Album Reviews

Dixie Chicken and Sailin' Shoes are the meat of the LIttle Feat catalog, with Dixie Chicken arguably being the group's finest studio effort.

One of the fascinating aspects of collecting records, particularly if you're willing to haunt Goodwills and hit garage sales, are the variations you often find of the same record. 

The only original copy of this album that I ever saw was in The Library of Congress's record collection. It features great period cover art that Green Day lifted for their Foxboro Hot Tub album and a live performance from guitar legend Dick Dale. 

Little Feat was never an "album" band, even though they released many good records. They were low concept and high boogie. The groove was cerebral though, not the mindless "good time" endless fist pump variety mainly because of the playful and smart Lowell George. Lowell was from Baltimore,MD.

Well this is embarrassing: I've played often and enjoyed this excellent sounding reissue featuring L.A. based anglophile singer/songwriter Emitt Rhodes in preparation for this write-up but the record has gotten lost here somewhere.

The iconoclastic singer Harry Nilsson lived hard and mostly sang softly. His Los Angeles debauchery with his pal John Lennon and the resulting outcast behavior including being tossed with Lennon from The Troubadour for heckling The Smothers Brothers is well known, as are many of the songs he wrote, including "One" covered by  Three Dog Night and "Cuddly Toy" covered by The Monkees.

In an indie-rock era saturated with smirky, slacker irony, the roots-rocker Ray La Montagne comes across as downright solemn. He and his group execute cleanly and almost reverentially, funk, blues, jazz and country, which La Montagne sings in a honey coated gruff voice that veers between Joe Cocker and Tim Hardin. The man is sincere and like Tim Hardin, he knows how to move three chord rounds.