Bill Payne and Paul Barrere Talk About Their 30-Year Ride
| by Blair Jackson |
The rise of Little Feat coincides with the rise, for better or for worse, of bands recording in multiple studios. Here’s Sailin’ Shoes being done at Amigo and Sunset Sound and Sun West…
Payne: Well, a moving target is hard to hit… [Laughs.]
How much of that was the influence of people like [Warner Bros. producers] Russ Titelman and Ted Templeman wanting to work in different places, and how much of it was the peripatetic world you lived in or not being able to get people together?
Payne: It might have had something to do with those guys, but I’d lay it more on Lowell. He was a very bright guy who loved to experiment, and that included experimenting with recording in different rooms with different sounds. He was very aware of room sounds and what they might do to the drums or to a guitar or anything. That was one of the strengths of Lowell—he wasn’t afraid to use that mystery part of an artist and say, “Let’s make it even more mysterious and more eclectic and take some shots at doing things differently.”
I gather he was somewhat autocratic in the studio.
Barrere: He was and he wasn’t. Lowell was very strange. He would dangle the carrot out in front of you and get you to go for stuff and let you feel like you were actually going to have a say in some things, and then, lo and behold, things would change. He also did a lot of work on his own late at night in studios, so things were rarely the way you left them the night before when you’d been there. [Laughs.]
You guys were lucky in that you came along at a time when radio was pretty open, so there weren’t these insane expectations about what was a “radio-friendly” song. It was a more experimental era in all ways.
Payne: That’s a very interesting point to bring up. Pop music’s undercurrents have always been there. It was indeed a more experimental time. What was going on at Warner Bros. is that we were, along with Van Dyke Parks and Ry Cooder and Randy Newman, Dr. John and, later, Bonnie Raitt, allowed a freedom to do what we did without having to worry about how many records we were going to sell. So that existed, but it existed within the realm of artists and acts that were bringing in money for the company. That is not a situation that exists today. Artist development? What the hell is that? There is no artist development anymore, so how do these labels expect to be afloat 10 or 15 years from now? And now you’ve got all the Internet stuff happening with Napster and all that, and the labels really don’t know what hit ’em.
They’re freakin’ out!
Payne: They should be, because they haven’t been paying attention to much of anything for years other than the bottom line and trying to make giant hit albums. It’s biting them in the ass, and there isn’t anything they can do about it at this point.
In an odd way, we may be looking at a lot more freedom than we had back then, forgetting radio, because that has become so restrictive. There’s so much stuff out there now, and new ways of doing things and promoting things and getting the music out, but you have to look a lot harder for it. The good part of that is that people are looking for it and bypassing conventional things.
Barrere: We’re all learning how to do it. Young people are probably ahead of the curve, technologically, and people my age are a little slower to get on it.
Payne: I think we have a better chance than we did 10 years ago, but it’s such a free-for-all out there I wouldn’t dare predict what’s going to happen. But the Pandora’s Box is open.
Reprinted with
permission from 
Magazine, February, 2001
© 2000, Intertec
Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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