Georg Purvis - Little Feat On Track: Every Album, Every Song

  by Nicky Crewe

published: 31 / 7 / 2022

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Article

Georg Purvis has written for the On Track series before. He’s a lifetime Little Feat fan, thanks to his parents’ musical influence. Before he began the book, he was intending to only take the band’s story as far as 1979, though members continue to make music to this day. When asked to include their complete discography, he was pleasantly surprised to discover their post-Lowell George recordings. There’s a place for books like this on our shelves, written by fans for fans. All the hard work of trawling through the internet is done for us. Georg Purvis has done the research and his enthusiasm for the band shines through. In this slim volume he explores Little Feat’s recorded output from 1969 until 2021, encompassing fifteen studio albums, one live album, a collaborative album and Lowell George’s solo LP. Purvis also got the chance to listen to recordings of their live performances, and hints that there might be another book in the pipeline to cover their legendary shows. Little Feat have long been one of my all-time favourite bands. I was introduced to their music by enthusiastic friends back in the early Seventies. Their first four LPs: ‘Little Feat’, ‘Sailin’ Shoes’, ‘Dixie Chicken’ and ‘Feats Don’t Fail Me Now’ were the soundtrack of my life for several years. Homemade cassette recordings played on many a car journey and vinyl spun on turntables at work and at home. Later entries in their discography, ‘The Last Record Album’ and ‘Time Loves a Hero’ were also favourites. New releases were eagerly anticipated, not least because of Neon Park’s amazing artwork on the LP covers. I was there in Manchester when they opened up the Warner Bros. Music Show tour on January 15th 1975, alongside The Doobie Brothers and Tower of Power. I loved Lowell George’s voice. I loved the lyrics, and the changes of mood. Every song tells a story and some of those stories were close to my own life. Believe it or not, there was a romantic appeal in being a long distance lorry driver or roadie back then and my boyfriend at the time became one after dropping out of university. Am I giving too much away if I say that I even thought of naming my first born son Lowell George? For the record when that happened many years later, I didn’t. I always get excited when I hear a band do a cover of a Little Feat track and it doesn’t happen as often as it should. They wrote music that should be played. Of course there have been some famous covers, Linda Ronstadt’s version ‘Willin’’ being one of the best known. While the band never had any hits, their fans included some of the best known artists of the day, including Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Bob Seger. Little Feat deserve to be placed alongside these legends too. Lowell George died of a heart attack at the age of 34 in 1979, on a solo tour. The band reformed as Little Feat in 1988 and albums were released that included recordings with George, but I stopped listening once George had gone. Who would have thought that reading about songs could be such an intense experience? There’s a well-known quotation that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which is a way of saying that it’s difficult if not impossible. Most of the time when I write a review, I’m responding to music that is new to me, trying to encourage an audience to give it a listen. As I read through these words and the description of each song on those albums that I knew so well so long ago, each song comes back to me in glorious stereo sound. That kind of intense recall is a powerful experience, and it has been a pleasure to read this book. It’s also inspired me to seek out some of their recent recordings.

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