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Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
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Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Little Feat
I could try to find this funny, but it isn’t. Actually, this “Best of” collection makes me angry. First of all, you should understand that I have been a huge fan of Little Feat, but only in their ‘classic’ incarnation. In their heyday, I saw the band live six different times, in three different cities, between 1975 and 1978. I saw Lowell George’s solo show at New York’s Bottom Line one week before his death. For a kid 18-22 years old, that represented a significant dedication. I know this band, and I have their first six albums committed to memory.
I was such a big fan that the live album “Waiting for Columbus” disappointed me, because it barely captured the intensity of their live shows, especially the drifting mess that defined side four. After George’s death, the band floundered. They released a bad album (“Down on the Farm”), and then hired a Lowell George clone in an attempt at survival. I understood why they did what they did, but Craig Fuller’s carbon copy vocal style and limited personal appeal condemned the band to a lackluster future. I think that the idea of a Little Feat "greatest hits" collection is really good one, but this collection goes wrong in every conceivable way.
First of all, where the hell is “Rock and Roll Doctor”? If you make a "greatest hits" collection, don’t you start with their greatest hit? Instead, you start a "greatest hits" package with the band’s weirdest, least representative song (which they never performed live), “Hamburger Midnight”? Are you mad?? The list of bad choices and missing classics is almost too painful to recount, but I feel compelled to warn anybody with even a glancing interest in Little Feat that this is a terrible place to start. If you want to hear the band, then take my advice; start off with “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now,” the band’s fourth album, and a stone classic that captured the band’s spirit better than any other record. If you like it, then pick up “Sailin’ Shoes,” which features an earlier incarnation of the band, with Lowell George and Billy Payne showing off their songwriting abilities. If you like these two, then pick up “Dixie Chicken,” “The Last Record Album” and “Little Feat.” Five CD’s, probably available at discounted prices, will give you everything you really need to know about this fabulous band. These original albums are infinitely better than any of the compilations, including “Hotcakes and Outtakes” or “Hoy Hoy.”
If the record company ever recognizes the sheer idiocy of their track selections, maybe they’ll issue a better "greatest hits" collection, one that really has the band’s best interests in mind. I’ll even put my money where my mouth is, and do the work for them; If a "greatest hits" collection were inevitable, then here is my suggestion for the layout;
1) Rock and Roll Doctor
2) Easy to Slip
3) Dixie Chicken
4) Oh Atlanta (studio version)
5) Fat Man in the Bathtub (live version)
6) All That You Dream (studio version)
7) Rocket in My Pocket
8) Skin It Back
9) Spanish Moon
10) Crack in Your Door
11) Willin’
12) Teenage Nervous Breakdown
13) Somebody’s Leavin’
14) Fool Yourself
15) Brides of Jesus
16) The Fan
17) Cold, Cold, Col/Tripe Face Boogie
That’s it. If you feel compelled, add a second disk with the latter day stuff, but let this disk stand as a testament to what Little Feat (and Lowell George) actually were – a great, compelling, complicated and enormously talented group with a remarkably eclectic catalog. Naturally, I’d give my ‘greatest hits’ an ‘A’, but I give this mess a ‘C-’, and that’s only because the booklet is nice.
Grade: 
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