11/02/2023
ON THIS DATE (45 YEARS AGO)
February 10, 1978 - Little Feat: Waiting for Columbus is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5
# Allmusic 4.5/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Waiting for Columbus is a double live album by Little Feat, released on February 10, 1978. It reached #18 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart. The album was recorded during seven performances in 1977. The first four shows were held at the Rainbow Theatre in London on August 1–4, 1977. The final three shows were recorded in George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium on August 8–10 that same summer in Washington, D.C.
When you think about the great live albums, several immediately come to mind. The Who’s Live at Leeds. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo. The Allman Brothers Band’s Live at Fillmore East. Nirvana’s Unplugged. And, while it is sometimes unjustifiably forgotten, Little Feat’s Waiting for Columbus.
The last essential album the rootsy California band made, it stands as the group’s peak accomplishment—a staggering confluence of energetic performances, skilled improvisations, and thematic expansion. Joined onstage by the Tower of Power horn section, Little Feat accentuates and remakes familiar arrangements, using the stage as a laboratory for unbridled creativity, New Orleans-spiced fun, and spontaneous interaction.
Many of their more well-known songs were either re-worked or extended. For instance, one of their signature songs, "Dixie Chicken", was heavily extended to include a lengthy piano solo by keyboardist Bill Payne, a Dixieland horn arrangement and finally a dual guitar jam between the band's two guitarists, Lowell George and Paul Barrere. In some cases, songs such as "Rocket In My Pocket" and "Mercenary Territory" were re-worked to include the horn section, and Little Feat additionally covered such tunes as "Don't Bogart That Joint" and "On Your Way Down" as well.
Bud Scoppa in the liner notes for the Waiting For Columbus - Deluxe Edition:
"Onstage, the veteran group simultaneously displayed its genesis in 1969 as a somewhat twisted roots-rock cousin of The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, and The Band; its reinvention in 1972 as a blackened, spiced-up New Orleans-style dance band; its subsequent expansion into an improvisation-oriented players' outfit; and its latter-day appropriation of an uptown sophistication akin to that of Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs." Clearly the band draws from a variety of roots, producing a sound that is a unique and cohesive whole.
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COVER
The name of the album was inspired by the album artwork, done by the late Neon Park. George felt that the red, leggy woman with a large tomato for a head lying in a hammock, looked to be "waiting for Columbus to come and discover her". The eccentric artwork of Park adorned the covers of most Little Feat albums and is one of their many distinctive features.
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
Little Feat's brainy virtuosos have never sought (nor had the luck to stumble into) the kind of hit singles Steely Dan keeps racking up. Yet the two groups have the same stripes -- arch, even arrogant wit mixed with playing that pushes toward jazz. The important difference is in the bands' outlooks. Steely Dan is cool, fluid and distant, but its music fits into MOR programming. The Feat are heated up and, uh, willin', even though last year's studio album, Time Loves a Hero, exhibited the group more as players than songwriters.
Waiting for Columbus plunks itself down right between these strains. Little Feat's contrariness emerges as energy, and, though this double live set contains fifteen familiar cuts and two quick novelty numbers, it's anything but a garage sale. The songs really smoke.
"Dixie Chicken" might stand as an exemplar of what the Feat are doing right. The song's narrative opens with a vision of a Southern siren and closes with a barroom chorus from some of her many lovers. Everything here is characteristic of the saloon-story hyperbole these urban cowpokes have always been good at, and the Dixieland break from the Tower of Power horn section almost seems to bloom from Lowell George's bemused singing.
Whatever Little Feat may mean by Waiting for Columbus, this band has managed not only to utilize several styles of music (rock & roll, R&B, jazz), but to link these styles to a folk minstrel's grasp of the impulsiveness that American culture inherited from its frontier days.
~ Fred Schruers (April 6, 1978)
TRACKS:
Side one
"Join The Band" (Traditional) – 1:50
"Fat Man in the Bathtub" (George) – 4:50
"All That You Dream" (Barrère, Payne) – 4:25
"Oh Atlanta" (Payne) – 4:09
"Old Folks' Boogie" (Barrère, G. Barrère) – 4:22
Side two
"Time Loves a Hero" (Barrère, Gradney, Payne) – 4:20
"Day or Night" (Payne, F. Tate) – 5:23
"Mercenary Territory" (George, E. George, Hayward) – 4:27
"Spanish Moon" (George) – 4:49
Side three
"Dixie Chicken" (George, Kibbee) – 9:00
"Tripe Face Boogie" (Hayward, Payne) – 7:02
"Rocket in My Pocket" (George) – 3:42
Side four
"Willin'" (George) – 4:42
"Don't Bogart That Joint" (E. Ingber, L. Wagner) – 0:57
"A Apolitical Blues" (George) – 3:41
"Sailin' Shoes" (George) – 6:18
"Feats Don't Fail Me Now" (Barrère, George, Kibbee) – 5:17
