In tribute to the Rock & Roll Doctor, Gone Thirty Years

Mick Jagger was in Los Angeles during the overdubbing/mixing stage of Exile on Main St. One story goes that a go-fer asked him if there was anything he'd like. He requested the self-titled debut album by Little Feat. The go-fer had no idea who they were. Jagger was a bit nonplussed, after all, Little Feat was a band from Los Angeles. Then again, their debut album hadn't actually been a big seller. It would take until their seventh album, a live album that summarized the first six albums, that they'd get a gold album- even if musicians like Jagger, Jimmy Page, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Palmer and Emmylou Harris would praise them, it didn't translate to album sales. The story of Little Feat is indelibly linked with that of the man whose small feet had inspired the group name.

Lowell Thomas George, the Rock and Roll Doctor, was born on Friday, April 13, 1945 under a bad sign… the Hollywood sign. The younger son of a prominent Hollywood furrier, his parents encouraged his and his brother Hamp's interest in music from an early age. At the ages of six and eleven, the brothers George performed a harmonica duet on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour. By the time Lowell George was a teenager, he had taken up guitar, kept up with the harmonica, and branched out to include flute, oboe, saxophone, sitar, banjo, shakuhachi and more in his arsenal.

After high school, he enrolled in a local junior college and started playing music in earnest with various bands. He appeared on F Troop with his group the Factory, was in the Standells until he couldn't take it and managed to appear on records by both of music's most important Franks- Sinatra (playing oboe and baritone saxophone on one session) and Zappa (he was in the Mothers). Little Feat, the band he would lead for a decade, came about after Zappa supposedly heard George's demo for "Willin'", a trucker anthem with that embraced the use of illegal substances and shady actions. Zappa, depending on what story one believes, supposedly told George:

(i) he was relieved of his duties in the Mothers for having written "Willin'", a song with a message that the anti-drug Zappa disagreed with.
(ii) the song was so good that Zappa felt George was wasting his time in a backing role and perhaps fronting his own group would be better for both of them.
(iii) that he was relieved of his duties in the Mothers for having played a long guitar solo without amplification.

Regardless of the actual reason, George frequently cited the song as the reason he became an ex-Mother. Teaming up with Factory drummer Richard Hayward and failed Mother Bill Payne on keyboards (the bass chair rotated), the group cut demos and with a bit of help from Zappa, they ended up signing to Warner Bros. Records. Little Feat, the name having come from a comment Mothers drummer Jimmy Carl Black made about George's undersized feet (with the second "e" made an "a" in homage to some group from England), became four with the addition of Mothers bassist Roy Estrada.

Throughout 1970, the group cut their self-titled debut record with producer Russ Titelman, a raw, rootsy, rocking affair with a heady dose of weirdness strung throughout. It didn't sell. Album two, the Ted Templeman-helmed Sailin' Shoes, was a much different beast from its predecessor, still plenty weird but infinitely more refined and therefore more accessible aurally. Even with a warped cover painting by Neon Park based upon Fragonard's The Swing and a radio-friendly single ("Easy to Slip", written by George and his Factory bandmate Martin Kibbee, credited to "George & Martin", another reference to "you know who"), it barely outsold Little Feat.

In the interim between the group's second and third albums, the group split temporarily, with Estrada leaving permanently to play with Beefheart, seeing the Zappa associate as a more stable commodity than his band mates. Infatuated with the music of New Orleans, Feat replaced Estrada with New Orleanian Ken Gradney, late of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. As a condition of hiring Gradney, the group also welcomed D&B percussionist Sam Clayton (another New Orleanian) to the mix. Additionally, after having twice failed to make it as Feat's bassist, George's high school chum Paul Barrère joined as second guitarist to lighten George's guitar load.

With George himself producing, the sextet set about cutting their third album, tentatively titled Handcuffs and Accordions. Having a hand in writing seven of the album's tracks, George dominated the album. With the expanded line-up, the group finally found a sound that they were comfortable with, a funky hybrid of blues, rock, rhythm and blues and weirdness with plenty of percussive goodness. With Kibbee, George created a truly classic composition in "Dixie Chicken", a tale of a woman keen on seducing but not sticking around good enough to become the album's title track, rendering Neon Park's artwork for an album called Handcuffs and Accordions nonsensical. The album was yet another relative flop and the group split yet again.

Reforming after having replaced Hayward with Freddy White (brother of Verdine and Maurice), the group commenced recording their fourth album in Los Angeles with Van Dyke Parks behind the boards. Though the standout "Spanish Moon" resulted from the sessions, the rest of the material was ultimately scrapped. Picking up again in Maryland with George producing and Hayward restored to the line-up, the group cut an additional five new compositions, one each from George, Payne and Barrère, a fourth between George and Martin and a fifth between George, Barrère and Martin, with the remaining material being culled from the past- a new version of a Little Feat outtake ("The Fan") and a ten-minute medley of two Sailin' Shoes highlights highlighting the reworked band ("Cold Cold Cold/Tripe Face Boogie"). It was more of a group effort than its predecessor and tightened up any aural loose ends that the reconfigured line-up may have had there. Like its three predecessors, Feats Don't Fail Me Now didn't sell what it deserved to.

Jokingly, the group titled their fifth album The Last Record Album. With George stepping back, Barrère and Payne dominated the album, though George's presence was still felt throughout as he retained producer status and two of his three songs were gems. As it turned out, The Last Record Album wasn't, but it was the last studio album George would have any significant effect on. George willingly stepped back further as the group commenced work on their sixth album, Time Loves A Hero. With the rest of the band firmly entrenched in adding fusion overtones to their already inclusive sound, George largely removed himself from the mix, undertaking production duties for other acts instead of bothering to show up for the album's sessions. In the end, he added but one song of his own and another with Barrère (who dominated the album) and allowed production duties to be turned over to Ted Templeman, who had last worked with the band on Sailin' Shoes. Neither The Last Record Album nor Time Loves A Hero was able to capture the spirit of the band that had been generated on their third and fourth long players.

It was during the tour behind Time Loves A Hero that George reasserted himself as the leader of Little Feat, if only temporarily. The group, never having cut a live album, recorded seven shows (four at London's Rainbow Theatre, three at Washington DC's Lisner Auditorium) over the course of eight days augmented by the Tower of Power horn section. A concise portrait of the group featuring material from all of their studio albums, it served as a primer for all who had ignored the band throughout. Subsequent overdubbing and mixing yielded enough material for a triple album- it was wisely trimmed down to a two-record set for marketing purposes. The resulting album, Waiting for Columbus, finally earned the group their first gold record. The public was listening, but it was far too late for them to have started.

The group went into the studio to cut their eighth album with George splitting his time between the band and the solo album he had been intermittently working on since 1975. Any problems between George and the group named after his small feet that had subsided working on Waiting for Columbus had come back hundredfold. Searching for perfection, George led the group through countless takes of his songs before suddenly giving up on the band and deserting them with their album unfinished. If Little Feat was imploding for good rather than just taking a breather, at least George had his solo album to fall back on. With a cast of hundreds, George was exploring many of his musical interests, going from Feat-style numbers (the George-Jacques Levy collaboration "20 Million Things") to soul-rock (a cover of Allen Toussaint's "What Do You Want The Girl To Do?"), Dixieland (Jimmy Webb's "Himmler's Ring"), even a Latin-tinged ballad ("Cheek to Cheek", written by George and Van Dyke Parks). It may have come across as a bit too much all at once but such is the general nature of albums with a long gestation period.

The liner notes to Sailin' Shoes had concluded with the statement "the real title of this album is Thank You, I'll Eat It Here." Slightly altering that statement ("thank you" to "thanks"), George had an album title for his solo debut. With a Neon Park take-off of Manet's Le déjuner sur l'herbe with Dietrich, Dylan and Castro as the diners gracing the front cover, it was out in the late spring of 1979. Thirty years ago, on June 29, 1979, Lowell George was in the midst of touring behind that first solo album. He'd played the Lisner Auditorium the night before and was in an Arlington, Virginia hotel room working on a tape promoting the album for a radio show. Suddenly, he complained of chest pains. A lifetime of drugs and unhealthy living had caught up with the thirty-four year old and he passed away from a heart attack. Leaving a catalogue rich in treasures for the world to discover, Lowell George had the misfortune of dying just as the public was discovering he and his band. Honestly, for as many times as they called it quits, they were sure to come back together eventually.

The band's eighth album, Down on the Farm was completed and issued a few months later, with production credited to George "with a little help from his friends". The outtake-heavy compilation Hoy-Hoy, featuring two new songs from the remaining quintet, followed in 1981. Little Feat reformed in 1988 and continue plugging away to this day. Every show they pay tribute to their fallen leader, sprinkling George's compositions throughout their set lists. George's musical legacy also lives on with his daughter, Inara Maryland George, a singer/songwriter and member of The Bird and the Bee and the Living Sisters. Thirty years ago, the music world lost a legend. May he never be forgotten.