INTERVIEW: Little Feat are ready to boogie in NJ
Photo: Little Feat will play Thursday, April 20 at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by official site.
Little Feat, the legendary rock ‘n’ roll band, are ready to have a party at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At that Central Jersey venue, the band will bring its Boogie Your Spring Away tour, with special guest Miko Marks, set for Thursday, April 20 at 8 p.m. The jam band, which is sometimes labeled with the category Americana, has been making music for decades. Their hit songs include everything from “Willin'” to “Easy to Slip” to “Tripe Face Boogie” and “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” among many others.
Today’s band looks a different than the original outfit in 1969. The roster headed for the State Theatre consists of original member Bill Payne on vocals and keyboards, longtime member Sam Clayton on percussion and vocals, Fred Tackett on guitar and vocals, longtime member Kenny Gradney on bass, Scott Sharrard on guitar and vocals, and Tony Leone on drums.
Sharrard came to the band in 2019 with an impressive musical pedigree. He had been lead guitarist and bandleader for Greg Allman, and the Michigan native also carved out an acclaimed solo career. He is excited to bring the Little Feat songbook to New Jersey.
“We’ve got Little Feat up to about a 60- or 70-song master list of songs from the past, and every show is going to be its own unique setlist and musical journey through over 50 years of the rock history of the band,” Sharrard said in a recent phone interview. “Of course they’re going to hear the hits, but they’re also going to hear a lot of things that they haven’t heard maybe in 40 or 50 years. … I’ve played well over 100 shows with the band now since we got back to work in 2021, and I can tell you that every show is not only its unique adventure, but it’s a real escape. This music is a real escape from all the daily ills and trials and tribulations we all experience, so I think people can expect to leave their troubles at the door and have a great time.”
Sharrard and Payne will often sit down and design the setlist for each concert. Their daily ritual usually starts with Sharrard offering a first draft of the songs, and then Payne will offer a second draft.
“Sometimes we bring in Tony Leone and the other guys in the band to help out as well, depending on how much time we have and what we’re doing, so we work on it as a team and try to make each show very unique,” he said. “For me, it’s always a really painful process because I want to play all the songs. I’ve been a lifelong fan of this band, so it’s always hard to cut one.”
Sharrard’s journey to Little Feat is a long story — one that includes Allman and even the Doobie Brothers. The vocalist/guitarist first met Payne when Sharrard was bandleader for Allman. The Doobie Brothers and Allman were enjoying a double-bill summer tour, and Payne was actually sitting in as the keyboardist for the Doobies.
“I jammed with Bill on guitar quite a few times with them,” Sharrard remembers. “Fast forward a couple years. [Little Feat guitarist] Paul Barrere was ill. They were looking for someone to play two shows with the band. … I reconnected with Bill. He found out that I was also a vocalist and songwriter, which he wasn’t aware of. I came in and covered [original member] Lowell George’s parts and vocals and everything, and the first gig ended up being the day that Paul Barrere passed away. So the first time that I met Sam Clayton, Kenny Gradney and Fred Tackett was to give them condolences essentially and rehearse and then play a show, all in the span of a few hours. … And that was November of 2019. Then in February 2020, we went to Jamaica and did the Feat Camp for a week. And then March 2020, we know what happened next. There’s plenty of good books about that now. November 2021 we got back to the world, slowly. We definitely had a nice crawl back like most rock bands, starting in November 2021 through the horrific fumes of COVID. I’d say in the last few months we really hit a groove, and I hope live music has as well.”
During the pandemic, Sharrard didn’t simply sit at home and wait for better days. He stayed extremely active with recording, teaching via Zoom and even some limited gigging with his solo band. As he put it, every musician had an existential crisis during those difficult years of 2020-2021.
“Ever since the whole streaming / royalty thing, the loss of physical product and the reliance on live shows to make 90 percent of your income, it’s become ridiculous,” the musician said. “Even these heritage acts that have all these hits and had lucrative record deals back in the day, whether it’s the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s, their royalties are down 75-80 percent, so they have to tour. This is why sometimes you look around, and you go, are these guys on the road because they need to do it or because they have to do it? The answer is usually a little bit of both.”
Sharrard said that when the pandemic hit, rock ‘n’ roll artists, blues artists, jam band artists and Americana artists lost a tremendous amount of revenue. They couldn’t tour live, and they couldn’t sell merch after a gig. That’s when Sharrard made a pivot.
“For me, I’ve always been deeply invested in recording, producing and education … so when the pandemic hit, I veered right out of live performance into teaching songwriting, guitar playing and singing on Zoom,” he said. “I had 30 hours of work per week starting in April [of 2020]. I just leaned right into that. I did virtual concerts, and then I did live shows outside in very well-regulated environments starting in August of 2020 with my own band, my solo band. It took much longer to get Little Feat back because we have techs and crews and buses. It wasn’t the type of thing where we’re just going to play in a couple drive-in movie theater plexes and go home. It’s not that kind of a band. Once you start machinery on a band like that, you’ve got to sustain at least 10-15 gigs usually to really make a significant amount of money these days, so we had to wait for that operation. But certainly for my own solo band, I would say by the summer of 2021, we were back. We were doing gigs. They were still hobbled, but we were doing a lot of gigs.”
He also managed to record and release his sixth solo album, a well-received selection of songs called Rust Belt.
“Bill Payne from Little Feat is actually on a couple tracks on that,” Sharrard said. “That whole album was done virtually during the pandemic, and then November ‘21 Little Feat had our first rehearsals and got back on the road.”
And it has been the road ever since.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Little Feat will play Thursday, April 20 at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
