Block Me If You’ve Heard This One Before# 1 Little Feat
There were some stories that didn’t make the published version of Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down that I’ve been wondering what to do with. Thought I might post a few of them during the current quarantine. It’s something to do that isn’t a fucking jigsaw, anyway.
London, June 1976
Little Feat are due back in London to re-join The Who Put The Boot In tour, after two weeks in Europe during a break between the opening date of The Who tour at Charlton football ground and tomorrow's show in Swansea.
I'm supposed to meet them at 10.30 on a Friday morning at the Montcalm, the swanky hotel in Mable Arch much-favoured in those days by anyone signed to Warner Bros. There's no sign of them when I get there, although they were meant to be catching an early flight from Amsterdam. Eventually, someone from Warners turns up with the news that Little Feat are as we speak being held at Heathrow. The band are in custody and their impounded equipment’s being searched for drugs, flight cases and amps and the like being stripped, much like the group themselves, and thoroughly frisked. He has no idea how long they'll be held, but says if I want to wait, he'll book me a room. There's a well-stocked mini bar and food on room service if I want it.
I could, of course, go back to the Melody Maker office, where work is waiting for me. Alternatively, I could, you know, stay here and have a few drinks, some nibbles and maybe a nap. So I decide to stay and wait, trying not to take undue advantage of the record company's generosity, an intention that fails miserably, the stock of the mini bar much diminished by mid-afternoon, Little Feat still at that point being grilled at the airport.
It's early evening when they finally show up, in remarkably good humour and full of apologies for the long wait I've endured with what I hope seems to them impressive professional stoicism. Anyway, I'm here to interview them individually for a regular Melody Maker feature called Band Breakdown. To which end, they troop one by one into my room. Bassist Ken Gradney's first, followed by percussionist Sam Clayton, both veterans of Delany & Bonnie. Next up is keyboardist Bill Payne, who formed little Feat in 1970 with guitarist Lowell George and drummer Richie Heyward, their ambition, as he puts it, to sound like "a tougher version of The Band". Bill's very funny about Little Feat's early days, playing occasional gigs at strip clubs and generally so poor he ended up sleeping on the beach.
The poverty that's dogged the band ever since is something that subsequently preoccupies somewhat surly guitarist Paul Barrere, who joined them in 1972. He'd been working up to that point as a waiter - "make that a servant" - at a musicians' hang-out called The Black Rabbit Inn while playing part-time with a group called Led Enema. "For the next year and a half," he says curtly, "I made less money with Little Feat than I did as an out-of-work musician and waiter."
I don't really hit it off with Barerre who in a simmering hint of escalating tensions to come grumpily spends most of the interview complaining that Lowell gets too much credit for the band's music, which the moody Barerre clearly resents. I get on like a dream, though, with flamboyantly moustachioed Richie Heyward, who's sharp, funny and has great drugs. "We sent everything ahead of us," he says, explaining why nothing came of the airport bust. "It was all waiting for us when we arrived. Have some more,” he says, busy cutting up lines as long as a baby’s arm.
He starts off by telling me about The Factory, the band he played in with Lowell before Little Feat. "It was electric miasma music," he says. "We had a song called 'Car Crash', which was an instrumental that sounded like every violated water buffalo in the world plugged into a Marshall amp."
He then remembers The Fraternity Of Man, whose line-up also included Lowell. "I spent most of my time bailing them out of jail, where they were paying for their enjoyment of nefarious pharmaceutical pursuits and behaviour sub-standard to the ethic of The Daughters Of The American Revolution. The music was revolutionary. An incitement to riot. Anti-police state and pro-pharmacology. Inane, really."
Not long after The Fraternity Of Man split, Richie formed Little Feat with Lowell, who'd just left Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention, Bill Payne and former Mothers' bassist Roy Estrada, who eventually quit to join Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. "Beefheart offered Roy 350 dollars a month," Richie recalls. "Which was exactly 350 dollars a month more than Little Feat, collectively, were earning. Man, we were poor."
We suddenly realise we've been jabbering wide-eyed for hours and I still need to speak to Lowell. We go to his room, knock on the door. There's no reply. Richie suggests I meet the band the next day in Swansea, where I can interview Lowell. So the next day I spend a lot of time in Little Feat's trailer, drinking beer, smoking this and snorting that. I have a grand time, thanks for asking. But I still don't manage to get Lowell in front of a tape recorder. It's agreed with someone that I'll meet with Lowell at the sound-check for Little Feat's show on Monday at the Hammersmith Odeon, which is a gas. But Lowell disappears as soon as the sound-check's done. I don’t see him again before the gig, which turns out to be mind-blowing. There's an after-show party for the band, though, at the Zanzibar, a swish cocktail bar in Covent Garden, at which Lowell is finally cornered. We find a table and against much background rowdiness from the partying mob have to shout to make ourselves heard to each other. Lowell’s constantly distracted by a stream of well-wishers and other people he doesn't know, some of them offering him this, others that. A pretty waitress who catches Lowell's eye brings us round after round of exotic drinks, which we knock back like sailors on shore leave.
Lowell's already kind of what you might call out of it, although not as far gone as he looks like he might get. Whatever, for the next 45 minutes, he's great company. There are colourful anecdotes about his time with Zappa, The Factory, Sky Saxon and The Seeds, The Standells, The Fraternity Of Man, Stephen Stills, Peter Tork, Jimi Hendrix and, of course, Little Feat.
"We're like a Jackson Pollock painting," he says. "You know the way a Pollock painting is never really 'finished'? Pollock painted until he came to the edge of the canvas, that's when he had to stop. He then had a painting. When we're recording, we have a deadline to finish by, usually imposed by the record company. When we hit that deadline, we stop recording. It's the edge of our canvas. That's when we have a new album."
Around now, he's finaly dragged away into the seething crowd and the flashing lights, the pulsing maw of the teeming Zanzibar.
The next time I see him, it's June 1979 and I'm in New York with The Damned. The horrid little miscreants have just played a show at Hurrah's that ended with the band at war with the crowd who seemed only to be there to jeer them for not being The Sex Pistols. "You want anarchy?" Rat Scabies had shouted, a drum stick stuck up one nostril, spraying muck from the other at the audience. "You're fucking well going to get it." Captain Sensible, stripped down to his underpants, had by now swapped places with Rat and was banging on Rat’s drums. Rat played the riff from "Whole Lotta Love" on the Captain's guitar, which was probably last in tune when he bought it. Dave Vanian then reappeared, as if out of nowhere, like he'd just dropped down from the rafters. At which point they'd played "Pretty Vacant", someone rushing the stage to wrestle with Rat, who smashed him over the head with what was left of his drum kit, most of which Sensible had already thrown into the crowd, followed by an amplifier that shattered one of the club's wall-to-ceiling mirrors. A rather lively evening, all told.
Hours later, the Captain and I are in a lift at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where the band are staying. Sensible is by now wearing a fluorescent pink rabbit suit compete with ears and both of us are screeching with laughter at something or other. The lift stops at the second floor. The doors open. I look up, still shrieking with laughter, and there's Lowell George, in town for the start of his first solo tour after leaving Little Feat. Lowell steps into the lift, looks disbelievingly at Sensible in his fluorescent pink rabbit suit complete with ears. Before I have a chance to say anything to him, he backs out of the lift, looking baffled, possibly worried that he's having some kind of alarming psychedelic episode, all that acid coming back to terrify him.
Two days later, Lowell dies of a heart attack in Washington, another good man gone. As he boogies up to the Pearly Gates, I hope the last thing he remembers from a previous life isn't a man dressed as a rabbit, swearing his head off in a lift in New York at five in the morning.