"Normalize this!" (strange Feat)

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.

rockfunkboogie

So doggone funky this Elvin Bishop tune - love the way it twirls and sashays in the gtr-solo-y sections

I expect if I trawled through the Struttin My Stuff album and his other records of that period I might find one other gem at least 2/3rds as groovy and charming

But "can I be bothered?" is the question (so far, the answer is "no")

The references in "Struttin'" to the girl in Atlanta who "ain't nuthin but a Georgia peach"  got me thinking of this other rock / funk / boogie beauty. which starts with the lines  about a Georgia woman suffering from a mysterious ailment and in dire need of remedial rhythm



That drummer with the pointy little beard looks coked out of his mind - unless it's just the itchy-itchy funk that's making him twitch

"Two degrees in be-bop, a phd in swing"

Now what this got me thinking of again is how the date of these recordings / performances - 1975 for both Little Feat on Old Grey Whistle Test and "Struttin My Stuff"  - is just a few years distance in time from punk-funk moves like Go4's "Damaged Goods" or various songs on Talking Heads's first two albums

Begging the question so why was that move such a big deal?  Wasn't it a bit after-the-fact?



I mean, sure, the postpunk rending of funk is "tense and nervous and unrelaxed" -   a different, uptight feel

It's less "black" - more suburban stilted stiff-jointed neurotic white-geek

So more striking - potentially leading to a new sound, new direction - rather than simply replicating (and reinforcing ye olde muso values of slick lickmanship that Old Wave white bands shared with their soul and R&B counterparts)

New Wavers doing it themselves and slight wrong versus  Robert Palmer actually recording with The Meters (and Lowell George)



Still, with Old Wavers routinely adopting funky modes all through the mid-70s , it remains odd that "we like funk and disco and what do you think of that, eh?" was such a powerhouse postpunk rhetorical stance to make

As I observed on an earlier occasion, talking about "nifty groovers"

"You almost wonder what the point of postpunk's vaunted embrace of funk and disco etc was as a gesture -  given that the funk was already so deeply imbricated with mainstream rock music. It didn't need to be added or restored, it's there. "

Take this Al Green cover - for which Talking Heads got a lot of praise and even achieved a modest chart hit in the US -  this is just a standard sort of Old Waver who loves black music move isn't it?

 (A wonderful and clever version of course, with the Jerry Harrison aqueous keyboards)





Robert Palmer learned to do the whiteboy-funky thing in the New Wave mode of doing it eventually






It's not even a question of amnesia of recent musical history - pre-punk seeming on the other side of Year Zero -  because you had Old Wavers doing their funky-disco move at more or less the same time as the New Wavers like Blondie











This one below by Paul McC actually sounds a bit like Talking Heads - or ACR's cover of "Shack Up" (at least until the goofy chorus)




Old Wavers disguised as New Wavers (but still Old Wavers at bottom) doing the funky-disco move



The Blockheads used to be called Loving Awareness!.

Of course the intersection point between rock and disco is the word "boogie" which in music history is polysemous - as I explored in this Guardian blog

Another version of the sublime "Rock and Roll Doctor"  (wish they'd done a whole album in exactly this vein)




Live "Struttin"



Bishop on the box

Mtume journey

budgie versus budgie