A Conversation with Little Feat’s Bill Payne – HuffPost 9.17.12

Mike Ragogna: Hello, Little Feat’s Bill Payne!

Bill Payne: Hey, how are you, buddy? I’m good.

MR: I’m pretty good too, thank you. So the title track from your album Rooster Rag was “grateful-ly” co-written by you and a certain person. Now, who would that be? Robert Hunter maybe?

BP: Robert Hunter! I tell you what, Mike, I just got off a tour with Little Feat, which was about a month long, and right before I went out on that tour, I handed in my eleventh song to Robert. We’ve got eleven tunes, four of which are on this record, so we’ve got a good basis for writing songs with one another.

MR: Yeah, to me, the song “Rooster Rag” sounded a weeeee bit like The Grateful Dead.

BP: Oh, yeah. Robert’s lyrics are Robert’s lyrics. What I did, Mike, was I kind of scored my music to them. He sent me these lyrics and I went, “Okay, Tubal-cain was the god of fire; let me make this more of a ragtime, I’ll put a little bit more emphasis on the ragtime chords.” And then the last line in the last verse, which was, “Make this old world a better place, paper chase, what a waste,” I thought, “Hmm, let’s bring this down a little bit.” I worked with James Taylor for five years in the mid-eighties and I became quite accustomed to the idea that when you play acoustic music or when you bring music down softer and lower the volume, people, consciously or otherwise, lean in to hear it. I thought that a pretty important part of Hunter’s song was the idea of a paper chase being a waste. Yeah, I scored my music and my vocals to his lyrics. We both have a very cinematic approach to the way we write and do things anyway, so it was a really good handshake between the two of us.

MR: Now this is what, the sixteenth album for Little Feat?

BP: Yeah, that’s what they tell me. I’m glad somebody’s keeping count. I can’t anymore.

MR: You’ve had different lineups of Little Feat, especially with Lowell George and Richie Hayward’s passings. How do you account for the band’s longevity?

BP: Well, its longevity is also without two prime members, the second guy being from Iowa as a matter of fact, Richie Hayward. How do we continue it? The idea of the music that we write is based on a real flexibility. It’s based on an honesty, too, and the connection we have with our fans is a super important part of it as well. It’s about shared values and a community and such. When you put something in front of people that has an inherent honesty to it, it’s about continuation, it’s not about replication. We sound like Little Feat without Lowell, we sound like Little Feat without Richie, and yet we are those two gentlemen wherever the heck we are and whatever the heck we do. That’s an important part of it as well; really, really understanding your legacy and trying to do things in a fashion that don’t harm it but add to it, and to keep those two folks that are not with us anymore, keep their flames burning brightly in front of people as well.

MR: Beautifully said. By the way, one of my favorite songs by Little Feat that never seems to make it on these greatest hits packages is “Be One Now.”

BP: That’s a fantastic song.

MR: Yeah, I just wanted to point out that was such a wonderful moment on the Down On The Farm album. I always thought that sometimes, there are missed opportunities as far as having big hit singles, but I don’t know if you guys even care about that. You don’t, right?

BP: We don’t. The few times that we thought we cared about it, we quickly learned that nobody else cared about it. We were out of power to do anything. Why go after it? It may not be a paper chase, but it was a different kind of chase, and I think it didn’t lend any authenticity to what we were doing in the first place. It was just to see if we could do it. I think that’s what people admire about this band — not just fans, but other musicians, too. They know what it’s like out there; it’s a tough flog. There are a lot of great young players coming up and a lot of guys my age and older and younger. As Keith Richards told me in Amsterdam in 1974 — maybe ’75 — The Rolling Stones en masse came to hear Little Feat play and it was at Eden Hall just outside of Amsterdam, and I’m down in the dressing room going, “Oh, it’s Keith Richards!” and he goes “Aw, mate, we’re all part of the same cloth.” In Keith Richards’ biography, he had written about being in a dressing room where he was part of the show with Muddy Waters and Little Richard, and he thought, “Gosh, if I’m with these guys, I must be one of the guys, too!” That’s what Keith was telling me: “You’re one of the guys.” I kind of feel what he’s really saying is it’s this larger entity out there, it’s bigger than any of us. We’re musicians. The pop star thing, that’s okay. He’s a pop star. I thought Richie Hayward was a pop star, too — a rock star, to be honest, no denigration to that at all. Keith Moon was a rock star, but he was also a musician. I feel I’m under the category of being a musician. It’s an honorable place to be. I think it’s been chewed through the pop cultures. It gets excused sometimes to what this is all about. I don’t want to denigrate what other people are trying to do, to make music and make a living doing it. I think everything’s wide open. I liked “Alley Oop” as a kid, sort of a comic tune. I like all kinds of music. My vocabulary, musically, is all over the map. It’s a cool thing to be a part of it, and it’s a cool thing to be in a band that’s actually lent some weight to the argument that it’s okay to be a musician as opposed to what they wrote in the Oxford Dictionary, which is, “People want to keep their wives and girlfriends away from these people.”

MR: (laughs) Interesting. And to prove the point of “Hit single, hit schmingle, who cares,”Waiting For Columbus is a classic album, and why is it a classic album? I feel that it’s because you captured the essence of the band, you captured the spirit of the audience, and the interaction and the interplay between the two. It’s like a document of a unique moment in time. You’re all, in a bigger sense — audience and band — from the same cloth.

BP: Yeah. I think there’s some truth there. It’s taken me a very long time to sort that out and to embrace it and I’m doing solo shows, by the way, where I go out and talk about this sort of thing and exemplify it by playing music and by showing my photography. I’m a good photographer, I’m a writer, and I’ve got a poem, which I read over some music from an album I had called Cielo Norte. You get a deeper sense. I want to give people a sense of what it’s like to be a creative person who happens to play rock ‘n’ roll, who happens to play a lot of different styles of music and why I’m inspired by that and what’s kept me going all these years and, in part, what keeps Little Feat going all these years, too. It’s feeling good and having a passion for what you do, and laying that out to people that are passionate about their lives. And, occasionally, when we’ve all hit the wall and kind of dropped out, that’s when you need that infusion of good feelings or reflections or whatever it takes that allows us to move on from difficult times. That’s part of the thing that art provides to people. It’s a refuge sometimes, and it can challenge them as well. It challenges their sensibilities and I think all that’s good. It’s free expression.

MR: Right, right. Now, you’re the ultimate sideman, too. Whenever I interview Ben Taylor or his mom Carly Simon, I always bring up Another Passenger. I think that’s a brilliant album, her best, and you’re all over the place on that one as far as a performer.

BP: Carly Simon’s a wonderful person, obviously a very great person, with all she’s been through and is going through. I was at her house when we were working on a movie calledHeartburn and Nora Ephron wrote that movie about Carl Bernstein, her ex-husband at that time, and Mike Nichols directed it. There were a lot of very smart, sharp people in that apartment on the west side of The Park in New York.

MR: Right, and her, of course, being the daughter of the Simon of Simon & Schuster, there you go.

BP: Oh yeah, and she goes, “Look down at that apartment down there,” and I go, “Yeah?” And she goes, “That’s where Lenny Bernstein lives.” I go, “really?” “Yeah, he prances around there all the time.”

MR: Lenny Bernstein! As a musician, I want to know where your creativity comes from. How do you source it?

BP: Well, I source it from my teacher, Ruth Newman, who, when I was about five years of age, I started taking lessons from her. What Ruth provided me, Mike, was the dual track of playing music by ear and by learning to read music. She didn’t monitor me on what I was playing by ear, she said, “You know, if you have something you want to play for me, go ahead.” What she told my mother was, “Look, I’ll make sure Bill knows how to read music, but let’s not take the magic out of this for him,” and that was a very astute comment for her to make. It’s really led me down the path of being a very good improviser when it comes to music, and I take my chops from sitting there and playing Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, et cetera, and I also played a five-manual pipe organ at the Presbyterian church along with every other church in town which might not have helped me in a religious sense, but I certainly did learn the literature of music that’s in the church. I’m not a church guy, so I wouldn’t have anybody under the notion that I am. It’s just that it was a part of my upbringing, so it involved choirs and being able to take signals from the preacher or whoever I was dealing with. Then I got into rock ‘n’ roll, and then all bets were off. I find myself today writing with Robert Hunter. It’s a good hat trick being sixty-three years of age and doing my first solo shows as well. I don’t know what to say; I’m a late bloomer, I guess.

MR: That’s a really sweet history. By the way, earlier, when you mentioned “Alley Oop,” from that period, The Coasters and The Drifters are probably my favorite vocal groups.

BP: Sure! Well, The Hollywood Argyles did “Alley Oop” if people want to Google that, but James Taylor has done at least one, if not a couple of Drifters songs, “Up on the Roof” being one of them. The Drifters came to Lompoc, California, when I was in high school. I was in a band there. That kind of band would come into town and go, “We’ve got a pickup group we’ve got here. Do you know this song?” “Yeah.” “Do you know this song?” “No.” “Okay, we won’t do that one.” We’d forge us a setup based on the songs we knew, and I thought, “God, that’s a tough way to do it.” These solo shows I’m doing, I go out and I go, “Do you know ‘Oh, Atlanta’?” So, we’re doing it in advance, but I work with some pretty good players and I don’t do it the entire show. I get them up there for a couple or three songs if that, and if there’s nobody there, I’ll just do everything myself. I’ve got a couple different ways to play “Oh, Atlanta” for example. One’s more of a New Orleans-style rather than the straight-ahead Charlie Watts two and four on the snare thing, which is the way Little Feat does it.

MR: Yeah. That’s really pretty cool. And I imagine, just to stay sane on the road as a band, you have to have some alternate versions of how you do your songs all these years later.

BP: Well, in some cases we do. We’ve got a reggae version of “Under The Radar,” which is very cool. We play off vocals. “Dixie Chicken” inherently is played the same way, but sometimes the tempos make a little bit of a difference, too, and then the way we improvise and the way we throw different things in too, whether it’s “Fatman In The Bathtub” or others, those things morph over a number of years. Gabe Ford as a drummer plays a slightly more solid groove than Richie did, but he’s capable of moving off the signature the way Richie would in a really Love way and manner, and kind of have it swim a little bit sometimes. The beauty of Richie was that when he was at his best, I’d never heard anybody like him, to be honest with you, and maybe when he wasn’t at his best, there was this thing like, “Is it going to go off the road or not?” That brought a certain excitement to it, too. It was just like, “Oh my gosh, where is he going?” It’s a band. We’re up here doing anything, but what we need to do on a level of making things work from night to night.

MR: Bill, what advice do you have for new artists?

BP: If you’ve got a chance of becoming a lawyer or a doctor or something…I’m kidding. My advice is just “communication.” I’ll put it in these terms: The biggest argument you’re ever going to have with either your band or people you hire to back you up is going to be when you can’t hear on stage. You’re just going to tear into each other. I just suggest taking that down to a minimal boil, you know, a little bit, but don’t go crazy because the next night, you can play in that same venue and have the monitors actually work, or you’ve got enough of a crowd to where the sound is absorbed and it sounds really good and you’re going to just love each other again. So there’s that aspect of it and I would also say for new artists, not to be preachy about it, but figure out what it is you really want to say. That can change over time, too. I’ve been doing this for forty-three plus years. Finding your voice is important, and the only way you can find it is digging into your influences. If you like blues and you like Eric Clapton, let’s say, maybe check out what influenced Eric Clapton, which would be Albert Collins or Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, et cetera, and begin to get into that amount of music and stuff. Being inquisitive is always a good thing and that ties over to everything else in life, whether it’s what you read or what you eat, where your politics are, even if you don’t have politics, what your sense of the community is. Get involved and be, as I said, inquisitive about what makes things work. That’s what you’re going to share with your audience, how you perceive life.

MR: Beautiful. And speaking of beautiful, those Neon Park album covers that you guys have featured over the years? How amazing. Those are in a whole other realm. We didn’t really get a chance to talk about your photography, so we’re going to have to do another interview at some point, Bill! I really want to thank you and thanks for calling in to Solar-Powered KRUU-FM.

BP: It’s a real pleasure, man, and I like the fact that it’s solar-powered. I had some parabolic units up at my house back in 1979, believe it or not, when Linda Ronstadt was dating the governor of California, Jerry Brown, who’s the governor again. He came out and took a look at them. And we had No Nukes with James Taylor and a bunch of people. But yeah, solar-power, good for you, good on you. I think it’s a good thing.

MR: Thank you so much for the shoutout. That’s right, I forgot you guys were involved with the No Nukes project.

BP: Yeah. We were actually rehearsing for a concert to commemorate Lowell George and to raise some money for his family and that’s why Linda Ronstadt was at my house and she brought governor Jerry Brown out there with her. So he was taking a look at that parabolic unit I had. We’ve got to keep focused on moving the ball forward with alternative energy sources.

MR: Exactly. All the best, man, and we’ll definitely talk again.

BP: You’ve got it. Thanks, Mike, take care.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne