Fact #179256

VINYL ICON - LITTLE FEAT - SAILIN’ SHOES

by Johnny Black, Hi Fi News 2019.


On its initial release in early 1972, Little Feat’s second album, Sailin’ Shoes, didn’t even sniff the Billboard Top 40, selling a meagre 13,000 copies.

In the decades that followed, however, the album’s status has grown immesaurably, making it one of the most acclaimed releases of its era.

Little Feat sprang into existence in Los Angeles in 1969, when Frank Zappa ejected guitarist Lowell George from his band, The Mothers Of Invention, and suggested that he should form his own group. The precise reasons for the sacking remain unclear, but they seem to have revolved around George having written a song called Willin’ which, in due course, would become Little Feat’s signature song.

During his tenure in the Mothers, however, George had learned from Zappa how to appreciate an eclectic range of musics, which no doubt helped form his stated ambition for Little Feat, "to alter the stream of musical consciousness".

Their eponymous 1971 debut album did so badly that, according to Warners’ A+R exec Van Dyke Parks, "Warners made no commitment after the first record and refused to finance a second one. Little Feat were, in effect, dropped from the label." Luckily, Parks had such faith in the band, that he helped overturn that decision, enabling the band to make a second LP.

The quartet that started work on the tracks that would become Sailin’ Shoes, was, as it had been on the debut, Lowell George (guitar, vocals and sundry other instruments), Bill Payne (keyboards), Roy Estrada (bass) and Richie Hayward (drums).

The first album had been produced by Russ Titelman, but creative disputes between him and Lowell George resulted in former Harper’s Bizarre member Ted Templeman being drafted in for Sailin’ Shoes. Being a drummer himself, Templeman was blown away not only by the quality of songs on offer, but by Hayward’s drumming. "These guys were monsters in terms of musicians," he told Ben Fong-Torres, for his band biography Willin’ - The Story Of Little Feat.

Templeman familiarised himself with their modus operandi by attending their rehearsals for the album. "I rehearsed them in the sound stages at Warner Bros and Richie was a killer," he revealed. "They used to compare him to Levon Helm, and I’ve used Levon in the studio, and Richie was just an incredible drummer."

Templeman has recalled that, in the studio, Lowell George was very much in charge of the band, and whereas their debut had a fairly equitable split of writing credits, on Sailin’ Shoes George moved front and centre, composing eight of the 11 songs.

"By the time we’d hit Sailin’ Shoes," Bill Payne has stated, "that period of good will had begun to evaporate as Lowell wanted to take a stance and writing his own stuff, which was fine. He was writing some truly wonderful tunes at the time. He only got better and better."

The album opens with Easy To Slip which, with its country-rock guitars and almost Eagles-like vibe, is said to have been written in response to Warners insistence that the album needed a commercially-appealing single.

Speaking of Lowell’s guitar work on this cut, Bill Payne has said, "It’s just some great stuff, ‘cause you can hear he’s combining a really good acoustic guitar sound with … well, I don’t know what he was using as an effect on his electric guitar, but it was really, really good. I think it still holds up."

Easy To Slip did get released, but failed to sell. "I think I put too much limiting on the guitars," reckons Templeman. "I liked it a lot. It had all the makings of a hit but, in retrospect, it kind of wandered around a little bit."

But then, 'wandering around a bit’ chimed perfectly with George’s songwriting philosophy. "I’m really trying not to manufacture it," he acknowledged. "I hate the thought of, 'Well, let’s aim for the 12-14 year old category' and come up with something."

Although a great track, Easy To Slip was a deceptive opener because most everything else on Sailing Shoes is harder than any other mainstream rock emanating from Los Angeles in 1972, as became immediately apparent on the track which follows it, Cold, Cold, Cold.

According to George, the track owed its origins to a one-nighter in Houston. "We were staying in a hotel by The Astrodome. Next to that was an amusement park and back of that was a little thing called 'The Torture Dungeon', a stucco castle sprayed in glistening material with a large imitation Hollywood drawbridge. I saw that and said, 'Boy, am I in trouble'. So I called room service and they brought me dinner, which turned out to be a phosphorescent chicken. I turned the lights off and the chicken glowed in the dark."

The track opens with a stark drum machine pattern in an era when drum machines were widely considered the spawn of the devil by LA rockers. "Lowell had been playing with his drum machine at home," remembered Richie some years later. "At that time, drum machines were very primitive. It was just a little red box with two knobs on it. He had the basic pattern repeated over and over again, and he played it with just himself and a little amplifier on a cassette at home. Somehow he edited the cassette, put it on a 16-track tape, and had me overdub drums. It’s funny because this drum part was turned around a couple of times due to the way he cut it together to fit. He wanted me to copy it and throw in fills."

In 1972, George’s use of a drum machine would have been sufficiently radical on its own but something else George had learned from Zappa was how to edit tape to create a song, a technique employed brilliantly on Cold Cold Cold. "The initial track of that was cut in Richie Hayward’s living room," George explained to Paul Kendall of Zigzag in 1976. "I just took the tape into the studio for everyone to play over. It wasn’t entirely successful as it stood - it was about fifteen minutes long, but I edited it down, snipped it up and tried to make something out of what was essentially just a mindless piece of music."

The album’s first all-out rock’n’roll assault arrives in the shape of the Richie Hayward - Bill Payne composition Tripe Face Boogie, said to have been written by Payne on Lowell’s grandmother’s grand piano. "One of the ironies of Richie’s use of words was the lack of them in our songs," Payne has revealed. "He and I wrote one song, Tripe Face Boogie. He wrote the lyrics, I provided the music and melody." This was because Payne was already finding it difficult to write songs with George. "It (co-writing) started off in a pretty straightforward manner, but it became increasingly difficult from there. And I don’t blame the guy: he wanted to do his own thing."

It’s not the album’s most imaginative piece, but Payne’s honky-tonk piano drives Tripe Face Boogie relentlessly along and Lowell turns in a sweet slide solo. In the words of a later Feat guitarist Paul Barrere, "Lowell was phenomenal. He made his slide, which he played with an old spark plug, conjure up Hawaiian melodies or pedal steel. It was so eclectic that we could be out of our skulls and still function. It was nirvana onstage, and it was funny."

As already mentioned, Willin’ was the song that led to George being removed from The Mothers and, before it showed up on Sailin’ Shoes, it had appeared on their debut album.

George once recalled the origins of the song’s lyric in some detail. "I wrote it at Richie’s house, where a guy was talking about the three wicked Ws, which were weed, whites and wine, and I went, 'Oh, that’s it.' Then Richie’s sister-in-law walked into the room and said, 'Oh, look at that chair, it’s been warped by the rain.' And I thought, 'I’d better start making some notes here.' So I scribbled various things down and bashed it into shape, and it all seemed to come together with a tune I’d written the previous day, some music without words that I’d started. The song just happened, seemed to flow together."

The version that appeared on the first album was, according to Richie, "the publishing demo that Lowell did with Ry Cooder. Lowell was in one studio with Van Dyke Parks, and Ry was playing down the hall." Lowell had injured his hand, so he played only rhythm, leaving Cooder to handle the melodic embellishments. "They put it on the Little Feat record, but then we decided that, since the whole band played it live, we would re-cut it on Sailin’ Shoes."

The second version, which also benefitted from the presence of Sneaky Pete Kleinow on steel guitar, resulted in a track which was much more coherent and fuller.

Side One ends with the fairly conventional A Apolitical Blues which, if hardly ground-breaking, functions well as an opportunity to savour George’s facility as a blues-oriented vocalist, demonstrating his spontaneous phrasing and inspired interplay with the rhythm track.

The album’s title track, Sailin' Shoes, opens side two. "On Sailin’ Shoes, he (George) played the brushes (on the snare drum)," Templeman has remembered. "The brushes are off, it’s not with the groove at all … and I was telling him, and he said, 'No, I want it this way'. He wanted it to be a little wacky." It’s probably the album’s finest showcase for George’s slide skills, which revered critic Barney Hoskyns once described as, "out-Coodering Ry Cooder."

This is followed by Teenage Nervous Breakdown, which was resurrected from a batch of pre-Feat demos done for Zappa’s manager Herb Cohen. In essence, it’s a 70s update of Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu - a dollop of speedy, frenzied, caustic rock in which George compares rock’n’roll with mental disarray. 


Bill Payne’s composition Got No Shadow, with its inscrutable lyric, is often overlooked but his jagged keyboard rhythm and George’s howling solo make it well worth paying a little more attention to than the album’s penultimate track, another Payne song, the slow blues Cat Fever.

George rounds out the album in admirably quirky form with the surreal tale of goings on at the Texas Rose Café, a hangout visited by the band after a gig in Houston. George was so taken with the place that he announced, before he even left it, that he would write a song about it. It’s George’s song, but Bill takes the honours with a superb keyboard blast of which Ted Templeman recalled, "Billy, Holy God, he was just amazing. There’s so many things that Billy would do. There was this song I loved, Texas Rose Cafe and, in the middle of that thing, he took it to Mars … and that was Lowell letting him do it."

It is alleged that when Van Morrison was shown the album’s bizarre cover, he declared it to be "the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life." When the comment was relayed to Lowell George, he responded, "That’s great! We’re really onto something here."

Like their debut, Sailin’ Shoes failed to set the world alight but, as Payne has pointed out, "When you hear that record and listen to the growth of the band between the Little Feat and Sailin’ Shoes, there’s so much more maturity in the record. We got a little bit more used to recording. I think Lowell’s chops as a writer – and mine, too, with Richie – were starting to kind of blossom, and…it put us on the map. Not sales-wise, but as a group to be taken seriously."

PRODUCTION NOTES
Produced by former Harper’s Bizarre drummer Ted Templeman, the sessions for Sailin’ Shoes were spread over three Los Angeles studios, Amigo Sounds, Sunset Sound and TTG Studios.

Sunset was the most respected of the three, having been founded in 1958 and used exclusively for Disney movies until 1962, after which Herb Alpert started using it, opening the door for everybody from The Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan. According to Grammy-winning producer Joe Chiccarelli, Sunset offered "a natural '70s kind of tone … not too wet and splashy but they still have a nice reverb time and ambience around instruments.”

Templeman was already acclaimed for his work with The Doobie Brothers and Van Morrison, and he gave Little Feat a thick, ringing sound, well-suited to Lowell George’s emerging writing style. "My concept of a good producer," he once declared, "is, if you listen to Van Halen or Montrose or The Doobies or Little Feat, you can’t really tell who produced them. I think that’s the mark of a good producer. It’s just an album and you recognise the artist."

Speaking specifically of the Little Feat album, Templeman said, "Lowell was great because we had a personal relationship, and he would ask my opinion all the time. He wasn’t one of those guys who thought he was in charge … he was a very humble cat."

George was, however, keen to participate in mixing but, revealed Templeman, "I always mix myself, with Don Landee, my engineer. The guy’s a genius and we were a team."

Unlike most, Templeman was not a fan of Sunset Sound, which he described as, "like a meat locker, with parallel surfaces and horrible sound." To combat this, for Cold Cold Cold they put the drums up on a riser, miked them both up close and far away and then used "every limiter we could get in town" to get the right drum sound.

For George’s vocals on the same track, Templeman had him sing through an amp which he placed in the bathroom of Amigo Studio. The resultant sound achieved the 'coldness' he felt was required for the song.