Little Feat takes musical Americana to the masses

Kirk Baird

Friday, Jan. 19, 2001 | 9:12 a.m.

What: Little Feat.

When: 8 p.m. today.

Where: Sam's Town Live!

Cost: $22.50.

Information: 450-8326.

For a musician, having a release on Rhino Records is like having a lobotomy.

The good news is you're still alive. The bad news is you wonder why.

After all, Rhino is not known for taking on cutting-edge artists or even bands at the peak of their careers.

Instead, the label often focuses on once-popular or obscure musicians and/or groups that, while perhaps no longer relevant when it comes to record sales, have contributed to the music scene in some capacity. (See greatest hits records from Todd Rundgren, Black Oak Arkansas, Firefall and Marshall Crenshaw, among others.)

In that respect, Little Feat fits right in. The group performs tonight at Sam's Town Live!

The recent focus of a four-CD box set, "Hotcakes and Outtakes: 30 Years of Little Feat," the veteran band has 16 albums to its credit, including last year's "Chinese Work Songs." During its 32-year career, however, only one of those records, 1978's live work "Waiting for Columbus," has gone platinum.

But to include Little Feat in the same breath as such Rhino labelmates as Foghat, the Knack and Greg Kihn is not fair -- or accurate.

Similar to another artist with a Rhino box set, Randy Newman, Little Feat has earned a reputation as musician's musicians, teaming up with such notables as Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead, among many others.

And similar to the Dead, Little Feat found its audience not through burning up the Billboard charts, but on the road, taking the band's hodgepodge of Americana music -- Dixie, blues, R&B, soul, jazz -- to the masses.

Which is what the plan was all along, said Bill Payne, keyboardist and vocalist as well as one of Little Feat's founding members.

"Thirty-two years ago I was sleeping in my car and sleeping on the beach when I wasn't in my car," Payne said in a recent phone interview from his hotel room in Tucson, Ariz. "I had a dream that I would be in a band that wasn't necessarily a household name, but would influence and be influenced by other bands. And we're doing that."

When asked if lack of mainstream success for the band bothered him, Payne didn't seem all that concerned. Little Feat is one of those groups people seem to recognize, but can never recall why.

"If someone says they've heard of us, I'm flattered. There's an awful lot of white noise out there," he said. "People that dig through that white noise will honestly say, 'I've heard of them. I'm not sure, but I've read this article and I want to hear these guys. They've obviously been around a long time and played with everybody under the sun -- what the hell do they do?' "

Payne said he's always been in a quandary as to how to deal with that knowledge, that Little Feat wasn't as well-known as many of its peers.

"I finally figured out the best way was not to shut out the industry, but to deal with them and to deal with them ourselves," he said.

And to that end, Payne has taken charge.

Payne said the band members felt as if Little Feat were being "buried and pushed aside" by the pop-music mentality dominating the record labels.

So, eschewing the axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," three years ago Payne and Co. took a grass-roots tactic with the band, straight from the pages of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," where, among other topics, the author details how to get a movement started from the ground up.

For Little Feat, this involved increasing contact with the band's fans, something Payne said he'd been reluctant to do.

Additionally, he said he and the band members decided to take more of a hands-on approach to the group, effectively doubling as both management and artists.

"I figured out a few years ago you need to protect your art," Payne said. "I began this walk toward freedom, as it were, along the lines of paying more attention to what we were doing and why. The selfish reason being that we wanted to continue doing this."

One of the choices to come out of this was to further push Little Feat's reputation as a jam band, playing with others of the same type, such as Denver-based the String Cheese Incident.

"We are probably a jam band in the truest sense of the word," Payne said. "We have a very good future on that level." Kirk Baird

is an Accent feature writer. Reach him at 259-8801 or kirk@lasvegassun.com.