Little Feat, 12/29

After seeing Little Feat at the Folk Festival last August, I was determined to see them again, if at all possible. Well, I didn't have to wait long for the next chance. Within weeks, Darling Wife saw a notice that they were coming to the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood, NJ in late December. I grabbed some tickets, and have been looking forward to it ever since.

Saturday finally arrived, as did 4 inches of snow. There was some last-minute shuffling of attendees, but we got over to Jersey with no problem, got a very nice sushi dinner, and made our way to the auditorium. It's a very interesting old 1,000-seat theater dating from the 1930's, and we had great seats - very first row of the second section, left-center.

The band went on shortly after 8:00 (with no opening act), and launched into "Rocket in my Pocket" and "Fat Man in the Bathtub", two great songs from "Waiting for Columbus" (their monster album from the 70's, and for my money, the best live album there is.)

I'll likely repeat everything I said after the August folk fest show - they lay down an amazing funky groove. I can't explain what makes it so infectious, but I could listen to them play all night. Many of their songs probably went to 10 or 15 minutes, with the two guitarists and the keyboard trading solos, and I found it mesmerizing - never tedious, as I often find extended jamming. It wasn't flashy pyrotechnics, just fun jamming over top of a rock-solid rhythm section.

I had one detail wrong in August, and I didn't realize my error until after Saturday night's show - there are two guitarist/frontmen, and the guy I thought was Paul Barrere was actually Fred Tackett. So in my August review, when I talked about being impressed with Paul Barrere's multi-instrumentalist playing, I was giving credit to the wrong guy.

They mixed in some songs from their new CD, and the title track, "Rooster Rag", is a very nice bluegrass-type tune with acoustic guitar and mandolin. But they did all the big songs from "Waiting for Columbus", but to their credit, none were note-for-note reproductions.

They closed the set with an extended "Dixie Chicken", featuring Fred Tackett's jazz trumpet intro, then one encore ("Oh Atlanta"), and the show was over, a few minutes shy of two hours.

I see on the band's website that Paul Barrere is going to be taking a medical sabbatical to try to recover from Hepatitis C. I wish him a full recovery, and hope Little Feat will be back on the road ASAP.