Little Feat (excerpt from chapter 21)

"If you'll be my dixie chicken, I'll be your Tennessee lamb. And we can walk together down in dixieland..." From "Dixie Chicken" by Little Feat, 1973

We celebrated with friends on New Year's Eve 1998 at a Little Feat concert. In a Richmond, Va, hotel with hundreds attending, we heard an extended jam of "Dixie Chicken" plus songs such as "Let It Roll," "Hoy Hoy," "Time Loves A Hero," and "Oh, Atlanta" in Feat's rockin'/cajun style. The band was polished and entertaining but mostly know only to its dedicated following. The members were seasoned veterans and backup musicians for other, much more familiar bands, but Little Feat was their core. We were invited backstage and chatted with the members, then we caught up again the next day at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, en route to a Norfolk gig.

That night in Norfolk, Little Feat performed for a new crowd at "The Boathouse." Afterwards, we were joined at dinner by keyboardist Bill Payne. Sitting next to Bill, I tried to forget that he was at the keyboards for some of the early Doobie Brothers' hits. Table conversation was more about the food, the latest movies, golf, family and just about anything besides music. The members of the Little Feat band, as it turned out, were just regular people away from their home and missing their families.

The Little Feat experience was not unlike Jackson Browne's message of the road in "Stay" or Bob Seeger's in "Turn the Page." The rock tour is hard work. There's memorabilia, t-shirts and cds to be sold, roadies packing and unpacking heavy equipment, sound checks, lighting and instrument tunings, all for the purpose of producing seamless, high energy concerts. Everything has to be perfect regardless of the venue. The fact that this band has continued for so long, with minimum personnel changes and a steady flow of new material, is commendable.