Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Robbie Grey, born on this day in 1957. —Ed.

When people think about Modern English, the band that was formed in Colchester in the early eighties, it’s invariably their 1982 hit “I Melt With You” that comes to mind. It was dreamy, irresistible, and impossible to avoid. But before “I Melt With You,” to wit on their 1981 debut LP Mesh & Lace, Modern English showed a far more raw and dissonant face to the world. Mesh & Lace led to no comparisons with Duran Duran because it was an uncompromising slice of droning noise boarding at times on chaos, and had far more in common with Joy Division and PiL than, say, Simple Minds.

Not everybody liked it, that’s for sure. Yo La Tengo’s Ira Robbins, writing for Trouser Press, sneered at Mesh & Lace, calling it “a load of monotonous droning and shouting by a precious art band oppressively weighed down by its self-conscious 4AD pretensions.” Precious they may have been, and droning to boot, but Mesh & Lace is anything but monotonous. Rather it’s an adventurous foray into the heart of darkness by a band that would soon enough undergo a sea change that led to the synthpop of “I Melt With You.”

I’d have never known had it not been for a review comparing noise vandals Clockcleaner to Modern English. This struck me as being akin to comparing GG Allin to the Partridge Family, because like most sentient humans I knew nothing more about Modern English than “I Melt With You.” “Balderdash!” I cried. But I’ll be damned if Mesh & Lace wasn’t one fearless foray into the precincts of noise for noise’s sake. Manic drumming, long drones, chanted lyrics—these guys took Joy Division one step further, by sacrificing their melodies to the exigencies of total desperation. Mesh & Lace doesn’t sound like affectation to me; it sounds like a fatal bludgeoning by Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer.

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Remembering John Rutsey, born on this day in 1952. —Ed.

Sounding less like a bird of prey than a castrati with a gerbil up his ass, Geddy Lee is trying to tell us something. Xanadu, subdivisions, the spirit of radio, how we’re all trees in the forest and if you happen to be a stunted one you’re shit out of luck—your guess is as good as mine. The late Neil Peart, may he rest in peace, wrote ‘em, and your average 13-year-old with a unicorn glitter notebook would have rubbed his nose on the playground gravel.

Behind Geddy, prog-metal bric a brac: 2012’s ping-ponging title track (Rush isn’t a band, it’s a kid with attention deficit disorder) boasts seven parts including a grand finale, and is less a suite than a Frankenstein monster of ill-fitting parts. As for the band’s concept albums, Geddy himself has been quoted as saying, “Even I can’t make sense of them.”

Either you love Rush or you loathe ‘em, and I loathed ‘em up until the day I realized they were a comedy act. Now I love ‘em. Geddy cracks me up every time he opens his beak. “Closer to the Heart” is my all-time favorite song.

But there was an old Rush before the new Rush, and the old Rush can only be heard on the band’s 1974’s eponymous debut. With the soon-to-be-booted John Rutsey on skins, and nary a tedious 19-minute musico-philosophical discourse on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in sight, everybody’s favorite Molson belchers made like Led Zeppelin on Beaver Tails, and while your critic types derided Rush as a turd hamburger, I like it cuz I’ll take good old-fashioned hard rock over mutant mullet metal any day.

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Celebrating George Clinton on his 83rd birthday. —Ed.

A decade or so ago my friend D., a borderline sociopath jailhouse-type individual, suggested we go rock climbing. Without ropes. Idiot that I am, I said sure. I was some 20 feet off the ground—a frightful distance when you looked down—when I found myself unable to go forward or retreat. Suddenly my left leg began to violently shudder. D. looked over (I think I was whimpering for help) and mirthfully cried, “You’ve got Disco Leg!” That’s when I fell, breaking my ankle and cracking my skull.

That “Disco Leg!” never fails to crack me up, and for some reason always brings to mind Funkadelic, the greatest funk-rock band of ‘em all. And of all their LPs, my all-time fav-o-reet has always been 1971’s Maggot Brain. (Yeah, I know, 1978’s One Nation Under a Groove is brilliant, fantastic, blah blah blah, but I’ve made up my mind, and I’m too dumb to change it.) I would say you can thank guitar svengali Eddie Hazel for making Maggot Brain my most treasured slice of P-Funk, but it would only be partly true—some of the tunes on Maggot Brain barely feature Hazel at all, and I still love them every bit as much as my Black Power Fist Afro pick.

Maggot Brain features one of the more unfortunate covers in music history, with its front cover depicting a black woman buried up to her neck screaming in agony and back cover showing the same woman’s head, now become a skull. Why, it’s almost as creepy as the cover of Herbie Mann’s Push Push, on which Herbie shows off his ghastly lubed-up chest pelt for reasons I don’t care to speculate about. And the same goes for Maggot Brain. Then again, what do you expect from a band that entitles an LP Maggot Brain in the first place? P-Funk was a crazy-eyed crew of acid-gobbling freaks, and on LSD everything seems like a grand idea.

Some brief history: George Clinton’s Parliament was founded in the late 1950s in Plainfield, New Jersey as a doo wop group called the Parliaments. But then psychedelics hit town and the Parliaments became Parliament, and morphed from played doo wop to do wot?, by which I mean they went funky berserk. Funkadelic began its career as the backing band for Parliament, but by the early seventies Parliament and Funkadelic were separate entities with different sounds but utilizing most of the same musicians. Funkadelic was the freakier of the two outfits, a funk-rock monolith that melded psychedelia, big honking guitar riffs, Bible-belt blues, James “Soul Brother No. 1” Brown’s flaming funk, Frank Zappa’s absurdist humor, and Sun Ra’s astral plane crash jazz, to cite just some of their influences.

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What am I missing when it comes to English pub rock legends Dr. Feelgood? That’s easy—the pub. I’ll bet you I’d be in seventh heaven if I were hearing them live in a packed public house called The Plough and Merkin, chugging a pint of lager without bothering to remove the cigarette from my mouth, but I’m not. I’m sitting alone in my apartment, with nary a lager lout, football hooligan, Dickensian street urchin (how’d he get here?), or slumming Tory MP in sight. Where are my mates? And the blowsy matron with a bad red dye job, lost in reminiscences of loo knee-tremblers past? And where’s Charles Shaar Murray? He never misses these guys!

But what do I know about the goings-on in English pubs? I’ve only ever been in one, The Blind Beggar in London’s East End, where legendary gangster Ronnie Kray (one of Morrissey’s last of the international playboys) shot and killed George Cornell, and I was there in the middle of the afternoon and the place was as dead as, well, George Cornell. Deader even.

No, Dr. Feelgood is a purely British phenomenon—like Cliff Richard, the Bob’s your uncle and Spotted Dick, and as close as I can come to an American equivalent is the J. Geils Band sans Magic Dan’s showboat harmonica. Except Dr. Feelgood never made the big time thanks to songs like “Love Stinks” and “Centerfold,” and good for Dr. Feelgood says I.

They were meaner and leaner than the J. Geils Band too—they sounded like the aggro-soundtrack to a bit of grievous bodily harm. They were hard men playing hard music, and while they certainly didn’t give you the impression they’d just picked up their instruments and they weren’t calling for anarchy in the UK, they kept things primally simple enough that it wouldn’t have surprised me a find a young soon-to-be Sex Pistol in that imaginary pub of mine, taking notes. Which is why a British journalist wrote of the band, retrospectively, “Feelgood are remembered in rock history, if at all, as John the Baptist to punk’s messiahs.”

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The ugly truth about this review is that the only people who are going to read it are 1) British blues enthusiasts, or as they’re commonly known geeks, 2) Brummie bricklayers on the dole, and 3) Seventies kids who understood that “Slow Ride” was the greatest song ever written about fucking, although they’d never come with forty-girls-length of having sex and couldn’t escape the sneaking suspicion that it was actually a lecture set to music on the wisdom of driving the legally posted speed limit. I fall into the third category.

We’re an oppressed lot. People spit on us from a great height, but what irks me more is they spit on Foghat too. Critics I respect heap shit on them—Robert Christgau wrote, “Is good competent rock really good and competent if its excitement never transcends the mechanical? Is that what getting off means? So maybe they’re not good and competent.” Chuck Eddy wrote, “Can you imagine millions of teenagers paying good money to watch four unemployed gas station attendants? Can you imagine if you were a kid, and you had to explain to your class that your dad plays in Foghat for a living?” And then there was the joker who wrote, “Foghat plays meat and potatoes rock, but they forgot to add the meat.” Wait. That was me!

The basics: Foghat was a London group formed when three of its four members split Savoy Brown after coming to the realization that they were wasting their lives in a group that forgot the potatoes too. They were “Lonesome Dave” Peverett (lead vocals and rhythm guitar), Roger Earl (drums), and Tony Stevens (bass). They were joined by Rod Price, whose prowess on the slide guitar led to his being dubbed “The Bottle.” “Foghat” was the name of Peverett’s imaginary childhood friend, which is pretty fucking weird if you think about it.

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Celebrating Dion on his 85th birthday. —Ed.

Poor Dion DiMucci. In 1975 the singer-songwriter from the Bronx—still seeking to recapture the fame he achieved in the late 1950s and early ’60s with vocal group The Belmonts and as the solo artist who gave us “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue”—made the same mistake so many musicians seem to make: he decided to hire fellow Bronxite Phil Spector to produce his album. Fortunately Spector—a stick of unstable human dynamite on a good day—didn’t shoot Dion, or so much as brandish a gun at him or even give him a wedgie, as he did the Ronettes. But Spector was his normal—which is to say volatilely abnormal—self, and the sessions were chaotic, to say the least.

And what did Dion get for his trouble? A flop. The critics panned Born to Be With You and record buyers shunned it. Even Spector and Dion hated it, the latter going so far as to disown it as “funeral music.” But the winds of fortune are nothing if not mercurial, and in subsequent years the album has become a cult fave, with critics reversing their opinions and many prominent rockers citing it as an influence on their own music.

Dion’s career trajectory is complex, zig-zagging improbably all over the place like the Kennedy Assassination’s Magic Bullet. He began with The Belmonts, which made him famous and almost killed him on the frigid evening of February 3, 1959, when Dion—travelling with the Belmonts as part of the Winter Dance Party tour—declined for financial reasons to board the infamous Beechcraft Bonanza that crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing fellow tour members Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper. In 1960 Dion went solo, and more hits followed. Then he fell prey to heroin addiction, and his style of music became instantly antiquated the moment the British invaded.

DiMucci spent several years in the pop wilderness, experimenting without much pop success with rock and classic blues. But—and here we are, back at the Kennedy Assassination and the Magic Bullet again—in 1968 Dion covered Dick Holler’s “Abraham, Martin & John,” not long after having a profound spiritual experience and giving up heroin. The song became a hit and put him back on the musical map. It also helped establish him as a mature artist, rather than a teen idol. Over the next several years Dion recorded a series of excellent LPs, including Born to Be With You.

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Celebrating Linda Ronstadt on her 78th birthday. —Ed.

Through no fault of her own, Linda Ronstadt has been relegated to the 1970s soft-rock camp. Some would even label her an easy-listening artist, but they’d change their mind by listening to her fiery takes on Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” and Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “It’s So Easy.” Say what you will about the long-time denizen of West Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon scene, she’s more than a lovely voice.

Ronstadt has primarily covered other musicians’ songs, but she’s always left her unique stamp on them. Like Joe Cocker at his best, she’s made their songs her songs, and many of those songs were written by her L.A. contemporaries: Warren Zevon, Lowell George, Townes Van Zant, Neil Young, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the list goes on. If Thelonious Monk was a close personal friend, I would have to include him on the list.

There are plenty of welcome vinyl introductions to Ronstadt’s work. Studio LPs such as 1974’s Heart Like a Wheel and 1977’s Simple Dreams are as good as any, as is 1976’s Greatest Hits. There are some more extensive compilations out there as well. But my personal favorite is 2019’s Live in Hollywood, which was recorded in 1980 at Television Center Studios in Hollywood for broadcast as a special on HBO. Only three of its twelve songs were previously recorded, making it an essential purchase for fans looking for songs they’d yet to hear.

Ronstadt isn’t known for having grit in her voice, or muscle for that matter. But on Live in Hollywood she makes it clear that Linda Ronstadt the MOR (in some folks’ opinion anyway) can be a real belter. It doesn’t hurt that her backing band are not just crack musicians but close friends, and they include the likes of Little Feat keyboard player Bill Payne, guitarist Kenny Edwards, Stone Poneys founder and frequent Ronstadt collaborator, drummer about town Russ Kunkel, and backing vocalist and singer/songwriter Wendy Waldman. They lend Live in Hollywood an organic feel—their warm and intimate sound is miles away from the clinically cold sound coming out of Ronstadt’s contemporaries at the time.

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No one is going to confuse these Swedish Sleazeballs with filthy habits with Abba, although they covered the latter’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” with spectacular success. The best way to introduce the Leather Nun is with their feces-friendly porn-funk classic “F.F.A.” which you might think is a salute to the Future Farmers of America until lead singer Jonas Almquist starts tossing off perve-friendly dance-craze slogans like “Let’s fist again” and “Fist and shout” before finally getting down to the brown with the lines, “Shit on my knuckles, pain up the ass for you.” Well I never.

And lest you think the song “I Can Smell Your Thoughts” is a kind of fecal-sequel (I certainly smell something!) it sounds to me like bad U2, which speaks to Leather Nun’s ultimate failure of nerve. Despite all of their dirty filthy posturing (strippers and hard-core gay porno films at their live shows, hooray!) they could never settle on a sound, and ultimately ended up sounding like wimps on the make.

Depending on where you stand in their discography, they sound like deranged noise punks, an industrial band, a Velvet Underground tribute band, the Psychedelic Furs (see “A Thousand Nights”) with funny accents or the kind of band that puts out a simply hideous synth-rap song called “Cool Shoes” in the hope you’ll think it’s a joke—which it probably was, but it still stinks worse than Almquist’s knuckles.

So, to sum things up, The Leather Nun don’t quite live up to their rep. In fact they didn’t even wear leather—image-wise they couldn’t quite decide whether they wanted to look like the Velvet Underground or the Dead Boys, when any Colonel Tom Parker wannabe worth his salt would have decked them out in full sado-masoch regalia. Why, on one live video I’ve seen guitarist Bengt Aronsson is wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and white pants. What kind of message is that sending to the youth of Sweden? How did these guys expect to be treated as the Elongated Country’s (the Swede’s own nickname for their country, swear to God) answer to the Velvet Underground? You can’t sell defilement, decadence, degradation, and the friendly act of fisting in white pants!

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Talk about your inexplicable oversights—Netherlands’ Gore included a lyric sheet with their 1987 LP Mean Man’s Dream, but they forgot to sing them! Or probably not; certainly one of the metal power trio’s members would have said, as they were turning out the studio lights, “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

Which means Gore were expecting YOU, dear listener, to sing them! They invented at-home heavy metal Karaoke! They made you the star! It wasn’t like every other loser metal album in your record collection, where you have to compete with some Geddy Lee type capable of hitting notes so high you’d need a surface-to-air missile to hit them. Why, it was the greatest stroke of genius since Uriah Heep’s 1971 album Look at Yourself, the cover of which was a mirror allowing you to stare into it and say, “Fucking A, The Heep put ME on the cover!” And the lyrics are in Dutch and English. Which only sucks if you speak Swahili! (Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if they’d printed them in Swahili? Now that would have been a stroke of genius.)

The weird part about this is that Gore don’t strike me as pranksters. Their music is utterly devoid of humor. It’s also, in case you’re wondering, utterly devoid of color. And no wonder. Gore stripped metal down to its bare bone essentials. No vocals. No guitar solos. No harmonies. No irksome melodies even. All of that stuff is for decadent bourgeois types who can’t handle the brutal truth that life is a relentless and remorseless grind intent up grinding you into powder! Gore’s is a puritanical minimalism that brings them into the realm of the avant garde. Which is French for “no fun.” But who ever said you were supposed to “enjoy” music? Gore understood a simple truth: you’re its punching bag! And Gore wore brass knuckles.

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Celebrating Peter Murphy on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

Sometimes I’m ashamed for my fellow music critics. Take their rude treatment of Bauhaus’ 1980 debut, In the Flat Field. An NME writer described the LP as “nine meaningless moans and flails bereft of even the most cursory contour of interest,” while a Sounds writer dismissed the LP for having “No songs. Just tracks (ugh). Too priggish and conceited,” before writing the LP off as “coldly conceited.”

I’m no Goth fan because I have a pulse, but I think the writers above are idiots. I will concede that In the Flat Field is cold, but I also happen to find it brilliant—one of the finest LPs of 1980. Clamorous and loud, it’s a wonderful example of the sonic possibilities of carefully controlled noise, and its wild sounds and angular riffs provide the perfect backdrop for the chilly vocals of Peter Murphy.

Take “Dive.” Daniel Ash’s guitar playing and saxophone work are brilliantly crisp and menacing, the tune proceeds at a breakneck pace, and Murphy’s vocals are a marvel; he stutters, shouts, does it all. Or take LP opener “Double Dare.” It commences with some heavily fuzzed out riffs, then the drums kick in, and this is metal, people. Murphy is as his dark best, producing nonsense noises when he isn’t shouting, the rhythm section is heavy as Flipper, and what we have here is a drone rocker as good as any by No Trend.

The title cut is a racing rumble of distorted guitar, with great percussion and Murphy singing about who knows what (“black matted lace of pregnant cows”???), although the chorus is clear enough: “I do get bored, I get bored/In the flat field.” My recommendation is to ignore the lyrics about “spunge stained sheets” and hone in on Ash’s shredding sheets of guitar noise, the wonderful percussion, and Murphy’s vocals, which climb to an apocalyptic pitch while Ash’s guitar howls and howls.

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Celebrating Courtney Love on her 60th birthday. —Ed.

Lots of people despised Courtney Love back in the day. They viewed her as the talentless and vulgar villain in the lurid, drugged-out soap opera that was her marriage with Kurt Cobain, and if you listened to some of them, she was actually responsible for murdering the poor guy. Bullshit. To all of it. And to prove them all wrong, Love’s band Hole produced one of the very best albums of 1998, Celebrity Skin.

Celebrity Skin was Hole’s third LP, and there are those who prefer its predecessors (1991’s Pretty on the Inside and 1994’s Live Through This) because Celebrity Skin constituted a turn away from post-grunge punk towards a more pop sound. In addition, unlike most of the songs on Hole’s previous efforts, the bulk of the songs on Celebrity Skin were team efforts, with another two being written by guitarist/collaborator Eric Erlandson without Love’s assistance. Finally, Love saw fit to enlist the help of Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy “Ol’ Cueball” Corgan, who gets partial songwriting credits on five of the LP’s twelve tracks.

The songs on Celebrity Skin aren’t merely pretty on the inside; they’re pretty on the outside as well. The LP’s title is its theme—Love abandons overcast Seattle for sunny California, and the LP’s pop leanings reflect that fact. Which isn’t to say it’s themes are sunny as well—far from it. It’s the contrast between sun-drenched melody and dark message that makes Celebrity Skin so potent a work.

Both of the LP’s two opening tracks make this clear. The title track has a guitar riff as sharp as a razor, and opens with the great lines “Oh, make me over/I’m all I wanna be/A walking study/In demonology,” after which Love runs down the cost of Hollywood celebrity (“No second billing ’cause you’re a star now/Oh, Cinderella, they aren’t sluts like you/Beautiful garbage, beautiful dresses”) and failure (“When I wake up in my makeup/Have you ever felt so used up as this?/It’s all so sugarless/Hooker, waitress, model, actress/Oh, just go nameless”). But Love ends it all on a defiant note, “You want a part of me/Well, I’m not selling cheap/No, I’m not selling cheap.”

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Remembering Bon Scott in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

Rock ‘n’ roll primitivists in thrall to electricity and American thighs, these salivating koala shaggers from Oz were the dingoes who REALLY got Meryl Streep’s baby, and maybe your baby (or your mom!) too. Just about everybody I know hates ‘em, thinks their dumb, but I’m a big fan of AC/DC’s brand of Down Under thunder–it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to being struck by lightning.

Released the year punk exploded, High Voltage (the band’s first international release) may as well have been a punk record; the snot quotient’s high enough. But the Aussie lager louts in AC/DC weren’t play-acting nihilists–all they wanted to do was get rich and get laid while sticking their tongues out (just like Angus on the album cover!) at everything (school, parents, jobs, the Twelve Commandments) that stood in their way.

Accidental electrocution risks like “Live Wire” and “High Voltage” let you know AC/DC has electricity on the brain, but that’s just cuz it takes a whole lotta juice to produce their bare-bones brand of arena-shaking amplification. Nobody’s ever accused AC/DC of subtlety, and that’s one of the things I love most about ‘em. They’re the rock’n’roll equivalent of Mike Tyson, dispensing with all that Muhammed Ali “float like a butterfly” bullshit shit in favor of big one-punch T.K.O.s.

And then there’s Bon Scott, whose premature death (gargling vomit really can be a health hazard) was a bona fide rock tragedy. High Voltage is hardly the best AC/DC LP in terms of songs (with a few exceptions they would go on to write better), or even sonic sturm und drang, but Scott–whose voice is all sandpaper and razor blades–never sounded better.

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Unlike a certain religious figure I can think of, Rod “the Mod” Stewart didn’t walk on water until his third go-round. On 1971’s Every Picture Tells a Story Stewart finally got it right. He nailed down his persona (lovable rogue with lascivious cackle and sensitive side). Wrote himself a remarkable assemblage of brilliant songs (including perhaps the two best coming-of-age songs ever written and the heartfelt “Mandolin Wind”). And finally assembled THE IDEAL cast of players who found the perfect balance between rough and tumble rock ’n’ roll, folk, and soul. If Every Picture Tells a Story isn’t the perfect album, I’m D.B. Cooper.

Which isn’t to say he sank beneath the waters without a trace his first two times out. Anything but. Both 1969’s The Rod Stewart Album (which was released under the better title An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down in the UK) and 1970’s Gasoline Alley are superb albums—gritty, soulful powerhouses packed with strong Stewart originals and imaginative covers, and boasting simpatico supporting musicians many of whom would join him on Every Picture Tells a Story.

His first two don’t get the attention afforded solo album number three, but they’re required listening. Unlike Elton John and David Bowie, Stewart (who’d honed his vocal chops with Long John Baldry’s Steampacket, the little known and short-lived Shotgun Express and the Jeff Beck Group) never took a false or indecisive step. He had his blueprint down from the very beginning—it was simply a matter of perfecting his songwriting.

And talk about double-tasking. Stewart may have the reputation as a debonair roué and two-fisted drinker (who else would put out a greatest hits album shaped like a whiskey glass?), but at least part of it must have been smoke and mirrors—he couldn’t have spent all of his time bedding the ladies and hitting the bottle, because if so where’d he find the time to put together his early solo albums (one per year, more or less) while also singing and writing songs (and immortal ones, at that) for Faces, who toured heavily and released four albums in three years in their own right? The guy worked like a bricklayer. And the lads in Faces were doing double-duty too—some or all of them appeared on his solo albums, that is until he began his sad downward slide towards mainstream mediocrity and decided he could be more mediocre without them.

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Remembering Paul Barrere in advance of his birthdate tomorrow.
—Ed.

Little Feat was one of America’s foremost pre-punk-era bands, perhaps even its best. Little Feat boasted musicians with mad skills, the best of them the brilliant vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Lowell George. And like a great junkball pitcher, they could throw all manner of bedazzling shit your way. They played fastball rock, curveball boogie, knuckleball blues, and a dangerous forkball funk, and with a runner of third and one out they might even send some screwball country past you, and make you look like a fool, boy. No wonder none other than Jimmy Page hailed them as his favorite American band.

In short, Little Feat cooked. But lots of bands can cook—all you need is a frying pan and some grease. What truly separated Little Feat from the pack was its brilliant songwriting. The band bequeathed us a whole shitload of timeless songs—including “Easy to Slip,” “Willin’,” “Spanish Moon,” “Hamburger Midnight,” “Dixie Chicken,” and plenty more besides—not one of which I have ever heard played on my car radio. There is no justice in this world, boyo.

In addition to being a great band, Little Feat remains an enduring medical enigma. To wit: When did Little Feat, or Patient X as the band is referred to in the copious medical literature on the subject, actually die? Some would argue that Little Feat is very much alive, and it’s true that a band by that name continues to make the rounds of the concert circuit. But I would argue that said band is little more than an animated corpse, dragging its desiccated carcass and reek of putrefaction from town to town and playing by means of jolts of electricity carefully administered by technicians hiding backstage.

Still others would pronounce the time of death as June 1979, when George died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Arlington, Virginia at age 34. But in my expert medical opinion, and I will go into this in more detail later, Little Feat expired well before that, in 1975 to be precise, a victim of Lowell’s diminishing role in the band and a creeping case of Steely Dan Disease.

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Remembering Delaney Bramlett, born on this day in 1939. —Ed.

Poor Eric Clapton. Having been through the supergroup wringer with Cream and Blind Faith, there was nothing he craved more than a little anonymity. No more “Clapton is God”; all he wanted to be was a player in a band that wasn’t being hyped to the stars, and where he could perform his six-string pyrotechnics in the background, as it were. Those are rich man problems, for sure, but Clapton was truly burnt out, and given the opportunity to tour with the American soul/rock/blues band Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, he happily said yes. It was a respite and it paid off, as his guitar playing on the resulting LP, 1970’s On Tour with Eric Clapton, testified.

During the early seventies the Bramletts fronted a musical family that saw them taking in lots of famous orphans, including Duane Allman, George Harrison, Rita Coolidge, Dave Mason, and King Curtis. Despite a host of studio LPs Delaney and Bonnie were best regarded as an incendiary live act, one that led Clapton to not only say, “Delaney taught me everything I know about singing,” but “For me, going on [with Blind Faith] after Delaney and Bonnie was really, really tough, because I thought they were miles better than us.” In any event his time spent with Delaney and Bonnie was a happy one for the troubled musician.

On Tour with Eric Clapton didn’t just feature Clapton. In fact it was populated by a veritable who’s who of the best of rock’s supporting musicians, many of whom also played on that same year’s LP Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Clapton’s next project, Derek and the Dominos. You’ve got Dave Mason on guitar, Bobby Whitlock on organ and keyboards, Carl Radle on bass, Jim Gordon on drums, Bobby Keys on saxophone, Jim Price on trombone and trumpet, and Rita Coolidge on backing vocals; the folks who saw this iteration of the band live were lucky indeed.

Opener “Things Get Better” is a Booker T. and the M.G.’s song, and the band does Stax Records proud with a great horn section, Delaney and Bonnie’s soulful singing, and lots of funky organ by Bobby Whitlock. Things really do get better when Rita Coolidge throws in on vocals and Clapton rips into a guitar solo that never fails to sock my knocks off.

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