LITTLE FEAT OPENS SATURDAY FOR TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND AT SPAC
“We’ve had more acts than a Shakespeare play!” laughed Payne when I proposed a rock and roll resiliency award should be named for Little Feat – one of America’s greatest and longest-lasting bands.
Payne sees Little Feat in the rear-view mirror and through the windshield with equal clarity.
Little Feat, 2024 – From left: Bill Payne, keyboards; Kenny Gradney, bass; Fred Tackett, guitar; Sam Clayton, percussion and blues vocals; Scott Sharrard, guitar; Tony Leone, drums. All but Gradney and Tackett also sing. Fletcher Moore photo
Early in a phone conversation last week from his Montana home, Payne discussed the new “Sam’s Place” Little Feat blues album and the also-new “Strike Up the Band” that hits next year. Meanwhile, a 50th anniversary reissue of “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” (1974) refreshes familiar tracks and buried treasures.
Saturday, Aug. 31, Little Feat opens for the Tedeschi Trucks Band at Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Only TTB, the best rock big-band on the road, could risk such strong openers as Greensky Bluegrass and Margo Price Friday, and Little Feat Saturday. Past TTB tours have featured Los Lobos, Hot Tuna, Ziggy Marley, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Marcus King, Drive-By Truckers, Shovels and Rope and other killers.
“We’ve got an exceptional band right now,” Payne confidently said, noting how newcomers drummer Tony Leone and guitarist Scott Sharrard have renewed Little Feat; as has longtime percussionist turned bluesy singer Sam Clayton. Constantly evolving since 1969, it’s one of America’s most versatile and powerful bands.
Little Feat, 1988; at Albany’s Palace Theatre – From left: Bill Payne, keyboards and vocals; Fred Tackett, guitar; Sam Clayton, percussion and vocals; Craig Fuller, vocals and guitar; Richie Hayward, drums; Paul Barrere, guitar and vocals; Kenny Gradney, bass. (Tackett played on that same stage with Bob Dylan on his 1980 “Saved” tour.) Michael Hochanadel photo
As Payne is writing in his memoir “Carnival Ghosts,” Little Feat split and reformed twice even before co-founder Lowell George died in 1979. That break seemed final, but they reunited in 1987 with new singer Craig Fuller, brought in Shawn Murphy when Fuller left and new drummers after Richie Hayward died (Leone is the latest), then guitarist Sharrard after Paul Barrere died.
“You can’t replace Lowell George, Richie Hayward and Paul Barrere,” Sharrard told me last year. “These are three of the most brilliant musicians in American music history…What you do is honor them.”
Little Feat’s new “Sam’s Place” album starring Clayton as lead vocalist honors the band’s bluesy history. It’s resiliency personified, with an Albany connection.
“It was hidden in front of everybody,” Payne said of Clayton’s voice, “but nobody knew it.” Payne felt, “I had a pretty good line on what the blues is” after playing with B.B. King, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Taj Mahal and others. He said Clayton belongs in that company. “He has a great delivery, and his ability to emote and capture people is the thing.”
Payne’s long-simmering idea of a Clayton-centered blues album became reality when he and Brian Penix from Vector Management listened to a Little Feat show recorded at The Egg. When Penix said, “Sam really sounds good,” Payne replied, “I think we ought to do a blues album with him.”
Little Feat’s groove sizzles and steams on “Sam’s Place.” In addition to Clayton’s raspy, soulful secret-weapon voice, adding Leone and Sharrard also juiced the band’s sound. Payne suggested in their first post-COVID rehearsal that the newcomers learn current versions of Little Feat songs. Instead, they went back to the originals – “re-introducing me to our music,” said Payne.
Bill Payne at Albany’s Palace Theater, October 1988. Michael Hochanadel photo
He explained, “Musicians can tell you that Little Feat’s music sounds like it’s easy, until you try to play it!” When Blue Note Records chief, bassist and producer Don Was led a band playing Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus” live album, he told Payne it was harder than he thought. Payne felt humbled when Phish also played it, when the ambitious jam-band played full albums by Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and other giants. “To be included in that company was mind-blowing for me.”
Paul Barrere also told me late in his life, “It’s nice having all these jam bands, like Gov’t Mule, Phish and Widespread Panic play a song or two of ours here and there because it kind of revamped our careers. Their fans became our fans.”
“It’s endless.”
Barrere had then explained Little Feat’s supple, strong groove. “We have a way of creating space that allows everybody to have a voice.”
Jam bands’ seek to emulate that groove in playing Little Feat songs, honoring how the band helped pioneer rock improvisation onstage.
Little Feat still stretches out on vintage tunes including “Spanish Moon,” as many jam bands now do. Payne said Little Feat “can really take that one on a journey.”
He said, “We just open it up to whatever we deem necessary or we think this would be fun to stretch out on. So the music is elastic…It’s endless. We can throw it anywhere we want.”
Checking the rear view again, Payne reflected, “Whatever we were, we didn’t expect to be a household name,” He said, “But we very much hoped that we would be in the front of peoples’ minds when it came to musicianship and songs, so that people that were musicians would gravitate to us.”
Payne said, “I always thought people who would gravitate to our music would be adventurous, quizzical. We have a great audience and they’re very eclectic in their taste.” He added, “I hope you can tell in my voice that I enjoy what I do. The band certainly does, and that translates to an audience.”
“I very selfishly want to be in a band with the breadth of music we play.”
That loyal audience, Payne said, has “given us longevity, career-wise,” and freedom to just be Little Feat in all its variety.
In writing his memoir, Payne realized, “I very selfishly want to be in a band with the breadth of music we play…which has been very hard to describe over the years, as a gumbo.” To their original outsider country-rock, they added New Orleans beats and jazzy boogie with free improvisation. Playing it produces joyful camaraderie onstage and with the audience.
Placing Little Feat’s legacy in time and tradition, Payne said, “We all grew up in…kind of a golden age.” Here and now, listeners value Little Feat for preserving and extending elements of earlier musical eras. “A lot of people think of Little Feat (doing that), for example, and Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks,” said Payne.” They’re keeping it very much alive, among the people who are performing today.” TTB has recreated the entire “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” album on tour, and played everything from raw 1950s blues to polished Motown 60s soul.
In addition to the newly recorded blues tunes Sam Clayton sings onstage from behind his congas, Little Feat is already performing some of the 13 fresh originals on “Strike Up The Band,” due next year. For onstage vocals, “The baton gets thrown around to me, to Scott Sharrard who sings a bunch of songs of Lowell’s; and Tony Leone, who I didn’t even know was a singer, has taken on some of the Paul Barrere songs. And he sounds terrific.”
Looking back at tradition and Little Feat’s place in it, Payne recalled playing Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano in a Memphis studio. Like (The Band’s) Richard Manuel’s piano years before, Jerry Lee’s piano seemed to play itself. Payne said, “I was looking for heel prints…where he would smash it with his foot. I felt I had to do that too.”
Payne said, like the bluesmen he worked with and revered in the 70s, “I was a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, a big fan of Little Richard and all the stuff that was going on in those early rock and roll albums.”
When I noted these were big shoes to fill, Payne cracked, “Yeah, big shoes to fill, for a guy with Little Feat!”
Little Feat opens for the Tedeschi Trucks Band at Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Saturday, Aug. 31 – second night of a two-night stand. Greensky Bluegrass and Margo Price open Friday’s show. 7:30 p.m. Tickets, amphitheater indoors $215.50, pit; $48.50 balcony; lawn outdoors $48.50. 518-584-9330 www.spac.org.
NEW/OLD Little Feat: “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” Re-Issued on Two Vinyl Discs or Three CDs
In both formats, Disc 1 offers a remastered great-sounding version of the original eight-song album, with a medley of “Cold Cold Cold” with “Tripe Face Boogie” playing as a single track, as on the original.
Disc 2 in both formats collects un-released out-takes and alternate versions of familiar tunes. These offer insights into process – takes that stop mid-song, comments and slurred vocals in preliminary or practice takes.
The third CD disc, not available in the two-disc vinyl edition, is all live, seven songs recorded in a 1975 Paris concert.
Hoke's Jukebox 