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Who: Little Feat, with Fat Cats

When: Thursday, doors open 8 p.m.

Where: Club 77, 77 King William St.

Tickets: $36.92, all Ticketmaster locations, www.ticketmaster.ca

It's an astonishing document, more than 20 pages in length. Listed alphabetically under the names of 10 past and present members (one now deceased, two departed) are the titles of hundreds of albums, representing a veritable A to Z of popular music, from Bryan Adams to Frank Zappa, many classics, just about all quality. It is the discography of Little Feat.

The Doobie Brothers, Buddy Guy, Barbra Streisand, Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, J. J. Cale, Alice Cooper, Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, Burton Cummings, John Hiatt, Travis Tritt, Warren Zevon, Robert Palmer, Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris, Neil Diamond, Pink Floyd, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, The Carpenters, Joan Baez, The 5th Dimension, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Rod Stewart, Lionel Richie. The list continues.

It's apparent that members of Little Feat aren't touring because they need the work. Individually they are some of the most sought-after studio musicians in the business. They don't look for work. People come to them. They're together for a different reason. When they're on the same stage, they simply can't help sounding like Little Feat, even if they're doing a cover, even if they're without their late great frontman, Lowell George.

It is a sound to behold. Soaring slide guitar, fat Hammond organ and a knee-bending three-piece rhythm section that never quits. Trumpet, mandolin, boogie-woogie piano, seven voices, percussion everywhere, even a synthesizer. It's southern rock, contemporary jazz, Cajun funk, truck-stop blues and Deadhead jam. It's shaken, stirred and spun-around songs such as Spanish Moon, Fat Man In The Bathtub, Dixie Chicken, All That You Dream, Oh Atlanta and Day At The Dog Races. If they don't get your head spinning and you're feet stomping, then the lyrics to tunes like Willin' will simply make you cry. It's Little Feat.

On Thursday, this seven-piece band of musicians' musicians is moving into Hamilton's Club Seventy-Seven. They're not playing Toronto. As a matter of fact, Hamilton is pretty much it for Eastern Canada this year.

It's not cheap, bringing a band of this calibre across the border. With the exchange, it translates into a $36 ticket price, something Hamilton club patrons aren't used to paying. But it's the type of act promoter Brian Carson feels the scene is ready for.

"We've decided we want to take it to the international level," says Carson. Carson, a Burlington native, hasn't staged a lot of shows here, yet (the successful Bad Religion show earlier this year at the convention centre is his only previous show of this stature). When he books shows, his contracts expressly forbid the subjects' playing nearby places such as Buffalo or Toronto.

"It was just a little bit of hard work and studying their routing," Carson, 28, says about snagging Little Feat.

Back to the discography. Bill Payne, the band's celebrated keyboard player, has played on more records than anyone else in the band. A quick count puts the number at 272. He's probably the leader, if there can be such a thing. He lives with a dog, a bird and his wife in a house he had built on a 20-acre property in southwest Montana, 17 miles away from the nearest town. ("The cash crop is dental floss.")

At 54, Payne has no reason to toot his own horn. His work speaks for itself.

"We're in competition with ourselves, and virtually everything we like or love in music," Payne says. "If we can't lead the bar in that direction, we have no business doing this. We're musicians. We were never a hit band on a commercial level and probably never will be. That's not the exercise. The exercise is what you have to say as a player, an artist, as a lyricist."

Payne was with the band at its inception in 1969, a ragtag group of L.A. musicians, half fresh from Zappa's Mothers of Invention (Lowell George and Roy Estrada), the other half Mothers wannabes (Payne and drummer Richie Hayward). They had eclectic tastes, unified only by a willingness to experiment. They wrote music "only Stravinsky himself could read," Payne says, before moving on to soft Americana like Truck Stop Girl and Willin'. It took two albums before the band's sound and lineup gelled into a New Orleans influenced gumbo called Dixie Chicken (1973). Estrada had left the band, while bassist Kenny Gradney and drummer Sam Clayton had joined from Delaney and Bonnie. Blues guitarist Paul Barrere joined to ease the burden on George. As other arguably lesser bands of their genre rose to the top of the charts, the Feat toiled away , revered by those in the know, but failing to sell a million until 1978's double live Waiting For Columbus (recently reissued under the band's Hot Tomato label with 10 extra tracks). Ironically, by this time Feat frontman Lowell George was addicted to heroin. Barrere and Payne had already taken over much of the songwriting duties. When George died in 1979, the band called it quits.

It took a few years for the survivors to realize that the sound was still worth carrying on.

"We still had a sound. We still sounded like Little Feat with or without Lowell," Payne says. "That was the first thing that struck me, other than the fact that we couldn't remember the tunes."

Payne, Barrere, Clayton, Hayward and Gradney added multi-instrumentalist Fred Tackett and guitarist Craig Fuller (both old friends of the band) to the lineup, wrote more music and released new albums. They went back on the road in 1988.

Since then there's been only two major changes to the band. The first was the replacement of Fuller in 1996, with singer Shaun Murphy, who had done extensive work with Meat Loaf and Bob Seger. The addition of a female voice raised eyebrows among hardcore Featheads, especially those who still worshipped at the altar of Lowell George.

"It's definitely the men's club," Payne admits. "There are a portion of a skeptical crowd, albeit a small one, who would just as soon she not be there. But there's a lot more people who have walked in skeptical and walked out saying 'Gee, she's really got it.' She just kicks ass.

"Murphy has a bluesy rough-edged voice, not replacing George's or Fuller's (Barerre takes on much of George's former songs), but simply adding a seventh element to the band. "And she's a good writer," Payne notes.

The other major turning point for the band was a six-week apprenticeship Payne and Barrere took three years ago with the ultimate jam band, Phil Lesh and Friends. By the mid 90s, Little Feat had become staid, less willing to take risks, dropping songs like Day Or Night, made for extended musical excursions, from their repertoire.

"It was a real eye-opener working with Phil Lesh (bass player for the Grateful Dead)," Payne admits. "We were reintroduced to the devices of jamming and how to manoeuvre between songs. It was a great experience working with him. We brought a lot back to the table for Little Feat to digest and re-energize.

"I finally figured out why people over the years have compared the Dead and Little Feat. I never thought we sounded anything like the Grateful Dead, but I guess the similarities are in how complicated the music is. It sounds easy until you sit down and play it. Then you find out that the first verse has nothing to do with the second verse, which has nothing to do with the lead into the instrumental, which may or may not go into a third verse live. It may go back into a different song, and three days later you will complete the song that you played on Tuesday night."

By Graham Rockingham

The Hamilton Spectator

grockingham@thespec.com

or 905-526-3331

The Hamilton Spectator Entertainment, Tuesday, May 27, 2003, p. D09

© 2003 The Hamilton Spectator. All rights reserved. Doc.: 20030527HS708728. This material is copyrighted. All rights reserved. © 2003 CEDROM-Sni

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