{"id":5819,"date":"2019-10-20T22:09:32","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T02:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/?p=5819"},"modified":"2019-10-20T22:09:41","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T02:09:41","slug":"interview-little-feat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/2019\/10\/20\/interview-little-feat\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW: Little Feat"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sam Trottenberg<\/em><\/p>\n

WTBU DJ Sam Trottenberg interviewed Bill Payne, the founding member and keyboardist for the band Little Feat, on October 11. Catch Little Feat at the Orpheum Theatre Boston on October the 23, 2019.<\/p>\n

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Sam: First of all, I’d just like to say I\u2019m a huge fan of both yourself and of Little Feat.\u00a0 I caught you guys at the Great South Bay Festival a few years ago and I thought you guys were just something else and I went bald and listened to a bunch of your records and yeah I just wanna say that it\u2019s a great honor to be able to interview you here today.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill Payne: Well it\u2019s my pleasure man, thank you Sam.<\/span><\/p>\n

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ST: So now you\u2019re on the 50th anniversary tour for Little Feat you know it\u2019s a huge milestone.\u00a0 What do you see in the band’s future?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BP: Well that\u2019s a good question and to be honest with you I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 Paul Barrere is on the sidelines. His doctor suggested that he not make this tour so he hasn\u2019t been touring with us on this particular run.\u00a0 He\u2019s been dealing with liver issues the last few years. We do have Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams with us, they\u2019re opening. Larry and Teresa are dear friends of the band and so everybody sort of coalesced.\u00a0 We have a big family, an extended family, I might add, which includes Larry Campbell and Teresa. But yeah I\u2019m trying to project what\u2019s gonna happen I know next January I believe we’ll be doing our soir\u00e9e down in Jamaica and I\u2019m not sure if Paul will be able to join us or not, we\u2019ll just have to see.<\/span><\/p>\n

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ST: Yeah, I hope he\u2019s doing well. Right now he\u2019s such a big part of the band and he definitely grew into that role very well.\u00a0 Even just listening to his modern stuff over his things when he was first in the band, you know his guitar playing really has evolved and he\u2019s really taken an identity within the group I think.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BP: He absolutely has and you know what\u2019s happened with this band, and maybe it happens with other groups too, but with Little Feat in particular the band, the music, it\u2019s bigger than any of us honestly at this point, and we\u2019ve proved it with you know, not to everybody’s satisfaction of course, that\u2019s impossible, but we\u2019ve done it without Lowell, we\u2019ve done it without Richie, but they\u2019re still with us I mean Lowell\u2019s music is with us, we try to honor him every time we hit the stage, same with Richie.\u00a0 You just, you can\u2019t replace them, you can\u2019t replace Paul Barrere, it\u2019s not a matter of replacing it\u2019s a matter of going out and can you do service to the music, and the music is pretty solid I gotta say.<\/span><\/p>\n

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ST: Yeah, for sure for sure, and sort of building off that, how do you view the legacy of Little Feat, you know?\u00a0 How do you guys, what do you think the band is gonna be thought of in 50 years from now? What is your real impact?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BP: I think the impact is the musicianship, the importance of what I takes to play an instrument, what it takes to craft a song to sing a song that deals with phrasing, so we\u2019re not doing anything that\u2019s not already there with from Frank Sinatra to Herbie Hancock to Ray Charles on up and down, but it\u2019s continuing a tradition of people who really know how to play, really know how to do – they\u2019re enveloped by what it is they do which is a craft and I think secondarily and maybe up there with why we do it are the influences that come in that we adapt to and adopt.\u00a0 You\u2019d have to be in 10 bands to play what is the breath of music that Little Feat plays, and that\u2019s just us saying chances a saying \u201cyou know what, we like r&b, we like rock and roll, we like you know here\u2019s corazones seis hombres and let\u2019s add some Mexican music into the mix, some blues, some jazz, and I don\u2019t know a lot of bands that take those kind of chances. So I think what we\u2019ll be known as if you wanna put it down just single phrase which we were already known as is a musician\u2019s musicians band.<\/span><\/p>\n

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ST: Yeah, for sure, I mean I\u2019ve always been listening to you guys and I try to do this with a lot of the groups I listen to.\u00a0 I get a sense of you know musicianship over stardom, it\u2019s really about paying your dues to the craft and making sure that it\u2019s real heavy stuff, it\u2019s not fluff in any sense.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve also really gotten a sense from you guys of kinda what you\u2019re saying, of being well rounded, of being eccentric, of borrowing from different genres that maybe aren\u2019t super textbook, and you know a lot of modern cats are kind of picking up on that.\u00a0 Derek Trucks is a great example of someone who\u2019s kinda in that vein, is there anyone in particular who\u2019s like a real contemporary musician who\u2019s kinda one of the younger guys who you\u2019re listening to now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BP: Well I like a lot of people, when people turn me onto something then I\u2019ll check it out.\u00a0 I\u2019m not active with searching cuz I don\u2019t even know where you start, you know? There\u2019s no radio out there other than what you guys are doing which is a brave new frontier, which is to say that you don\u2019t have a robot programming your musical tastes, you guys actually I assume pick it yourselves, I\u2019d like to see more of that happen.\u00a0 To your point there is a guy I\u2019m aware of and who\u2019s a part of our extended family: Connor Kennedy. Connor\u2019s from upstate New York and he was 18 when we met him, and he\u2019s probably 23 now, maybe 24, but he\u2019s playing with Steely Dan so he\u2019s with Donald Fagen\u2019s band and he\u2019ll be joining us down in Jamaica, he and I are in contact about a lot of things.\u00a0 His group did a tribute to Little Feat, he said, \u201cI\u2019d like to do a tribute to you guys. I said, \u201cWe\u2019ll sure, what record are you gonna do?\u201d Well he did the very first record called Little Feat, with Strawberry Flats, Hamburger Midnight, Brides of Jesus. Strawberry Flats you can tell by the title of these songs that they\u2019re out there, and I thought that was a brave way to do it because most people would do you know \u201cWaiting For Columbus.\u201d\u00a0 Phish did that and I was over the moon about that one, I called up Mike Gordon to thank him profusely for that tip of the hat. So yeah and by the way Derek Trucks man, I think he was a teenager he might have been 13 or 14 the first time he sat in with Little Feat down in Florida many years ago. I think the way Little Feat operates and the way musicians operate, musicians are attracted to one another in the sense of how one plays with the other one on stage, I\u2019m the studio, writing wise.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written 20 songs with Robert Hunter who just passed away, and you know we didn\u2019t know that was gonna be a twenty song journey at the time but it was cool and it was an honor to have been in that very tight circle between the two of us. I never met him, I never talked to him on the phone, and here I am in a city, down in Louisville, Kentucky today, the home of Muhammad Ali but it\u2019s also the home of Hunter S. Thompson who I got in touch with at some point and I never met him either but we were – \u201coh hey he read your letter and he really dug it and stuff.\u201d\u00a0 So, life moves I\u2019m strange circles sometimes.<\/span><\/p>\n