Like some sort of curmudgeonly pop star who only plays his new album that no-one knows in his new concerts, I don’t really do requests. Except, it struck me, that if I ever ended up being like a curmudgeonly pop star I would slash my wrists. So flicking through my copious mail sack for alimony cheques for the various Rolling Stones children I have pretended to sire (like they they remember who they have shagged) I came across a slightly left field request. Lowell George.
Imagine if you will a world where the most respected British statesman of the twentieth century was not Lloyd George, but rather Little Feat pharmacologist Lowell George. There would never have been a depression at the end of the 1920’s for one. We would all have been far too whacked out of our bonces to care. Luckily though the inevitable upshot of this policy, namely the death of an entire culture, was averted by his birth in America in 1949. A generation is saved, at some say the relatively small price of Mr George being involved in some of the worst records (and album covers) of all time.
If one were to collect all of the worst musicians togethe rin a room together, what method would you use? Best ask Frank Zappa, because he did it with the Mothers Of Invention. Zappa deserves a whole week of slagging, so I’ll leave him alone here, but rest assured that a job of employment by the father of Moon Unit is a sure sign of being lousy. It is unclear whether George left the Mothers or they kicked him out(!) but forming Little Feat was no great improvement in his skills. Except it put him front and centre, maybe him band heroin buyer and idiot with responsible for getting those fucking shoe ducks drawn on the album covers.
Like a poor mans Steely Dan, Little Feat were feted for having anodyne full productions and supposedly sharp songwriters. George was but this time a so called master of the slide guitar, something which came about because his pudgy fingers were far to fat to make proper chords any more. Their most representative, for which read lazy, song was probably their only hit Rag Mama Rag, a song about menstrual fluid. It was in this period that George also grew the scankiest beard in rock, which he kept until his premature yet deserved death in 1979.
He had left Little Feat by then due to musical differences, the rest of the band never being sure if he was capable to stand up or not. His only solo album Thanks I’ll Eat It Here, summed up his entire philosophy – his heart attack being caused in more than some part by him being fatter than Mr Creosote. Many people say that the track Twenty million things, on said album, is made awfully poingnant by his death. I disagree. In it he suggests he has twenty million things to do. If even 1% of those were making more music, his heart did us all a favour.