Little Feat: Strike Up The Band (Once Again)
On Oct. 26, 2019, Scott Sharrard was preparing to play his first show with Little Feat when the band received the tragic news they had been dreading—Paul Barrere, the veteran singer, guitarist and songwriter Sharrard was slated to temporarily fill in for, had passed away that very morning, following a four-year struggle with liver cancer.
“Kenny [Gradney] and Sam [Clayton] found out that Paul had died about an hour before I met them,” Sharrard says of Little Feat’s longtime bassist and percussionist/ vocalist, four and a half years later, while sitting for a Zoom interview at his apartment in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. “We rehearsed for half an hour—just the endings and beginnings of songs—and then they took off to take their time. I wasn’t even sure if the show was going to go ahead at that point.”
The concert, which took place on Long Island at Huntington, N.Y.’s The Paramount, did end up happening, albeit only after keyboardist Bill Payne, the lone founding member still performing with Little Feat, publicly announced Barrere’s passing to audible gasps.
“They played a New Orleans funeral piece,” Sharrard says. “And then they turned it over to the band as it stood on stage.”
Little Feat, with Sharrard once again rounding out the lineup, made it through a show in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the following day and their annual Jamaican destination event in early 2020, before the pandemic curtailed any future touring plans. Especially after losing such a primary voice, that extended pause could have marked the end of the venerable act, who first formed in Los Angeles in 1969. But, instead, the addition of Sharrard and drummer Tony Leone, a year later, ended up laying the foundation for their next creative era, which is documented on their 17th studio project, the Hot Tomato release Strike Up the Band. It’s both the combo’s first album of original material in over a decade and a choice document of Little Feat’s current incarnation, which also features guitarist Fred Tackett and, often, the horn section of Art Edmaiston and Marc Franklin.
“After Paul Barrere passed away, I didn’t know whether we should continue or not,” Payne admits, while relaxing at the Montana home he’s owned since the early 1980s. “I thought, ‘We can, but should we?’ Scott coming in partially opened the door. A few months later, we were in Jamaica, and the thought really presented itself as something we should pursue. Then the iron-clad door of COVID hit, and it almost smothered the whole process. But when you want to do something, you’re going to figure out a way to do it.”
The members of Little Feat started working on the album that became Strike Up the Band early on in the pandemic, with the band’s primary songwriters sharing their new ideas and rough recordings remotely. In 2021, they onboarded Leone— known for his work with Levon Helm, Chris Robinson, Phil Lesh and Ollabelle— and once it was deemed safe, regrouped on the road, including a series of dates celebrating their landmark 1978 live LP, Waiting for Columbus. Energized, they then ducked into Sam Phillips’ former Memphis studio to make a blues set, 2024’s Grammy nominated Sam’s Place, before heading to Nashville’s Blackbird Studio last year to track Strike Up the Band with producer Vance Powell.
“[Powell’s] a very important part of what they call the ‘new Nashville sound,’ especially the work he did with Dave Cobb and Chris Stapleton,” Sharrard says. “It all sounds like rock-and-roll to me, but they call it Americana. We went in with the whole band, and we played the way we play live. A lot of my vocals are live off the floor— really raw.”
“I’m hardly a wallflower, as you can probably tell, but I didn’t really have to say too much,” Payne says of the easygoing atmosphere Powell created. “I was able to relax and go, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ And that was a great relief to me on many levels, not least of which was that I could just lay back and play. I’m going to weigh in where I need to, obviously, but there wasn’t the need to fill him in on every nuance. He was already there. That’s very unusual for an engineer and producer within the realm of Little Feat.”
The resulting set is a remarkable collection of music, representing a range of artistic voices—Little Feat enlisted the services of a mix of new and old friends throughout the process, like Larkin Poe, who contribute to the LP’s title track, and Molly Tuttle, Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, all of whom appear on the jamboree “Bluegrass Pines.” In advance of the sessions, Payne also wrote a few new tunes, at different times, with Leftover Salmon’s Vince Herman, New York-based producer and songwriter John Leventhal and Blackberry Smoke guitarist Charlie Starr, who collaborated with the keyboardist remotely from his place in Georgia. Starr and Payne ended up coming up with two originals, including the standout “Bayou Mama.”
“It’s mainly his song, but I threw in the bridge section and a few other little bits,” Payne says. “It’s his sensibility that steered that song.” (He hints that fans will be able to hear their other number soon, mentioning that they plan to work on additional material together.)
Of note, “Bluegrass Pines” is a collaboration between Payne and Robert Hunter that had been kicking around for a while—Payne previously recorded a version with Leftover Salmon when he was a member of that beloved Colorado jamgrass act and played it live with Campbell and Williams, but he worked up a new arrangement for Strike Up the Band.
Hunter, who passed away in 2019, first connected with Payne well over a decade ago through Cameron Sears, the longtime Dead tour manager and president/CEO of Grateful Dead Productions, who also managed Little Feat for a while. They exchanged over 200 emails and ended up co-writing around 20 songs, without ever meeting in person or even speaking on the phone.
“It was like having a Guatemalan internet bride,” Payne says with a chuckle. “We wanted to meet up, but it never happened—I know Bob spent a good deal of time with Jim Lauderdale, and they probably wrote 100 songs together. But we still ended up writing some really circuitous and great songs. Our process was, initially, that he would send me lyrics, and I would send him back the music and the melody. At one time, he said, ‘Why don’t we reverse that? Why don’t you send me the music first?’ And we did several songs like that. The process was not very quick. I knew from his experience with Bobby Weir that he didn’t like people messing with his lyrics. I tried it one time, and it was like, boom, I was shut down immediately. So I said, ‘Look, Bob, I would not say it like that. How would you address this?’ He went, ‘Well, try this.’ And he immediately came back with something that was not only good, but was much better. So we developed our own way of dealing with one another in the shadows, rather than in the broad daylight, and I thought that was a very effective way to do it.”
“It’s a combination of Little Feat’s sound, the Grateful Dead’s lyrics, the new Nashville newgrass and traditional Americana rock,” Sharrard says of “Bluegrass Pines.” “It’s all kind of jammed into this five-minute pastiche. It’s a pretty interesting track.”
Payne believes that the cut, one of the tunes where he sent Hunter the music first, benefited from the fact that they came of age at a similar time and had a mutual admiration for one another’s work.
“I’d written many songs before, but, I got to say, he taught me how to really write,” Payne says. “I can be a huge fan of somebody, but if I’m working with him, I don’t think any of that matters—I can look up at him later. When I work with a person—if I’m in the studio, if I’m on stage, if I’m sitting in with them, whatever the heck it is—I want to walk in at eye level. It makes for a better relationship.”
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While never a revolving door of musicians, Little Feat’s lineup has been somewhat fluid almost from the start. The original group—Payne, singer/guitarist Lowell George, drummer Richie Hayward and bassist Roy Estrada—first came together in 1969. Yet, in 1972, Estrada left, and Barrere, Clayton and Gradney all joined the band. That classic configuration stayed together until 1979, when George broke up the ensemble due to creative differences, shortly before he died of a heart attack following an accidental heroin overdose.
From the get-go, Little Feat had an amorphous spirit, spotlighting its individual members’ contributors. “They were one of the bands, like the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead, that picked up The Beatles’ torch and ran with it,” Sharrard says. “The idea was to have a collective of singer songwriters using all different genres of music to tell their story.”
Payne, Hayward, Barrere, Clayton and Gradney remained busy as session musicians for almost a decade after the group parted ways, playing with some of the day’s most acclaimed acts, before drifting back together and reuniting in the late-‘80s with singer Craig Fuller and Tackett taking George’s place. Little Feat released Let It Roll, their eighth studio album, in 1988 and have remained together ever since—though a few musicians have come and gone at various points and Hayward’s 2010 death left Payne as the group’s sole founding member. In that time, Little Feat released a number of studio efforts as well, including 2012’s Rooster Rag, which included four of the songs that Payne co-wrote with Hunter.
However, though they continued to play, as the 2010s progressed, Little Feat entered another wilderness period, focusing much of their energy outside the band. From 2015-2021, Payne served as a touring member of The Doobie Brothers, continuing a circle that began when he did some session work for the hitmakers in the early 1970s. That gig led directly to Little Feat’s latest fertile period. When Barrere needed to step off the road for health reasons, Campbell and Williams filled in for a while and, when the musical couple were unable to make a few dates, Payne started asking around for another sub.
The Michigan-bred, New York-based Sharrard had recently spent several years as the guitarist and musical director in Gregg Allman’s solo band, contributing some original material along the way. Several members of The Doobie Brothers family recommended Sharrard to Payne, who hired the now 48-year-old musician without knowing that he was a lead singer and songwriter. Payne was also unaware how core his music was to Sharrard, a second-generation fan who grew up riffing on “Willin’” and “Easy to Slip” with his father and truly went down the rabbit hole after experiencing Little Feat live when they reformed.
“It was transformative, and every band I have put together since that era of seeing them play, at the age of 13, has been based on their formula of creation,” he says. “What’s interesting about my own journey is that the Allman Brothers’ Seven Turns came out soon after that, and there was one summer where I saw Little Feat with Craig Fuller and the Allman Brothers with Warren Haynes. I experienced these revivals before I joined these musical families, and that’s the biggest strength I have going into Little Feat 3.0. I bore witness, at an impressionable age, to the rebirth and the shadow of the legends, and we’re trying to keep things going and thriving in that regard. During the pandemic, Bill and I would have these phone calls, and I related to him how Let It Roll was inspirational to me as a kid— how it proved that the band could survive losing the genius of its founder. And now we’re proving we can cross another Rubicon, which is to carry on the music without the sound of Richie and Paul. It’s a mighty task.”
“It’s a very similar situation to Let It Roll,” Payne says. “You’ve got a new band. You’re still calling it Little Feat. Why are you calling it Little Feat? Well, new music says it all. We can play like Little Feat, but we also have new songs and something that’s very powerful. That’s the best way to make the statement, when you’re walking through the door with new material, rather than just covering your material, which we did with Waiting for Columbus.”
When Little Feat decided to change up their drum seat, Payne thought of Leone, impressed with his work in The Midnight Ramble Band. Sharrard also had connections to the drummer, thanks to their years on the New York club circuit, and points out that his ability to contribute to Little Feat’s multi-part harmonies is one of his secret weapons. To audition for the group, Leone filmed himself performing Little Feat’s “Long Distance Love” with Amy Helm.
“When we were finally able to play together, it could have been that nobody dug Tony Leone or Tony didn’t like us,” Payne says, noting the curious experience of f inding a new band member during COVID. “It’s like the old Groucho Marx line about never joining a club that would accept him. Many of us are like that but music, and being in a band, is the ultimate club. So that was where we established that we were a group, in 2021. It was back to Little Feat and we got new management, Brian Penix at Vector. That camaraderie that exists, when it’s there, it’s open arms and hugs—‘Open your heart. Let’s hug. Let’s play some music.’ It’s heartfelt. The other side of it is that musicians can be really catty and weird with each other—competitive and territorial. But when we played with Tony, we knew we had the makings of something very special.”
Their first step forward was Sam’s Place, which, in addition to honing in on Little Feat’s blues roots, brought Clayton to the forefront. And, for the first time, he provides lead vocals throughout an album.
“Sam’s a full-fledged blues man who has been in hiding behind his percussion kit all these years. In the band, they had been talking, for decades, about Sam singing a Little Feat blues album,” Sharrard says. “It was an exercise in building more trust and chemistry, and it really laid the groundwork for Strike Up The Band, which was a very ambitious, all originals record that goes in all kinds of directions.
“It allowed us to test the waters because it was an easy album to record,” Payne says, echoing his bandmate’s thoughts. “You can make the blues as complicated as you want, but if you know the material, you just walk in and you play—you don’t really think about it too much. There’s fewer chords. The melodies are like playing country music—they’re established. Committing to it was really what people in the band had to accept. It’s like, ‘We’re not auditioning to play the blues. We’re there to play it. So let’s get on it.’ And once we did, we had an absolute ball. And because of the amount of fun we had, the tracks were energetic. I’ve played with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and John Lee Hooker—some blues people—and there is no question in mind that Sam Clayton is one of those guys. And, finally, we got a chance to put him in the limelight. The door that opened from that album into this one was, ‘Look, this one’s not going to be as easy, but we now know what we sound like in the studio.’”
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Little Feat currently have a busy year mapped out, mixing festival appearances with headlining dates across the country. Recently, their management has pushed them to have a little more variety in the setlist, leading to some unexpected song placements and bust-outs. Sharrard and Leone have also brought a new perspective to decades-old material.
“The idea is to try out the stuff that fans want to hear,” Payne says. “The Dead and a bunch of people do it, but we never had. They are coming to hear ‘Strawberry Flats,’ and I don’t know when the last time we played that was—or if we had even ever played that live before. And then guys like Scott, Tony and Ed Toth, who plays drums in The Doobie Brothers, are a little younger. They’re musicologists. They are checking out what these songs sounded like with Lowell. At first, I was like, ‘No, check out the new stuff, how this stuff sounds now.’ But they were right. I should go back and listen to the old stuff and see what works, what might meld into what we’re doing and take it from their sight lines, rather than from mine. Pun intended, that was instrumental in us getting on stage and owning what we were doing.”
He is also open about the fact that it wasn’t always easy putting a multi-generational band back together.
“It was difficult for those guys, in the beginning, to walk in as fans of the band, being much younger when they first heard us, and to then go, ‘I’m in Little Feat now,’” he says. “They didn’t quite believe it. But I said, ‘You’re not auditioning. You’re in the goddamn band—play as if you are.’ So there’s a little hardball here and there with the cats, but they fully accepted the gauntlet thrown at their feat—again, pun intended— and they joined full swing.”
After stepping away from The Doobie Brothers, Payne has also fully recommitted himself to Little Feat, though he still has a few other irons in the fire. He’s currently chipping away at his memoir— as he prepares to roll out the new LP, he’s just wrapped up the chapter on George and is about to dive into the work he did with people like James Taylor before the band’s late ‘80s rebirth. The keyboardist says that he still has about 15 unreleased songs from his writing sessions with Hunter and hopes to issue much of that material under his own name one day. “I think a solo record is a way to deal with the things that are non-Little Feat sounding,” he says. “I would like to go in with Vance Powell to record them.”
Sharrard and Leone are both accomplished producers and sidemen and keep themselves in shape between Little Feat tours by performing with their instrumental funk combo Eldorado Slim, which is named after a ‘70s track Payne and George wrote together. Sharrard believe that those varied outside experiences, from the start, have informed the group’s sound.
“Kenny Gradney and Sam Clayton were in Delaney & Bonnie when they joined Little Feat in ‘72,” he says. “Lowell George played with Frank Zappa before Little Feat and played with Robert Palmer, The Meters, Linda Ronstadt and Rickie Lee Jones. Sam Clayton was a member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band and Kenny had a whole chapter with Bob Weir’s band and was in Mick Fleetwood’s band. Fred Tackett is one of the most recorded session guitar players of the ‘70s and Bill Payne is one of the greatest keyboard players in the history of rock-and-roll. Once you get beyond Pinetop Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill’s on that list with Leon Russell, Chuck Leavell, Nicky Hopkins and Elton John. He’s in that pantheon, and he has the sideman credits to prove it. That’s part of what makes Little Feat such an advanced band all around—they work with the world’s best singers, songwriters, producers and musicians, and then they bring that back home to their own band.”
That’s particularly true of the time Payne and Barrere spent together in Phil Lesh & Friends around the millenium. The tours they turned in, which included a seminal run of dates with Bob Dylan, helped rekindle Little Feat’s love of improvisation, allowing them to embrace their role as jamband elder statesmen.
“I grew up in that era when jamming first started to take place,” Payne says. “It was the late ‘60s—I was in local bands in Santa Maria, Calif., and that’s exactly what we would do. We’d get up there and jam. Well, a lot of jamming for me was not that much fun because it was playing the key of A for an hour. I’m a guy who grew up playing Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, so I always wanted to throw in more chords. When I started working with Phil, he introduced me to a way to do that. One way was through signals on stage, not much different than the way Miles Davis would do his stuff. He may do a circular thing with his hand, which would mean, ‘Let’s break down the rhythm a bit.’”
He’s also fully aware of Little Feat’s influence on the next generation of big name jambands like Phish, Widespread Panic and Dave Matthews Band, all of whom have performed their music. In 2023, he attended his first Phish show in Chicago and sat for an interview with Page McConnell that is slated to appear in an upcoming documentary on Little Feat directed by filmmaker Jesse Lauter. Phish honored his presence by performing “Spanish Moon” for the first time in four years a night later.
“At my age, I’ve got pretty good energy, but I don’t think I’ve got the energy to do what they do,” Payne says with a laugh. “There’s a lot of brain power that they’re utilizing and a lot of that’s Trey. I know they have to say, ‘Pull it back just a little bit, would you, man? We’re going as fast as we can on this. I know you want to water ski, but we can’t row any faster.’”
And, more than anything, over half a century after first forming, Little Feat are still proud to be a tried-and-true band. Payne believes that has been key to their longevity.
“It’s like a marriage, where you can just discover each other in all manner of things, do the dance the same way,” he says. “Some things you might discover that you don’t like as much, but that’s where you can reposition yourself. And if it’s meant to be, which this obviously has been, then those adjustments continue, and they’re done in a manner of eye-level respect. It’s a team atmosphere.”
