God save us from Little Feat fans. They are a large and fanatical tribe, and the music critic who says baleful things about their favorite band risks everything but a public lynching. I wrote a very positive review of one of the Feat’s early LPs a while back, and in said review took some potshots at their later-era work, accusing the band of smoothing off its rough edges, writing dull songs, and allotting keyboardist Bill Payne free rein to turn the group’s once freaky, roots-rich sound into a slick soup that bordered at times on jazz fusion. I would add I’m not alone—Robert Christgau said Payne’s synths “recall bad Rufus.” And while I have no idea what bad Rufus sounds like, I know an insult when I hear one.
I took aim at 1975’s The Last Record Album, 1977’s Time Loves a Hero, and 1979’s Down on the Farm, but I also directed abuse at the band’s legendary live album, 1978’s Waiting for Columbus. And that’s what sent the Little Feat horde into apoplexy. My recollection of the band’s first live LP was that it was good, but mortally wounded by both Payne’s synthesizers and general slickness. I said so, and what I received in response were dozens of posts from Feat freaks telling me in no uncertain terms that I was full of shit.
I vowed then to give Waiting for Columbus another listen, and having done so I stand by my original assessment. I don’t care if it’s considered one of the better live albums of the seventies; to me it’s the last gasp of a band that had been going downhill for years. Their later studio albums (meaning every LP after 1974’s Feats Don’t Fail Me Now) were polished in a way that no blues’n’boogie LP should be, and lacked good songs to boot. The sheer weirdness of their earlier LPs went the way of the dodo, to be replaced by the nondescript songs on, say, 1975’s so-so at best The Last Record Album. Songs like “Romance Dance” and the execrable and synth-dominated slice of jazz fusion that is “Day at the Dog Races” were a sad comedown from the days of “Oh, Atlanta” and “Dixie Chicken,” and seemed to signal both the desertion of Lowell George’s muse (his share of songwriting credits decreased dramatically post-1974) and the hijacking of the band’s rougher-edged grooves by the silky smooth synths of Bill Payne.
And all of this is evident on Waiting for Columbus, which includes some lackluster songs from the later albums and is altogether too slick, thanks in large part to Payne’s synthesizer. To cite just two examples—I’ll get to more later—Payne’s synthesizer solo on “All That You Dream” is an annoyance and a distraction, drawing attention away from George’s soulful lament, as captured in such doleful lines as, “I’ve been down/But not like this before.” The same goes for the bluesy and otherwise wonderful “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” which with its great percussion, George’s excellent slide guitar and inimitable growl, and cool backing vocals is copacetic until you toss Payne’s synthesizer into the mix, at which point flush goes the toilet. All of which proves that if you intend to play dem cosmik blues, you’re best off leaving the synthesizer at home.
The true pity is that Payne’s piano playing is on of the band’s greatest attributes. The piano on “Oh, Atlanta” is proof, as Payne plays some boogie woogie that’s guaranteed to get you off the sofa. His piano work is also stellar on the slower but still great “Old Folks’ Boogie,” which Payne sings and which highlights solos by both Payne on piano and George on slide guitar. I wish the song had a bit more propulsion, but the guitar work alone makes it a keeper, which is more than can be said about “Time Loves a Hero,” which Payne sings and which I have always found slicker than a spitball. Everything—from George’s guitar on down—sounds too smooth coming from the band that gave us such rivetingly raucous tunes as “Snakes on Everything” and “Hamburger Midnight.” It has echoes of Aja-era Steely Dan, and that tells you everything you need to know about it.
“Day and Night” features some group vocals and is very middle of the road; even George’s gutbucket guitar playing fails to make up for the song’s lackluster nature. And matters are made worse by Payne’s synthesizer, which ensures the song’s ruination. Just how bad is “Day and Night”? It might as well be a Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers song. (How far-fetched is the MacDonald comparison? Not too far, as the Sultan of Smooth sings backup on “Red Streamliner,” an album out-take that was not released until the 2002 “deluxe edition” of Waiting for Columbus.) Even the saxophone solo towards the end is too “smooth jazz” for my tastes, although I must admit that the brief foray into chaos that follows has its charms. As for “Mercenary Territory,” another latter-day Feat tune, it sounds like a bad late-period Band song to me, and has all the charisma of George Harrison, although I do like it when George sings, “And I did my time in your rodeo/But the fool that I am/I’d do it all over again.” I also like the way the guitar and the Tower of Power horns build to a climax, and the rawboned sax squonk and squeal that follow.
Both “Spanish Moon” and “Dixie Chicken” are great songs, and Little Feat doesn’t fuck them up, or fuck them up beyond redemption in any case. The former opens with some funky percussion that sets up a great groove, at which point the members of Tower of Power come in with some really snazzy horns. George is at his best vocally, growling and moaning about a badass juke joint where “There’s whiskey, and bad cocaine/Poison get you just the same/And if that don’t—that don’t—kill you soon/The women will down at the Spanish Moon.” The same theme—namely, beware the ruinous spells cast by duplicitous women—is repeated in “Dixie Chicken,” which highlights Payne’s honky tonk piano and George’s slide guitar, and tells the story of a southern belle who promises George the world only to skedaddle after taking his every last dime. I’m not thrilled by Payne’s extended piano solo in the middle, which segues into some Dixieland jazz, because it disrupts the momentum of the song, but the guitar work after that is fine and the song’s ending is classic, as George stops in at the bar in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel to hear its every last male patron singing the same song he thought his Tennessee Lamb had only sung for him.
“Rocket in My Pocket” is one of George’s last good songs, and he sings it to the accompaniment of a great horn section. His call-and-response with the backup singers is great, as is his slide guitar work. I wish it were a bit more stripped down and closer to the bone; as the band got bigger their sound got fuller, and I never fail to miss the gutbucket, back-to-the-basics sound of their earlier LPs. “Don’t Bogart That Joint” is a nice little throwaway about that guy who just won’t pass the reefer, while the band performs a nice, and perhaps too nice, version of the great outlaw trucker anthem “Willin’.” Payne’s piano sweetens it up, and I would have preferred it had the song relied on the guitarists, but Payne’s piano fortunately stops short of kicking all the road dirt off the studio original. Not as effective is “Sailin’ Shoes,” which the band slows down and stretches out at the expense of the song’s original succinctness. Paine’s piano work is top-notch, the guitar work is stellar, and George is at his bluesy best on vocals. But this baby reminds me of The Grateful Dead at their most lethargic, and neither Payne’s nice piano solo or George’s slide guitar solo that follows justifies the tune’s doubling in time from the original.
“Tripe Face Boogie” opens in media res, and seems to be the continuation of some other song not included on the LP. But the beginning is great and features the Feat at their most rollicking, with Payne kicking keister on piano and George vowing to boogie his sneakers away. Unfortunately, Payne comes in around the 2-minute mark to play some pseudo-prog on the synth, and the terrifying specter of Keith Emerson suddenly darkens the arena. The rhythm then picks up again, but it’s still Payne’s synthesizer that dominates the proceedings, and what you get is synthesized boogie, which is not as tasty as real boogie, and gives you the squirts like those low-calorie potato chips. This song alone demonstrates the high price the Feat paid by giving Payne free rein to tinker around on his damn synthesizer in the first place. Fortunately George’s guitar returns just in time for him to sing, “Look out!” over and over, with a nice guitar riff tossed in between every repeat.
“A Apolitical Blues” may be the LP’s best tune. A bare bones blues with some roughneck guitar interplay between George and guest Mick Taylor of Stones fame, it features George receiving a phone call from Chairman Mao, which is just the kind of bizarre touch the early Little Feat liked to throw at you—due perhaps to their work with Frank Zappa—and which evaporated as time went on. The guitar playing is mean and George’s vocals are as rough as sandpaper, and the guitars kick the Chairman’s ass from here to Nanking. Payne throws in with some piano plink as George repeats, “Do you hear it ringin’?/Do you hear it ringin’?/DO YOU HEAR IT RINGIN’?” towards the end. LP closer “Feats Don’t Fear Me Now” is fast paced and features some nice harmony vocals and in general is one of Little Feat’s best songs, and they give it all they’ve got. Payne’s piano playing is frantic, and if I’m not wild about the long interlude in the middle during which the band repeats, “Roll right through the night” to the accompaniment of a great bass it’s only because I don’t believe in stopping a song’s momentum right when things are getting interesting. That’s jam band territory, which is the direction the Feat took after George’s passing. Lots of cries and shouts from the stage follow the band’s return to the raucous melody, and those cries and shouts are a nice way of going out, because they’re real, authentic, and not at all slick—in short, they capture the bloozy, live-wire spirit of the Little Feat I love.
The late seventies were a bad time for rockers. They all seemed dead set on going LA to slicken up their sound at the expense of their rough-edged charms. I call it Steely Dan syndrome, although that’s not altogether accurate because the Dan never had many rough edges to sand off in the first place. But so far as I’m concerned the synthesizer was one of the chief villains in this general trend, and few bands suffered from synthesizer abuse as badly as Little Feat. Waiting for Columbus is a good album marred by that damnable instrument, and if I loved Waiting for Columbus back in the day, I can hardly listen to it now. And why should I, when I can listen to Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, Dixie Chicken, Sailin’ Shoes, and Little Feat? There isn’t a single cut on Waiting for Columbus that is better than its studio counterpart, and not a single cut on Waiting for Columbus that is as cool as “Strawberry Flats,” “Teenage Nervous Breakdown,” or “Brides of Jesus.” To say nothing of the aforementioned “Snakes on Everything” and “Hamburger Midnight.”
The bottom line? Time loves a hero, sometimes. Other times, it helps you to realize that your hero has feet of clay. And so it goes for Waiting for Columbus, at least for me. I listened to it hundreds of times in my stoned adolescence and loved it, but I don’t love it no more. Now it just makes me sad. Little Feat could have been America’s Rolling Stones. Instead they fell flat on their face around the time of Time Loves a Hero and never got back up. Which is why I don’t consider Lowell George’s premature death as much of a tragedy as I do, say, the death of Ronnie Van Zant. George’s best work seemed behind him, and he was toiling in a band that was headed in precisely the wrong direction and no longer seemed interesting in producing sparks. In short, he was on the downward slide, whether it was due to cocaine excess or plain old muse desertion. In any event, Waiting for Columbus partakes more of the new, slicker Little Feat than the Little Feat that gave us “Dixie Chicken” and “Spanish Moon,” and that is a tragedy, I don’t care what the band’s legion of fans—a good and faithful bunch, God bless ‘em—have to say.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
