Interesting to discover that the one Little Feat song that really does it for me is not the miracle of oozy-groovy, organic-swampy boogiefunk that it feels like... but actually collaged into being.
"'Rock and Roll Doctor'... took an age to complete because the band had to build it from a crude demo Lowell George had assembled by splicing together chunks of several different cassette tapes. George's objective was to create a song with as many awkward chord changes and rhythmic eccentricities as possible, what he liked to call the "cracked mosaic". Its crowning glory is George's slide guitar solo, a screaming miracle of sonic architecture." - Adam Sweeting, The Guardian
“Lowell used to do this thing with cassette tapes where he would take the tape and cut and splice it together, not knowing what was going to happen. On ‘Rock And Roll Doctor’ there was like a couple of measures that were 3 1/2 beats instead of 4 beats and he would hand the tape to keyboardist Billy Payne and say, ‘Normalize this.’ I think within the framework of the verse there’s a 6/4 measure, which is probably why we didn’t get a whole lot of airplay on jukeboxes. If people try to dance to it, it’s like they’re on the wrong foot!” - Feat guitarist Paul Barrere talking to American Songwriter
Normalize this - anneal and full-fuse these fissile fragments (and they did become later on a kind of fusion band, Little Feat) to form the illusion of organic-elastic slip 'n' slide.
It's almost like a live-musicians version of jungle production - or maybe trip hop given that it's so languid and stoned.
Looking back, that's what must have startled and grabbed me when I first heard the famous 1975 Old Grey Whistle Show performance - when it was repeated at some point in the early 90s I think. The angularity / fluidity combination - the way the groove pulled at your body.
Similar reasons to why this is one of my favorite ZZ Top songs
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Does make you wonder how and why did ol' Lowell came up with this peculiar methodology in the first place
Was he bored with the songs he was coming up with more organically? (If "Willin'" is by common accord the best of them, then I'd have to agree with him... )
Was he too lazy and wasted to complete songs?
Was he just trying to fuck with his bandmates? (It's supposed to have been a frictional, interpersonally tense bunch of people, Little Feat)
Other Feat-provoked thoughts:
What is it about these LA / California bands and their obsession with the South? Creedence, Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Beefheart too in a way
Lowell George grew up within yards of the Chinese Theater, yet he's crooning gruffly about Alabama and Georgia!
The true authentic sound of LA - rooted in its rootlessness - would sound much more like Sparks than Allen Toussaint
"Rock and Roll Doctor" is not that highly regarded by Feat-o-philes, I don't think.
And certainly while the groove is excitingly wayward, the subject matter of the song is hackneyed
The thematic of "doctors" in rock'n'pop isn't an illustrious lineage, really.
Off the album Secrets - which is the album after Double Fun, on which Palmer had Little Feat as his backing band. And a few years before that he'd done an album Sneakin' Sally through the Alley with Lowell, members of Feat and members of the Meters
So sooner or later he was bound to do a song with the word "doctor" in it.
Dr John of course. And this atrocity
Back to the Feat - they were the epitome of
A/ the critics band (especially in the UK the sort of Americanophile crits who loved Steely Dan and Ry Cooder and Spirit and Todd Rundgren)
B/ the fellow musicians band (in '75 Jimmy Page said Little Feat were his favorite band.... many other examples)
C/ the hipster cognoscenti band (seem to remember I Punman saying something to the effect that they were one of the only saving grace around in the years immediately before punk)
But apart from "R&R Doctor", my sporadic ventures into their discography leave me scratching my head. It all seems tepid and tasteful.
2 comments:
1) I've never been able to find the source, but someone described George as writing "razor sharp parodies of trucker songs that are also the most heartbreaking trucker songs you've ever heard" and I think that's perfect. Like Zevon (a child prodigy who travelled in the same high culture LA transplant circles as Stravinsky), George came to pop fairly late - he was a cool jazz saxophonist/flautist in his teens - so there was always a sense of an outsider's simultaneous amusement and respect for it. (His best friend was Van Dyke Parks, to add a little more context.)
2) on 60s/70s California's obsession with the Deep South - it's worth noting that they were one generation removed from the Dust Bowl and the Okie migration (plus the second Great Migration of Black Americans after the war, and the continuing influx of military and aerospace workers)' so there WAS a huge Southern prescence there, extending into things like bluegrass (which in the greater context of the folk revival was mostly a West Coast phenomenon) and Bakersfield country.
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