Waiting for Columbus (Deluxe Edition) [Live]

During their heyday in the mid-1970s, Little Feat had the reputation of being your favorite band's favorite band. Other groups sold more records and tickets, but Little Feat cultivated a deep, passionate cult through their funky concoctions of New Orleans soul, California country-rock, and urban blues, a blend that was plenty appealing on record but found its natural home onstage. Little Feat were aware of the chasm between their studio sets and concerts, so they aimed to channel that kinetic energy onto Waiting for Columbus, the 1978 double live album that’s now been expanded into an eight-CD box set with three complete concerts that provided the source for the original LP. Like many double-live sets of the era, this was the album that crystallized the band’s appeal, capturing the elastic, elusive charms of a group that wandered on the fringes of rock counterculture since the late ’60s.

Lowell George, a shaggy hippie with prodigious appetites, formed the band after leaving the Mothers of Invention. Legend has it that Frank Zappa kicked out George after hearing the guitarist’s original composition “Willin’,” a country-rock ballad for dopers. George called up Bill Payne, a keyboardist who didn’t pass an audition for Zappa, then roped in his old Factory bandmate drummer Richie Hayward, and invited ex-Mother bassist Roy Estrada into his new band, who alternated heavy, surrealistic blues with stoned country-rock. After delivering two superb albums in this vein, Little Feat regrouped, swapping Kenny Gradney for Roy Estrada while bringing in percussionist Sam Clayton and guitarist Paul Barrere, players that helped lead the band in a funkier direction on 1973’s Dixie Chicken and beyond.

Little Feat found their footing on 1974’s Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, a record made after the group relocated from Los Angeles to the Washington D.C. area. They started playing college towns up and down the east coast, developing into a ferocious rock’n’roll band with the dexterity of jazz musicians. They were kindred spirits with the Grateful Dead—George wound up producing the Dead’s 1978 LP Shakedown Street—but their rhythms hit harder and the band was tighter, qualities that helped Little Feat become a simmering cult sensation. They reached a boiling point on January 19, 1975, when they played a Warner Bros. package tour at London's Rainbow Theatre, blowing headliners the Doobie Brothers off the stage with an unusually fiery set. Soon, the UK embraced Little Feat—and that includes British rock royalty: Jimmy Page sang their praises, while Clayton remembers, "One time, the Stones picked us up at the airport on the runway. We didn't even have to go through customs."

All the accolades didn’t translate into blockbuster sales in the United States. Little Feat managed to eke out respectable chart positions with Feats Don’t Fail Me Now and its successor, 1975’s The Last Record Album, whose title alone suggests how precarious their fate seemed. George started to drift away from the band during the recording of Time Loves a Hero, a 1977 record where Payne and Barrere nudged their music toward jazz, an inclination that came to a head on “Day at the Dog Races,” a winding instrumental that divided the band; upon hearing it, George groused “What is this, fuckin’ Weather Report?”

George rekindled his interest in Little Feat with the idea of a live album. The group decided to record shows at their hometown Lisner Auditorium in D.C. and return to the Rainbow, the site of their London triumph in 1975, adding a few warm up gigs in Newcastle and Manchester for good measure. Culling highlights from the Rainbow and Lisner gigs, Waiting for Columbus presented the platonic ideal of a Little Feat record: two LPs of prime loose-limbed funk, blues boogie, and jazz odysseys. Cut while they were plugging Time Loves a Hero, the tracklist prioritizes funky fusion over the stoner humor and hard-bitten blues of their first two records yet those elements are still present in the open-ended reworking of “Sailin’ Shoes” and the heavy stomp of “A Apolitical Blues.” When the group slides into “Old Folks Boogie,” it’s also possible to hear the origins of the middle-aged groove merchants Little Feat would become once they reunited nearly a decade after Lowell George’s 1979 death. When this shuffle is surrounded by funny, road-beaten rockers from Dixie Chicken and Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, it adds up to a complete portrait of everything Little Feat could do. As much as the Grateful Dead’s interstellar explorations, Waiting for Columbus is a urtext of jam bands, a joyous celebration of grooves and textures born of the group's idiosyncratic chemistry.

Much of that chemistry is an illusion. Waiting for Columbus was heavily tweaked in the studio, with George supplying vocal and guitar overdubs over the course of three weeks. The ambling sets were sculpted into four smooth sides, skillfully balancing George’s tunes with those of Payne and Barrere. Engineer Warren Dewey set up mics in a hallway to capture the band’s pre-show huddle where they harmonized on “Join the Band,” a spiritual George and Payne discovered on a Smithsonian folk collection, so that snippet serves as a fanfare for the good times to come. These little editing tricks are put into sharp relief on the new Super Deluxe Edition, which includes a full Manchester warmup date, a night at the Rainbow, and one at Lisner.

Superficially, these concerts don’t offer much in the way of surprises. Little Feat didn’t expand when they jammed—they dug deep, burrowing into the recesses of a groove to give it life and color. When they extend “Dixie Chicken” to 14 minutes, it’s a way to ride a wave, not to head into the unknown. Throughout these shows, Little Feat play with varying levels of intensity: In Manchester, they are a bit loose, while they’re focused and driven at the Rainbow and invigorated by the hometown crowd in D.C. These may be subtle differences but they are notable, as are the variations between these unvarnished live tapes and the finished album. Some of that amounts to the rough vagaries of live performance, whether it’s garbled lead vocals on a spectacularly funky “All That You Dream” from D.C. or George attempting to explain guacamole to a London audience during a fevered “Tripe Face Boogie.” On the whole, the performances are hotter than the finished LP, yet the shows also hint at the schism in the band by making space for fusion, both in the form of the jazzy “Red Streamliner” and long, long readings of “Day at the Dog Races” where Little Feat does sound like a streamlined Weather Report.

Heard on their own, each concert is thoroughly enjoyable, but an unexpected bonus is how they collectively accentuate the marvel of the original version of Waiting for Columbus. Far from diluting the experience of live Little Feat, the studio polish on the 1978 LP offers a heightened reality of the band, one where the bandmates are perfectly aligned, never leaning too hard on any one of their inspirations, never proceeding too far down one detour: They’re just rolling right through the night in a state of bliss.