Bill Payne from Little Feat – An Xperience Interview

By Liam Sweeny.

Little Feat is an iconic band that formed in 1969, and it would be rare to find someone who hasn’t heard a Little Feat song. With a sound uniquely their own, the band has refused over the years to do anything not authentic to their principles and vision. We talk to keyboardist Bill Payne.

RRX: Little Feat started in 1969. What was it like to start a band in that era, that particular time period?

Bill Payne: Well, that’s a good question. It was chaotic. There was a lot going on. The Vietnam War was taking place. There was a lot of mayhem, murder-wise with Charles Manson and his people. The LaBianca family was murdered down the street from where Lowell [George] lived. It was less than a half a mile, I think. You know, things were like they are now. They were intense, but there was music, which was very powerful. It was a powerful agent with regard to voicing concerns and whatnot. It was a great time to be in a band, and a lot of great music was brought out then, too. The times were ripe for people who were creative to be able to address issues. There wasn’t the kind of overlay in terms of people telling you what you could write and what you couldn’t write and what was correct and what was not correct. I mean, it was just a lot more wide open back then.

RRX: When you guys were starting, was there something you wanted to focus on musically?

BP: I think that’s a natural thing to do, too, by the way. At first, we were trying out a lot of instrumental music, more like Frank Zappa stuff. Then we started graduating into songs, writing songs, and one of the first ones we (Lowell and I) wrote was “Truck Stop Girl,” which the Byrds recorded. There were groups like The Band that were out there. We, we had some stuff that kinda sounded like The Band, the Rolling Stones … the Stones liked us, we liked them. You know, that kind of thing. 

Being in Little Feat, it’s like being in ten different bands, right? Because the scope of the music – it was rock and roll, it was country, it was some R&B. It had a little bit of everything. Then, in 1972, we brought in Kenny Gradney and Sam Clayton from Delaney & Bonnie. And there’s an element of Louisiana, New Orleans music in our repertoire, so things graduated from there. 

But that’s a natural thing to set out a scope in front of you and say, “Hey, what do we wanna do?” I think we made the right call, and it confused a lot of people at first, especially with the people trying to sell our music, that we were outside the boundaries. You can package it like this and that, but it helps us in terms of longevity to have a band that plays so many different styles.

RRX: When I listen to Little Feat, the feeling I get is like when someone’s playing accordion. They go out, and the music comes back to a point, and then it expands outward again, and then it comes back in. I hear that a lot in Little Feat. I love it. 

BP: Yeah, well … it’s more of a thing with jazz players, where you have the music … Miles Davis used to talk about it … and I think Zappa too, although he wasn’t doing jazz, but it’s those areas where you have terra firma under your feet. There’s solid ground, and then when you jump off and start swimming, you can either drown, or do the dog paddle, or get eaten by a shark, or whatever, but there’s freedom there. And then you swim to the next little island, where there’s a recognizable lick of the recognizable riff that you’re gonna play. And those things tie in. The Grateful Dead did that a lot, too. So it’s just a device that musicians use to be able to, as you say, expand and contract their music. Basically, it’s like jamming is what it is.

RRX: What’s Little Feat doing at the moment? What’s going on? 

BP: Well, Little Feat is on what we’re calling the last farewell tour. And this last farewell business is going to take probably two to two-and-a-half years before we come to dock. After that happens, we just won’t be jumping on the bus anymore, but we can go out and play residencies. We wanna go on a cruise or two, we can do that. If there’s a special festival we wanna play. We’ll just have to decide what we wanna do. When the act of actually touring ends (and we can always make records), we do everything we want, but it’s a new way of retiring.

RRX: Is there any possibility in the near or far future of another record?

BP: Oh yeah, I believe so. Little Feat will certainly do one. I’m gonna be doing a solo project, which will come out after my book. The book is scheduled to be released in February of next year, and I’d say I probably have an album ready for the fall of that year (2027). So we’ll see. And Little Feat’s gonna be recording too, so there’s a lot on the plate right now, which is great.

RRX: You wanna tell us anything about the book?  

BP: They’re my memoirs. I want people to know how a kid who learned classical music growing up was allowed by the teacher (Ruth Newman) to play music by ear, as well as learn how to read music by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The facility to do that, and the freedom to play by ear, is what created my personal piano style, and it’s worked out pretty well, I would say. I’m leading people through those shows and through the strata of the history that our music was made in, which you alluded to earlier, and it’s a pretty darn good book. I mean, Doug Brinkley, who’s a friend, he’s a presidential historian. He thinks I’ve written something pretty darn good, so we’ll see how it floats once it gets out there. It’s a book about music. It’s a book about life. It’s a book about redemption and family, family things that went very badly at one point, and coming crawling back from that. But also a really good book.

I think it’s honestly told. Just writing about Lowell could have taken up the whole book, but you know, I wanted to tell the truth about people, but without hurting people.

RRX: Yeah, right, and that’s not always easy

BP: Not easy to do so, but I think I did it.