner Bros.,

but I had "Easy to Slip" and they liked that one.

I started working with 'em based on that, I should say.

It was a song that I'd written because

I broke up with my first wife.

And he liked it, and so did they.

I mean, it wasn't like, there was no plan.

It was written for personal reasons, not

based on any commercial calculation.

♪ Well my whole world seems so cold today

♪ All the magic's gone away

♪ And our time together melts away

♪ Like the sad melody I play

- You listen to "Easy to Slip", and tell me

that's not the sound of America in 1972.

Listen to anything from Pogo.

Listen to The Eagles' first album.

"Easy to Slip" would fit perfectly on the debut album

by The Eagles.

"Easy to Slip" would fit perfectly on

any of the first two or three albums by Jackson Browne,

who was a contemporary of Lowell George

in the LA music scene.

♪ It's so easy to slip

♪ It's so easy to fall

♪ And let your memory drift

♪ And do nothin' at all

- "Easy to Slip", right in your face,

is something that's got some kind of Californian

radio punch to it.

It could almost have been a kind of

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young track, so,

I think there's a clear attempt to

create something that's got some sort of Top 40 potential,

in a way that obviously the first album didn't.

- We would go to a coffee house at 10 in the morning,

you know, drink 10 espressos and write songs all day.

Morning, noon and night,

that was all we were up to.

And we would come up with an idea, a lyrical idea,

you know, what the song was about.

He would go away and work on it,

and he would come back with it worked out

with having written it.

And, it was written.

If there was a guitar solo, he would play that solo,

take, you know, "Rock and Roll Doctor" for example,

that's written.

He'd play that note for note every time he played it.

And that's why it holds up, that's why it's memorable,

he thought it through.

It wasn't an improvisation.

He didn't like improvised bullshit,

but he was not overwhelmingly prolific.

It was tough for him.

Little Feat's sophomore album, Sailin' Shoes,

released in May, 1972, exhibited a fuller sound

and sharper identity than it's predecessor.

Aided by the clear development in songwriting,

the sure touch of Warner staff producer Ted Templeman,

and iconic cover art from illustrator Neon Park,

the record met with unanimous critical praise.

Though sales remained disappointing,

the band were beginning to attract a fan base,

and their appeal reached beyond America for the first time

with Sailin' Shoes gaining particular traction in the UK.

- I was delighted to hear that record.

As soon as I put the needle on side one

and heard "Easy to Slip", I thought,

"Okay, this is it.

"This band, this is my band."

The rest of the album showed that Lowell wasn't the only

capable songwriter.

Bill Payne was also beginning to show his chops

and Payne and Hayward did one of their signature songs

in "Tripe Face Boogie".

The album set up I think the,

the basic parameters

in terms of songwriting of what they would be

from that point onward.

♪ Lady in a turban

♪ In a cocaine tree

♪ Does a dance so rhythmically

♪ She's cryin', and a singin'

♪ And having a time

♪ And gee that cocaine tree look fine

♪ You've got to put on your sailin' shoes

♪ Put on your sailin' shoes

♪ Everyone will start to cheer

♪ When you put on your sailin' shoes

- Some songs Lowell George is at his absolute best

when it's really low key.

I mean, I love bad Lowell George,

I love the sort of almost acoustic Lowell George.

I just thought the acoustic slide solo on "Sailin' Shoes"

I think is one of the greatest moments

in the kind of Little Feat ever did, I really do.

- The Neon Park cover, that was the,

that was the first instance, a visual instance of

what would be the,

I think the term that they used was cartoon consciousness.

The idea that you could create a fantasia within

the three or four minute rock song,

that you could take it anywhere.

Artistically ambitious without being

in the least bit pretentious.

Sailin' Shoes proved to be the last album

from the original incarnation of Little Feat.

Roy Estrada, feeling that there were better gigs

to be found elsewhere, jumped ship to join

Captain Beefheart's Magic Band,

before the record had even been released.

The loss of Estrada presented an opportunity

to reconfigure the band, and take Little Feat's exploration

of roots music further south.

Together with local musician Paul Barrere on second guitar,

Feat recruited bassist Kenny Gradney

and percussionist Sam Clayton from southern soul ensemble

Delaney and Bonnie.

The expanded lineup brought a greater range to their sound,

and introduced a new set of musical influences

into their repertoire.

- They were missing, live, some pieces,

'cause they couldn't pull it off as a four piece,

not the way I think he heard,

or the way maybe they heard what these songs could be,

and so it was a logical outgrowth to add,

add another musician or two,

just to try to get some sense of what it sounded like

on record, live.

They, I mean, the power was

just breathtaking, when you heard that big band,

'cause there was so much coming off of the stage.

- It became biracial, for one thing.

And that element of blackness that had been hinted at

and certain of their earlier songs on the first two records

really became pronounced from that point on.

- The fact that, you know, two fifths of Little Feat

were African American,

I don't think it was significant

to any of us at the time, but looking back,

I think it was hugely significant.

I think Little Feat was way ahead of its time

as an integrated, multicultural, multiracial band,

and I just don't think we realized the significance

until years later.

With the band reconstituted,

Lowell sought to exercise greater control

of the Little Feat sound and direction.

When work on a new album,

Dixie Chicken commenced in late 1972,

it was with Lowell producing

and in sole charge of the sessions.

Keen to encourage greater freedom and experimentation

than Warner appointed producers had allowed,

he invited a host of other musicians to participate,

including Bonnie Bramlett, Bonnie Raitt,

and Danny Hutton on vocals,

and future full-time Feat's member Fred Tackett on guitar,

Lowell's artistic vision dominated Dixie Chicken.

Seven of the album's 10 songs listed George

in the writing credits, while the band's musical dexterity

finally proved able to match his ambition.

- With Dixie Chicken,

we had finally discovered our sound,

after like a 10 year voyage that,

as far as I was concerned,

this is what Little Feat's sound should be.

- There was this cartoon consciousness,

this almost intentional gauchery.

Lowell called it droite gauche.

His ability to go places that were just taboo,

and he continued that in his songwriting signature,

"Fat Man In The Bathtub", "Willin'",

"I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonapah",

he fell in love with alliteration, with word play, with,

with powers of deception in songwriting.

Later on, we wrote the song "Cheek to Cheek",

which became a stammer to "Chiquitita".

I would say that Lowell was a more powerful influence than

the musicians around him that had expected he would be.

He was a benevolent dictator, but he was a dictator.

♪ My sweet chiquita, what are you up to

♪ My Juanita

♪ Put my money in your meter baby so it

♪ won't run down

♪ But you caught me in the squeeze play

♪ On the cheesy side of town

♪ Throw me a dime, throw me a line

♪ 'Cause there's a fat man in the bathtub

♪ With the blues

- Little Feat's sound changes dramatically and radically

with the third record, with Dixie Chicken.

That's obvious from the word go.

You didn't hear like, congas on the previous two records,

I don't think, so straight away, you're into something

that's just blacker and funkier and more street,

and,

the New Orleans influence is very much more

to the fore, you know, to the rhythms,

the sort of second line grooves.

It's Lowell really getting into funk and R and B

in a way that he hadn't quite had the tools

to make that happen before.

♪ I've seen the bright lights of Memphis

♪ And the Commodore Hotel

♪ And underneath a street lamp

♪ I met a southern belle

♪ Oh she took me to the river

♪ Where she cast her spell

♪ And in that southern moonlight

♪ She sang this song so well

♪ If you'll be my Dixie Chicken

♪ I'll be your Tennessee Lamb

♪ And we can walk together down in Dixieland

- Not only did Little Feat become black as well as white,

but it became female as well as male.

In a very real way, I think that was part of

Lowell's inclusivity.

There's some sort of male/female connection

that's really at the essence of his music.

It's deeply romantic without ever

feeling in the least bit sentimental.

One of the most prominent characteristics

of Dixie Chicken was the band's assimilation

of the New Orleans sound.

New Orleans had a unique musical tradition,

one that had begun to make a pronounced impact

on rock and roll since the release

of Dr. John's Gumbo in 1972.

A virtuoso pianist and Louisiana native,

Dr. John had started out as a session musician in LA,

before launching a career as a solo artist.

Though he remained relatively obscure, Gumbo,

a collection of classic songs from New Orleans,

had proved to be hugely influential

and a number of high profile artists

had developed an interest in the city's musical heritage.

Dixie Chicken included a cover of legendary

New Orleans composer Allen Toussaint's "On Your Way Down".

And a strain of Louisiana R and B

ran throughout the album.

Gradney and Clayton in particular

had brought an innate scent

of the region's distinctive rhythms to Little Feat,

and that quality became a persistent feature

of the group's sound.

- The New Orleans R and B sound is

really a mixture of the kind of R and B you might hear

anywhere else in America, including, you know,

Memphis and Chicago.

And something that's just more unique to the place itself,

which comes from the kinds of rhythms that you would hear

at Mardi Gras, the marching bands who would play

in a kind of

very syncopated second line star,

as it was known.

And it's difficult really to define what that is,

only to say that the kind of accents and the rhythm

is slightly off, it's closer to something almost Caribbean,

one might almost say Brazilian.

It's a kind of rhythm that sort of repeats on itself,

and you hear that obviously in the great New Orleans

records of, you know, Professor Longhair.

But you also hear it in the soul singles,

that Allen Toussaint was producing in the 60s.

It's a very distinctive kind of almost jerky sort of rhythm,

which you then hear in, you know,

you hear it in "Dixie Chicken",

you hear it in "Fat Man In The Bathtub".

- Not just, you know, American black,

but a lot of Caribbean.

You know, and then you have the French, I mean,

New Orleans music is a wonderful melting pot.

The music, it's why it's so unique,

it's got all these different styles in it.

And Lowell was very influenced by that,

by Allen Toussaint,

and so when he got that,

he got a little bit more of what he heard

and what he wanted, so the band rocked more in its own way.

- They just took it all in.

It just became yet another part of who they were.

So, okay, there's blues, there's New Orleans,

there's the singer/song, there's the country thing,

there's all this stuff at play at the same time.

And maybe that's part of the reason it was confusing for

the average record buyer who wants,

"I want a rock and roll record."

Well you're not gonna get it from Little Feat.

You're gonna get all this stuff.

- They were growing with each record.

And there's a danger in that.

Every record artist faces a dilemma of success.

Suppose a record becomes a success.

Well, the promotion men would want the next record

to sound exactly like it,

so that it would be easy to merchandise.

Well, Lowell, kind of like my friend Harry Nelson

found that unacceptable.

And he created his own game plan,

and they would have to adjust.

And you see this foment throughout Lowell's short career.

Although Dixie Chicken was Little Feat's

most ambitious and mature album yet,

it failed to make any impression

on the record buying public.

Lowell became increasingly despondent

of what he considered to be no less than sabotage

on the part of Warner Bros.,

complaining that the label failed to engage

sufficient promotion, and were unprepared

to rouse themselves in support of the band.

- When he to record stores,

the record was not in the stores.

So,

you know, I'm not saying

we were so great they fouled us up or something but,

somehow, I don't think Warner Bros. really

took advantage of what they had there with that group, no.

- Lowell was like a desperado, waiting by a train.

He'd do anything to get attention,

and so he put on a chicken suit,

and he went around every

every radio manager that he could find.

It kind of represented a laughable matter,

absurd theater, and yet, in every comedy of that sort,

there's something fundamentally tragic.

He would do anything to promote the group,

and you see through this fabric that Lowell created.

As the group advanced from album to album,

Lowell became more and more

Little Feat incorporated.

He became more and more obsessed with everyone else's needs.

He was tremendously concerned with the people around him,

and I know it sounds vulgar to say it,

but he was economically-driven, but not

in self-interest.

- This, you know, this stuff doesn't drop out of the sky.

You have to have a game plan,

and then the member of the band have to be

willing to execute the plan.

And, one of the things that Little Feat was suffering from

as Bill Payne and Paul Barrere complain about

in interviews that I've done with them

is that there wasn't a plan.

It was kind of

anarchy.

The subsequent tour was no less disappointing,

with Warner's again failing to stimulate the attention

of music fans.

After wrapping up his road commitments with Little Feat,

Lowell spent much of the next year

deploying his talent in the service of other artists,

including producing a forthcoming Bonnie Raitt album,

and traveling to New Orleans where he played guitar

on both Robert Palmer's debut,

and a Meters record overseen by Allen Toussaint.

A restless musical spirit,

collaborating and assisting on a variety of projects

became an increasing feature of Lowell's activity,

but it came with a cost.

Although he evolved into an influential

and important part of the wider music community,

the extensive workload took a toll

on both his health and his productivity as a songwriter.

- One of his gifts was the ability to,

to pull inspired performances out of the people

he worked with, and that was true of Little Feat

and it was true of him in the studio as well.

- He was producing the third, Bonnie's third record,

Takin' My Time, and he came up to me and he said,

"Freebo, space is a place."

I'll never forget it.

Basically what he was trying to tell me to do was

don't play so damn much, you know?

Play less.

Space is a place.

The older I get, the more I realize the wisdom

of those words.

But you could hear it in his music back then,

and you could always hear it in his writing.

Like for instance, he has a song called

"Rock and Roll Doctor", and there's a line in it,

♪ Two degrees in be-bop, a PHD in swing

♪ He's the master of rhythm, he's a rock and roll king

I mean, all that space from one vocal line

through another vocal line.

- Linda Ronstadt, for example, and Bonnie Raitt,

they learned everything they could from Lowell about

the way to approach Melisma, Anacrusis,

musical identity,

deliver the blues.

Lowell was a great vocal instructor,

and a lot of people learned from him.

And he influenced a lot of people with,

with his trans-racial

effortlessness.

Basically, his study of failure, the dispossessed.

- You know, I felt he ought to spend more time writin',

and I don't think he found it fun,

and I think he found it hard work.

It was a lot easier for him to show up in

somebody else's session,

Jackson or Bonnie or whatever,

he would have fun, he'd show up, he'd play great guitar.

You know, he seemed to be so busy,

he didn't have time to write.

And that bothered me.

I kept trying to corner him, and it was tough.

However, fresh ideas for Little Feat

remained on Lowell's agenda.

A new song, "Spanish Moon", had been worked up

during band rehearsals in '73.

Van Dyke Parks produced a recording of the track

with the intention that it would be the precursor

to a full Parks-produced Feat's album.

Warner's, however, refused to sanction such a proposal,

fearing that any Parks/George collaboration

would quickly exceed its budget.

After a fierce argument, the label got their way.

♪ It froze on the ground

♪ Down the street I heard such a sorrowful tune

♪ Comin' from the place they call the Spanish Moon

- "Spanish Moon".

Strangely, autobiographic.

Most powerfully, autobiographic.

And kind of like Toussaint's elegy,

"Yes we can, I know we can, I think we can",

it just sits there

on a fundamental

hypnotica,

describing a great event, a ballad as it were.

It's not Marty Robbins, it's not Johnny Cash,

it's not Emerson or Thoreau,

it's not Robert Service, but it tells the tale,

it talks Lowell's walk.

It reveals the man.

And I enjoyed very much producing that

session for Lowell.

Though "Spanish Moon"

remained an isolated recording,

the opportunity to produce a full Little Feat album

appeared in the form of a cut-rate deal

on a small studio, in Baltimore.

Relationships within the band had become strained

over the preceding year,

and relocating to Blue Seas Studio in Maryland

offered the chance to rebuild a way

from the pressures and temptations of LA.

A further attraction for Lowell

was the studio came with a young engineer,

George Massenburg, whom he had recently met

during his session work and guest appearances.

With a mutual interest in studio technology,

Lowell had built a rapport with Massenburg,

and gradually became persuaded that the way forward

was to leave California and decamp to Baltimore.

- It came hard for him to leave town.

He wanted so much, and it was under advice from his lovely

manager, Bob Cavalo, that he leave town,

that he went to Maryland to find a country redoubt,

to get out of the swill of Hollywood for a while.

And,

get another perspective.

- He was the coolest guy that I had met

up to that point in my life,

and I met a lot of people,

but he was by far the coolest guy ever, you know?

You pretty much got an answer just by,

you know, a gesture or...

And he had great stories.

He had stories about everybody.

He loved to fish, he had stories about fishing.

And,

he was just beginning

to experience this wave of

popularity that came from doing Sailin' Shoes,

then Dixie Chicken.

Dixie Chicken, you know, took off in Great Britain

in like a wildfire.

But nobody knew much about it in the States,

except for this little area where these guys played

in Baltimore, Washington, where they were

a really important musical act.

You know, they would book Lisner

and the Warner Theatre and,

people would just go nuts for Little Feat.

Working with Massenburg,

Lowell spent ever more time at the studio,

looking to enhance his ability as a technical producer,

and searching for ways to develop and extend

the Little Feat sound.

- He got really into recording techniques,

and where to put a microphone,

what kind of microphone to use

and what kind of limiter,

and he was big into experimenting things,

and I think George Massenburg,

I think, I know was a huge influence on him

because of George's, you know,

vast knowledge of things that most of us mortals

have no concept of.

George is, that's what he does.

Seeing the studio as an extension of his guitar playing

and his singing was logical for him, I think.

It was, it was part of who he was.

For a lot of people, the studio was very off-putting.

It was intimidating.

And I think there was a comfort level for him

in the studio that not a lot of people was.

Matter of fact, I think it was very comfortable,

maybe more comfortable in the studio than out of it.

- And the ears he worked with were,

were quite good.

But, mostly,

there was

a limitation to what he, how he could turn his dream

into a sound, how he could realize this sound in his head,

and that's, that's what it's all about.

It's, we hear this sound, and we're just trying to,

trying to hear in real life what we hear in our heads.

And that was Lowell.

It was Lowell musically, and it was Lowell sonically.

It was the beginnings of what we called

hot pressing, hot pressing the tape,

where he'd play guitar and we'd take it with a direct,

it would sound very thin and weaselly and he'd say,

"Oh, okay."

You know, always the cool, cool,

cool cigarette, rip the filter off,

tap tap tap, you know,

little mountain of

you know what, and...

"Turn it up."

But he really wanted explanations of everything.

He really was able to follow technical explanations,

and to question, "Why do you do this?"

We would break through on misuse of technology.

We'd mic rooms.

We'd mic guitar cabinets in funny places.

I mean,

it became fashionable to do all of these things later,

but years later.

And Lowell drove that by just pushing

wherever he saw weakness,

wherever he saw, in sincerity,

or confusion,

or,

a lack of one's ability to explain something,

simply and clearly.

He would go for the throat.

He'd rip you apart, in the coolest way ever,

with a minimum number of words.

The sessions at Blue Seas

for Feats Don't Fail Me Now

took place in an atmosphere of hope.

Lowell traveled to Baltimore with his partner Liz

and their children.

Heavily pregnant with their daughter, Inara,

Liz made a home in a rented house near the studio,

while Lowell once again assumed production duties

and the responsibility for marshaling the band.

In contrast to Dixie Chicken, however,

far more space was afforded to the other Feats,

as the group embarked

on their most collaborative effort to date.

- Lowell had his kids there, Liz and kids there,

so Lowell would have to do things with kids,

and it left the rest of us some time to play around.

But it was loose.

What was the atmosphere in the studio at Blue Seas?

It was relaxed.

The guys felt like they could try things.

- They

collaborated, I think, more than,

than ever before, or after.

It, the album feels

really taut in terms of its intention

and its execution.

- Did Lowell drive the production?

Yes, he did.

But I think he established

a line in quality control

where the performances had to be,

and the word is authentic.

He would experiment with something

until it really, really, really felt right,

and the business had no patience for that.

The band barely had patience for it.

♪ Semi-smokin mama

♪ You got to give me some

♪ I heard you got the biggest, the biggest truck in town

♪ Right on through to Baltimore you got to love me now

♪ Got to do me gently, well it's feets don't fail me now

♪ Feets don't fail me now

- It sounds like a greatest hits album,

starting with "Rock and Roll Doctor" which is

a quintessential Lowell rock and roll song,

and then "Oh Atlanta" which is as close to a hit

as they got, and Bill Payne wrote that.

It was just a band hitting on all cylinders.

And I think, feeling really good about itself.

If there was ever a moment when

the band in the studio really cohered,

I think it was Feats Don't Fail Me Now.

- "Rock and Roll Doctor", I think,

was so extraordinary, you know?

I don't think anyone had ever heard anything

quite like "Rock and Roll Doctor" before.

I'm not sure that anyone's ever done anything

quite like "Rock and Roll Doctor" since.

I think it's one of the sort of 10 funkiest pieces

in music ever recorded.

♪ Now things got worse, yes a serious bind

♪ At times like this it takes a man with a style

♪ Like you cannot often find

♪ A doctor of the heart and a doctor of the mind

♪ If you like country with a boogie beat

♪ He's the man to meet

♪ Oh yeah

♪ If you like the sound of shufflin' feet

♪ He can't be beat

♪ If you wanna feel real nice

♪ Just ask the rock and roll doctor's advice

- I mean I know that in Europe, certainly in England,

Little Feat suddenly were the band to talk about, you know?

They were the band on everybody's lips, including,

you know, Jimmy Page's lips.

Everybody was saying that the Little Feat

were their favorite band.

Feats Don't Fail Me Now

proved to be the band's breakthrough album.

It made the US Top 40, and brought Little Feat

the commercial success that had eluded

all their previous work.

Warner Bros. finally put a push behind the group,

organizing a three week tour of Europe,

featuring Little Feat on a bill that included

six of the label's acts,

headlined by the Doobie Brothers.

The tour served to confirm the Feat's soaring popularity.

They stole the shows, with audiences demanding

extended encores and heckling the arrival of the Doobies.

- Little Feat opened for the Doobies at Wembley,

and came off stage and went in a

"Feat, Feat, Feat" chant.

About 40 or 50,000 people, "Feat, Feat, Feat".

And Pat and the band came out, the Doobies came out,

and starting playing, "Feat, Feat",

and they just got louder.

And, oh they were just as loud as

an audience can be.

And 25 minutes into the Doobie's set,

they don't know what to do.

Pat or Michael, came off stage and,

asked Bill, "What did you guys do?

"What's going on here?"

And that record set that up.

- Their show at the Rainbow Theatre in London

in January '75, which I was lucky enough to be at

as a sort of snotty little 15 year old.

You know, me and Elvis Costello and everybody else,

you know, we were all there,

the entire sort of pop rock fraternity of London

was queueing up to see Lowell.

You know, he was just the cool guy

that we wanted to see.

Afterwards, we really wanted Little Feat

just to come back on and play more songs,

and we just didn't want the Doobies

to come on at all.

The Doobies were good in their way, but,

there was just something greasier and dirtier

and funkier about Little Feat.

That really all started to come through

with that record.

Little Feat are one of those sort of, you know,

band's bands, you know?

They were one of those bands that every other band emulated.

But Lowell was starting to show signs

of burnout.

As Little Feat looked to build on the success of

Feats Don't Fail Me Now,

with a new studio album,

his songwriting and general productivity

began to drop precipitously.

Bill Payne and Paul Barrere became increasingly prominent,

picking up the slack and contributing the lion's share

of the new material.

- I don't think he was,

his health was good maybe at that point.

We don't need to discuss the abuses.

The touring.

I think he was tired, you know?

I think that there was,

this was a non-stop world that these guys were in and

he had been carrying,

largely, the songwriting with collaboration,

but mostly his involvement with somebody else

for something for, what now, five, six years.

- You know, Lowell is just starting to,

you know, kind of abuse

drugs and drink

in a way that perhaps had been manageable before,

and was no longer manageable.

I think it was difficult for the others.

I'm sure they were doing their share of chemicals.

No one wasn't in that era in Los Angeles but,

you know, Lowell was really abusing these substances

in ways that I think

Billy isn't.

And,

they really started to diverge.

They started to look at the music very differently.

You know, Billy wants to do something more,

more ambitious, and he is listening increasingly to

music by the likes of Weather Report, you know, fusion.

They're having fights, aggressive or passive aggressive over

the fiefdom of Little Feat.

And I think Lowell starts, you know, by all accounts to

just retreat a bit, doesn't show up,

he's just not as present, he's not as interested.

He's starting to think about other things that he might do.

Sessions for The Last Record Album

were tense and laborious,

interrupted by injury to Richie Hayward

in a motorcycle accident,

and marred by the growing distance between Lowell

and his band mates.

When it was finally released in November, '75,

most critics wrote it up as a step backwards,

although the band's constituency in the UK

remained enthusiastic.

Despite the tepid reception, however,

The Last Record Album shipped more units

than any of its predecessors.

- Lowell's habits in the studio led to an agonizingly slow

unfolding of a production.

So on

"Down Below the Borderline",

where it's Sound Factory West and

Lowell has his four track tape recorder set up

in the other room, and he would disappear into this room,

cutting tape.

Lowell was

not afraid of anything, and a lot of the odd grooves

that he came up with came up with his cutting tape,

where he couldn't get Richie or Sam to play something,

he'd get them to play it then he'd go cut tape,

and say, "No, no, more like this."

So, that's a rather slow process.

And he wasn't able to share his vision,

where it was going in his mind's ear,

just because he was going on instinct.

You know, the band wasn't very happy working like that.

I think Lowell was challenged by

the expectation of his coming up

with another Dixie Chicken.

He didn't know how to get there.

That wasn't really something that he wrote.

He didn't sit down to write that groove.

That's something that was given him by the gods,

through Richie, in my opinion.

The guys may argue, or this may be overstated but,

Lowell

couldn't hit, couldn't press a button and get a groove,

couldn't hit a button and get a feel.

He tried, you know, through all of this technical,

his emerging mastery of editing and studio technique.

It didn't tell a story

kind of all by itself.

♪ I've been down

♪ But not like this before

♪ Can't be 'round

♪ This kind of show no more

♪ All, all that you dream

♪ Yeah it comes to shine in silver lining

♪ And clouds, clouds change the scene

- It's not very strong.

There are moments on it, what,

"Mercenary Territory" has some moments.

"Long Distance Love" is on the record.

Lowell does have some moments on it,

but you just, you don't feel that he's present in the way

that he was in the previous records.

♪ Hello, give me missing persons

♪ They said what is it that you need

♪ I said oh, I need her so

♪ She said you've got to stop your pleading

♪ 'Cause no matter what you do

♪ Even pray to heaven above

♪ All you'll ever get from her is

♪ Long distance love

- "Long Distance Love" is probably the thing

that he really worked the hardest at.

Dialing in

the harmonies, his guitar,

and it's Valerie Carter and that took days to get.

His vocal took days to get.

And it's an extraordinary track.

And we spent hours doing, I did this with Billy,

we spent hours doubling Kenny's bass

on a many mold an octave down every

nuance in the bass part.

And getting that guitar sound,

getting that lead sound that slow, slides out.

Lowell was very much into that.

But as far as coming up with a new track, not so much.

By the time of Little Feat's next record,

Time Loves a Hero, the distance between Lowell and his band

had become pronounced.

Having assumed greater responsibility

for the group's output, Payne and Barrere

were naturally inclined to explore

their own musical interests,

whether or not they corresponded to Lowell's tastes.

Payne in particular had recently become heavily influenced

by the excursions of the preeminent jazz fusion ensemble,

Weather Report.

Warner's had already recalled Ted Templeman,

the producer of Sailin' Shoes,

to take charge of the recording.

And with Payne and Barrere interested

in taking a more cerebral jazz-inspired direction,

Lowell's presence on the album was barely visible.

- I think the band got out of his control.

And what he was hearing,

which maybe he couldn't articulate,

wasn't what he liked.

But it was a business at that point,

and a commitment, and this is a band of brothers.

I mean, like it or not,

they loved each other and hated each other

and everything in between.

The horse maybe got away from him, you know?

- Will, when he wanted something out of the band,

he was as authoritarian as,

as Frank.

And Frank was the ultimate authoritarian.

And it, you know, when you're in the studio

and when you're looking at something small,

when you're growing micro-aurals.

Van Dyke Parks called it,

"Masturbating tiny baby squirrels."

Lowell would want it perfected.

And, you know, the guys, particularly Billy,

wanted to feel it a little different way.

And so there were huge fights between Lowell and Billy.

The source of Lowell's

distrust of the band,

and in particular Bill, is he didn't see

Bill's jazz direction as being authentic.

But that thing is Bill's journey.

And there were a lot of places in Bill's journey,

musically, where he and Lowell would meet up.

But that's Bill's direction.

See, the best groups I've ever worked with

have extraordinary stress,

and the stress in the group has a lot to do

with creative energy.

And groups explode, they fall apart from this

tremendous tension.

But that's what makes music.

- Broadly, you can say that Lowell's

tastes inclined towards, you know,

funk and soul and,

you know, that kind of blues-y slide guitar thing,

that earthiness that we talked about.

And, Billy's increasingly,

was veering off in the direction of something more complex,

definitely more influenced by players like Joe Zawinul.

He was obviously a key influence on him.

And yes, you start to hear that,

you start to hear it on The Last Record Album,

and then increasingly, Time Loves a Hero.

You hear these two elements,

which could have worked quite harmoniously together,

but they didn't, primarily because Lowell just

really didn't like it, thought it was sort of wanky

and self-indulgent.

Billy, quite reasonably, doesn't see why Little Feat

can't encompass something that's more

experimental and jazz rockish.

It really culminates around something like

"Day at the Dog Races", but even before that,

on the cover "Day or Night", or "The Fan",

there are sort of showcases for Billy's talent.

And Lowell would increasingly make a point of, you know,

walking off stage while Billy did his thing.

And not in a very gracious way.

- When they toured behind that record, they were incredible.

And that material came to life on stage.

I remember seeing them at Santa Monica Civic in '77.

Those excursion kind of songs, the pain stuff,

with Lowell fully committed to them on stage,

because he did, he wasn't gone for good,

he did make his comeback and you could see that on stage

very clearly, man,

they were just impossible to resist.

- The deal was, as you know, that he made with Lenny was

he would get a solo record, Lowell would get a solo record,

if he would step back and let Ted produce Time Loves a Hero,

and let the band come up with material.

So Lowell was more interested,

I think more interested in Thanks I'll Eat It Here

than he was in Time Loves a Hero.

I mean, he showed up to sessions, he played,

he took it on the road,

but he was waiting for his solo record to do,

to redeem himself.

Time Loves a Hero split opinion,

with audiences quick to discern the schism between

Lowell's classic Feat sound,

and the new direction taken by Payne and Barrere.

However, fans stuck with the band,

and many were enthusiastic about the jazz fusion

and longer extensions.

Record sales remained buoyant,

and the subsequent tour was a roaring success,

with two shows taped for Waiting For Columbus,

an album that gained a reputation

as one of rock music's seminal live recordings.

But the specter of discord still hung over the band.

Lowell devoted all his energy to his debut solo album,

Thanks I'll Eat It Here,

as rumors circulated that he would leave

Little Feat for good.

- Lowell was constantly leaving the group.

Lowell was so beleaguered by the burden of

leading the group, that he desperately wanted a way out.

That's the nature of,

I think, a successful collaboration,

is to find out that the person in the room that you're with,

that you have the value of dialogue with, is dead wrong.

And I think more and more, Lowell knew

that he was right, it was self-confirmational,

that's what plunged him into doing a solo record.

- I think he finally had achieved what he wanted

in the sense that Warner Bros. gave him

everything that he asked for to do this record.

He had Wally hide his truck at his house.

He was happy.

You know, the idea that he was depressed,

having problems artistically is just totally wrong.

I mean, he had every expectation of becoming,

I think, a big star.

- Well, he had made a deal with Lenny

to make that record, Lenny would pay for the record,

and Lowell started recording it with,

sometimes with the guys, but more often with other drummers,

Jim Keltner, who's big on that record.

Dean Parks played guitar.

And he got to work with other players, doing his thing,

but better in his mind, better able to take direction.

Lowell didn't have to listen to anybody.

He was doing it on his

own time, on his own schedule.

"Himmler's Ring" was,

was kind of a oopah, oompah band, you know, his tuba and

Lowell was just going out to the edges

of what he could imagine to do with these tracks.

And I think he loved that.

♪ Himmler's Ring

♪ Ain't that ring a wonderful thing

♪ Don't that skull and crossbones shine

♪ Some day that ring's gonna be all mine

♪ Himmler's Ring

♪ Don't that ring make you want to sing

♪ Now ain't that monogram so fine

♪ Some day that ring's gonna be all mine

- I remember really looking forward to it,

and then listening to it a couple of times and then

not listening to it anymore.

It didn't give me what I wanted from him.

It just felt like whatever that magical quality was,

that effervescence that had been

so defining an element in his music.

It just wasn't there to the same degree.

- Lowell had somewhat lost touch with his,

you know, muse or his musical animus.

And, I like elements of that record.

But, you know, it's a bit of a cop out, you know?

If someone as great and as brilliant as Lowell George

is gonna make a solo album,

shouldn't it be a little more daring and interesting,

and individual

than that?

You know, it's an album that almost anyone could have made

in Los Angeles in the last half of the 70s.

You know, anyone who loved Allen Toussaint, and Ann Peebles

and hung out with Jimmy Webb and Van Dyke Parks.

It's very much one of those LA records where,

you know, lots of pals are sitting in

and dropping by the studio and adding backing vocals and,

you know, it has its moments.

I mean, "Twenty Million Things"

is one of the greatest ballads that Lowell ever wrote.

I mean, it's absolutely exquisite, beautiful,

and distinctive and if there'd been a bit more of that

on the record, I would have,

it would have made me very happy.

Thanks I'll Eat It Here finally surfaced

in March, 1979.

The reception was tepid,

with many feeling that a stronger debut could be expected

from an artist of Lowell's stature.

While noting that the record only included

a few original George compositions.

Little Feat had a contractual obligation

to deliver a studio album to Warner's

and session commenced in April for Down On The Farm,

but speculation over the band's future continued to mount,

with the press variously reported that Lowell

had either quit, been fired, or dismissed his band mates.

♪ But I got twenty million things to do

♪ Twenty million things

- I was hearing the opposite.

I was hearing that he was getting his shit back together

and the other guys were

encouraged by the

improvement that they thought they saw.

- What one can say about Down On The Farm is

Lowell didn't miss much, really.

I mean, this,

yeah, it sounds very tired and

afterthoughtish, and unsatisfying.

You know, I never play it.

I don't think there's any great moments on it.

Maybe "Front Page News" has a kind of

pale echo of,

of Lowell at his best but, beyond that, it's,

it's a pretty bland and dull record.

♪ They all asked about you

♪ Down on the farm

♪ The cows asked, the pigs asked

♪ The horses asked, too

♪ All want to know why to the city you moved

♪ Changed your name to Kitty

♪ What's come over you

♪ It ain't true, it ain't true, Linda Lou

♪ Say it ain't true, Linda Lou

- It was not a great album, but it was an album

that was full of encouraging signs and,

you know, that might have been wishful thinking on my part.

You know, again,

it wasn't something that I kept going back to

as I had the early stuff,

right through Waiting For Columbus.

But I thought, as a stepping stone to

a recovery I guess is a good word

as you can have, that it was promising.

There was the belief among people who were around the band

or who loved the band that

there was gonna be a happy ending, and it was,

it was just a, you know,

it just ripped everybody's heart out instead.

In the summer of '79,

with Down On The Farm awaiting mixing,

Lowell put a band together and took Thanks I'll Eat It Here

out on the road.

On the 29th of June, just a few shows into the tour,

Lowell George collapsed

in a hotel room in Arlington, Virginia.

The cause of death was later given as heart failure.

He was just 34 years old.

- Well, the day before he died,

I'm working on The Complex and,

building The Complex,

and I get a note from Harry Grossman,

and it says, "Lowell George wants to tell you a joke",

and I didn't call him back,

and that night he died.

Maybe it was the next day,

but I heard about it from Harry Grossman,

we were in the production trailer back at The Complex,

and Harry came in and said,

"You know, I have some really bad news.

"Lowell George died."

I said, "How?"

He said, "Heart attack."

But we all knew

that it was more than a heart attack.

And,

as

oh, who was it?

Said it, Peter Lorre, "I miss him every day."

For 20 years, I miss Lowell George every day.

What it said for me is to take every relationship

a little more seriously, at least to face

how important that person is to me.

You know, we all thought we'd live forever.

Lowell thought he'd live forever.

You know, he'd had motorcycle accidents.

He had fucked up his back on a motorcycle

doing wheelies on Pacific Coast Highway.

And you just don't,

you just, you're just blindsided by it.

But yeah, miss him every day.

- I heard about Lowell's death in New York one morning.

It was before dawn.

The phone rang.

I answered it.

"Lowell's dead."

I waited about two hours, and that

gloaming that came,

the crepuscular dawn setting in.

Finally I dared call Mo Ostin,

the head of Warner Bros. Records.

Warner would breeze.

I said, "Mo, Lowell died."

Without missing a beat, he said, "Was he insured?"

I said, "I doubt it."

He said, "I'll look into that."

Now, this is not for me to assume

that maybe Mo Ostin

committed the most innocent felony of his life,

but all I know is that Lowell's family survived,

with difficulty,

because Lowell didn't get that much

financial gain from all of the time and energy

he put in to helping bid Warner Bros. a fond adieu.

- I was,

I was very sad, and I wasn't surprised.

I, the last time I had seen him,

it was just before he went out on that tour,

as a matter of fact.

There was an artist that I'd mentioned, I said,

"You know, I think she'd be great for you to produce.

"I think you guys should really get together

"when you get back.

"Oh yeah, great."

So there was some planning of what would happen when,

when he can return, but he looked terrible,

and everybody knew it.

There was an inevitability to what had happened.

- Artists hang on, by a slender thread,

forced into performance.

Lowell,

that's what killed Lowell, the forced march.

He was in the front line of a forced march,

outrunning his supplies.

A great general,

whose ambition outreached his ability, ultimately.

So, I can't help but question the ethics

of the record company that sent him gladly

to his death.

- You know, I think about

ultimately, the waste of it.

And I was mad.

There was a time, not long afterwards,

I just got angry about it, you know?

"This seems really unfair", and, you know,

silly, stupid.

"You're smarter than that.

"How could you let that happen", you know, but,

sometimes the power of, certainly the drugs,

the lifestyle, it got bigger than him.

- The guy loses that battle,

and it's a battle with himself.

And, you know, and then you start thinking,

"Well, the thing that,

"the thing that made it great

"might have been the thing that killed him.

"If there's something in that chemistry of

"you know, pushing, pushing to the edge

"and wanting to go beyond it,

"that manifested itself

"in positive and you know, devastatingly negative ways."

In the weeks following Lowell's death,

the stars of American music lined up to pay tribute

to a beloved friend and peerless musician.

A memorial concert at The Forum in LA was held

as a benefit for the George family,

with Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt,

and Bonnie Raitt among the guests that joined

Little Feat on stage.

For Feat, the journey came to a halt.

Following the release of Down On The Farm,

the band members went their separate ways.

The would not reform for the best part of the decade.

- Lowell is one of a handful of artists

who are never gonna get in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,

despite the fact that they've moved the needle

to a far greater degree, artistically,

than a lot of people who have been inducted.

And it has to do with the band's lack of commercial success.

For someone who could affect people

as strongly as he did,

I think he's a shoe-in.

That just makes it a little more melancholy, you know?

The fact that,

the fact that the people who,

the people who know are so far outnumbered

by the people who have no idea.

- If only musicians were allowed to vote,

Little Feat would have been in the Hall of Fame

20 years ago, 25 years ago, on the first ballot.

It's a doggone disgrace that Little Feat is not

in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And from what we can tell,

there doesn't seem to be much of a groundswell

to make that happen.

The line forms behind me, right now.

Little Feat, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

As the years passed,

Lowell's legacy came into sharper relief.

Discovered by successive generations of musicians,

his work became ever more influential,

distinguished as unlike anything else in the idiom,

a truly distinctive voice in rock and roll history.

- He had a unique signature

as a musical personality,

as an artist, that,

I think as time passes,

shows even

greater amounts of depth

that I think for a lot of younger artists,

it recognize as, this is a person of great importance.

- For Lowell, it had to be great, had to be great,

had to be self-evident on hearing it

that it was great and authentic and great.

So that's to me his legacy, and his legacy repeated is

that if it's not great, then fuck it, then go home.

Do it again, you know?

'Cause that's Lowell.

If it wasn't great, do it the fuck again,

not after the first take,

we can fix it in Pro Tools, as the saying goes,

but do it the fuck again.

And if it's not right, do it again!

And do it again, and do it again,

and if you're there all night, you're there all night,

and then go into the next day, and do it again.

You know?

Yeah, that's Lowell.

- This is his legacy.

There was no one like him.

There's nothing stale about the humor.

Farce is very difficult in music.

Absurdism can get very tiresome.

Lowell was capable of

putting a margin of those nuances in his work,

and still inviting another inspection.

As a friend,

he's irreplaceable.

How can I miss him when he won't leave?