However you want to classify them: classic rock, jamband adjacent, country rock, or blues rock, there’s no denying that Little Feat has been one of the most consistent and popular live music acts of the last 50 years. From its days with guitar player and lead singer Lowell George to the decades after his death, Little Feat have been trucking on with relentless touring since they got back together in 1988. Lineups have changed over time, but Bill Payne, co-founder of the group, has been along for the ride since their inception in 1969. LEO talked with Payne to discuss Little Feat’s new album, reflections on the past, and how the band changed after Lowell George passed away. Little Feat will be playing at the Louisville Palace on October 24, with support from the Travelin’ McCourys.
LEO: With Little Feat, you just released your first album in 12 years, and also 53 years since your debut studio album. How has the record making process changed for you over this time?
Bill Payne: That’s a great question, first and foremost. The process has not changed a whole lot. In other words, when you record whether it’s in a studio, which we did for this record Sam’s Place, or you’re recording at home which a lot of people do including myself, you still have to know how to play. You still have to know how to put music together. It’s all based on format and songs. Grooves. None of that’s gone away, it still applies. In that sense it’s good, everything else has all changed. The methodology of getting music out to people, the fan base. You don’t have as much record company support as you used to have, that kind of thing. Really, the notion of recording seems to have been pretty stable over the years and it’s just in terms of what a musician has to do to pull it off.
LEO: Why did the band feel an urge to get back in the studio after such a long break and only touring?
Bill Payne: There was an idea that I had quite a few years ago to have a blues album for Sam Clayton. To my mind he’s one of the real guys. I’ve worked with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, John Lee Hooker. I played a show with Willie Dixon at Madison Square Garden, it was George Porter on bass from the Meters, Paul Barrere and Richie Hayward from Little Feat, and we backed up Willie Dixon, Greg Allman, Johnny Winter, and Joe Cocker, and it was a party for John Lee Hooker. A couple months later I was working with John on his records. So, [Sam] Clayton to me fits in where those folks are. He’s the real deal. The practical side of things is we couldn’t get it funded, and it wasn’t until we got new management with Ken Levitan and Brian Penix that I brought up the idea again for a blues album as we were listening to some music of Little Feat playing in Albany at the Egg. He remarked how great Sam sounded on this blues song and I said “yeah he sure does, and it would be great to do a blues album on him.” Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting people on board with things, because that idea was there a good 15 years before it came to fruition.
LEO: Could you go a little bit into the formation of the band in 1969?
Bill Payne: What I’m doing right now, I’m writing a book, it’s a memoir called Carnival Ghosts, so I’m deep into the subject right now. In 1969 we formed Little Feat. I met Lowell George at his house. Richie Hayward was one of the first people to come by a few weeks later. I was still living on the beach in friends’ apartments up in Alta Vista which is in Santa Barbara. But over that summer, we started to put things together. We probably auditioned about 14 bass players over the next 8 to 9 months, but most importantly we started writing songs. The first group of songs we wrote were more aimed at Frank Zappa and the Mothers kind of stuff, instrumental music. We played it for Ahmet Ertegun, [he] was a producer and record guy at [Atlantic Records] that produced Ray Charles and a bunch of folks. He looked at Lowell and I and said “boys, it’s too diverse.” So we went back to the drawing board, and started writing what would be the first Little Feat record, the self-titled Little Feat. The titles alone for the songs give you ideas of how eclectic the album was. “Brides of Jesus,” “Hamburger Midnight,” “Strawberry Flats,” you know, that kind of stuff. It was all over the map. Rolling Stone Magazine, Ed Ward and Bud Scoppa, were [some] of the guys that thought out music was really cool and I was like, “Wow! We’re gonna be stars!” Of course we weren’t, but we were off and running anyway. 1969 is what I call the summer of murder, lust, and love.
LEO: You mentioned Lowell George, and I know that you and him wrote most of the music together in that era of the band. I know that you’re still a songwriter yourself, and I wanted to know how did your songwriting process change after he passed away in 1979?
Bill Payne: Another great question. In this book that I’m writing I’ve got these sections called “Into the Wilderness” and I think this is “Into the Wilderness 2.” What I’m doing after Lowell George’s passing I’m beginning to work with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, I think Stevie Nicks might have been in there as well. At any rate, when I was out touring with those people I wasn’t out writing songs I was performing their music, but I was getting a better sense of what Little Feat meant to people. Because that was in the middle of the storm, with Lowell and everything. Paul Barrere wrote a lot of songs too, he and I wrote a lot of tunes together. But what happened was I slowly began to gain more confidence as a songwriter once I began to get a sense of who we were to people. We reformed Little Feat in 1988 which was for Let It Roll. Craig Fuller was now in the band, he was with Pure Prairie League and wrote a song called “Aimee,” he was a really good song writer too. Fred Tackett was with us. Fred was also one of the first people I met in Los Angeles, he’s an excellent songwriter. One of his tunes, “Fool Yourself,” is on Dixie Chicken for example, but he wasn’t in the band until 1988. I became a lot more collaborative with people, which is another aspect of my songwriting. I’ll shoot forward quite a few years into the future when I began to start writing with Robert Hunter from the Grateful Dead. We wrote 20 songs together, of which four were on Rooster Rag which is a record recorded in 2012. I think confidence was a pretty good factor.
LEO: It’s also the 50th anniversary of Feats Don’t Fail Me Now and you all released a deluxe edition of the album. I was wondering if you could into the recording of that album?
Bill Payne: Feats Don’t Fail Me Now was in 1974. The deluxe version is something that Warners and Rhino have gone to the vaults and taken out recordings we did in and around the time of recording that album and shortly thereafter, because there is some stuff from Europe on there. The album itself was record in Maryland in a place called Hunt Valley, at Blue Seas Recording. We brought in George Massenburg, who was our engineer. He came in from Barkley Studios in France. George is an acoustic scientist, in addition to being an engineer, he developed a parametric equalizer which is in every home studio and studio in the world, so he’s an innovator. The recording process itself was kind of fun. We set up camp in Maryland to record this album, so we had people like Emmylou Harris and Fran Tate who I later married [come to the studio]. We had Robert Palmer in there, because Lowell had been recording in New Orleans with [him] on a record called Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, so not only did we meet him but we record on his next album called Pressure Drop, and I worked with Robert on a few more records after that and wrote songs with him too with Fran Tate. In addition to the recording process, we were more or less the darlings of the Washington D.C. and Maryland corridor, so that began our love affair with Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and surrounding areas that exists to this day.
LEO: You mentioned the archival stuff that’s on the deluxe editions, I think that’s how a lot of newer fans get into the music with re-releases and just a large amount of music coming out of the vaults. As a fan, is there a lot of stuff still in the vaults? Are you involved in picking what gets released?
Bill Payne: With Warners I haven’t been involved in it. There’s really not that much to choose from to be honest with you when it comes to archival stuff, particularly things that were recorded in the studio. A lot of bands go in and record say 20 songs, but we would go in and if we needed to record 10 songs for a record we would record 10 songs.
LEO: How do you feel about the accessibility of music now, you mentioned it earlier when talking about the new album, and for younger people to find the music?
Bill Payne: I think it’s cool, man. We relied upon looking at albums, which are back en vogue again because you can read the liner notes and see who played on what and that kind of thing. You guys have access to that but you have a lot more available to you. Having knowledge is a good thing. It increases your vocabulary, for one. I was talking to Ed Toth who is the drummer for the Doobie Brothers, Scott Sharrard who is in our band, and Tony Leone. Tony’s 54 and I’m 75. Those guys are like historians in a way, because they have access to so many things and you can have a deeper understanding of some of the stuff that guys my age lived through. I got that going for me, provided I can still remember it. I have access to the same things you guys do, but it’s a matter of being inquisitive, you know? Like, how much do you want to know about Muddy Waters or B.B. King? There’s just so much there, and I love the fact that we have access to it, and that [younger people] have access to it. And what we do as creative people, whether it’s writing, cooking, playing music, we’re only as good as what we surround ourselves with, what we read, what we eat. I think the inquisitive people have an edge because you’re up against some people that are not inquisitive. I’d rather read books than ban them or burn them, I never thought we’d get back to that but here we are. It’s important to stay on top of the curve on that level and being a humanist. The arts and humanities are named that for a reason, they express our humanity. If we can be custodians of that, at any age, because it’s not about age it’s about how involved we are, so I applaud that.
LEO: So for the final question, I always like to ask people, what are you listening to a lot of now?
Bill Payne: Let me look at what I’ve got on my playlist. I’ve got Alicia de Larrocha who is a classical pianist from Spain, she does a lot of Mozart. I love listening to her. On the jazz side, I haven’t been listening to a lot lately because I’ve been writing this book and it takes up a lot of real estate in your head. There’s this album I’ve been listening to when I’m baking that’s got Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis [E.S.P. by Miles Davis]. Any stuff those guys did was cool with me. I don’t listen to a lot of rock and roll, but I’m certainly aware of stuff. I’ve been listening to a lot of the stuff I played on back in the day. When I met Lowell I was familiar with Conway Twitty and stuff on the countryside, but back in 1980 or 81 I worked on a record with Johnny Lee called “Lookin For Love in All the Wrong Places,” and that was for a movie called Urban Cowboy, and that movie introduced country music to a wider audience. I felt really cool about being on a record that had that kind of impact. I’ve got a big place in my heart for country music.
This article appears in LEO Weekly presents Readers’ Choice 2024.