(Old) Feat (Mostly) Don't Fail Me...Now

Quickly, what smells like old feet? Or old Feat? This certainly does! And yet, to my surprise, I have some smelly old Feat on this here blog...and I'm getting used to the smell of them. Little Feat, for me, were always Lowell George's band, and they should have died with him. For the longest time I considered the Little Feat that reformed in 1987 with ex-Pure Prairie League leader and singer-songwriter Craig Fuller as George's replacement as a bunch of impostors, usurpers of a band name that didn't belong to them. Nevermind that the band minus George was fully present or that Payne was probably as much a founding father of the group. I, of course, met the 'new' Little Feat under the worst circumstances: On the otherwise fabulous sampler As Time Goes By: The Best Of Little Feat, a compilation that was exclusive to Europe and for years the only good and comprehensive single disc comp on the market, some of these Fuller-era tracks were dropped in the midst of the classic George-era tracks and could only suffer, badly, in comparison. Little Feat without George were no Little Feat at all, to younger OBG. 

But things change, times change, and people, too, even lil' ol' me. After hanging out at, ah, whatchamacallit?!? - it seems the mere mentioning of Little Feat can sometimes cause serious memory loss - I started to reconsider. Farq and Babs championed latter-day Feat, and while I still think they should have gone out there as The Rock'n'Roll Doctors or something, I decided to relisten and give these Fuller and even Shaun Murphy years a fair shake. Now, this is still no patch on classic George-era Feat, but taken on its own terms, this stuff really isn't half-bad. Way to sell you guys on the accompanying comp, huh?! 

Latter-day Feat are still a groove-based band, but the grooves are quite different. This is clearly a veteran band whose bread is buttered by going on the road and doing a bunch of groovy, but not exaggeratedly so, tunes night in and night out. On record, this translates into a band that still has faint echoes of the old Feat, but is also often grooving dangerously close to AOR/MOR territory. But, if you cherry pick from the Fuller- and Murphy-era albums - and as usual here at One Buck Records cherries were picked.

As you will see from the set list, I greatly prefer the Fuller era to the Murphy one, with the Fuller era getting twelve tracks to Murphy-era five. I don't hate Shaun Murphy, and I think a track like "Drivin' Blind" is a fine addition to the Feat canon either way, but the songwriting did take a bit of a dip towards the end of the 90s. Fuller could still conjure some of the old Pure Prairie League magic on tracks like "Cajun Girl" or "Voices On The Wind", and does a more than credible Billy Gibbons impression on the clearly ZZ Top-inspired "Texas Twister". Bill Payne's voice is well-fitting for songs like the unexpectedy attractive "Eden's Wall", a surprise for me personally was how much he sounds like Marc Cohn on some of these cuts. 

When I talked up there about how latter-day Feat as a road/jam band transkated to record, I forgot one side effect of this: Most of their tracks run long, and quite a bit longer than they need to. Most have long run-out grooves that are mainly repetitive and don't go anywhere specifically, so I edited a number of tracks here. Just a fair warning, in case you're a latter-day Little Feat purist, which sounds weird to think about, but whaddayaknow. The whole point here was, as usual, listenability and flow above everything else, and I think these 17 tracks achieve that and make a good point for latter day Feat as being pretty damn good. Not Lowell George-good good, but pretty damn good nonetheless.