FEATPRINTS CHRISTMAS BONUS ISSUE 1995
Published December 1995 8 pages, 8-1/2 x 11
- Excerpt From Featprints Issue 12
- "In The Beginning "
- An Interview With Lyricist Martin Kibbee
- by Marty LeGrande
With aspirations of becoming the Rodgers and Hammerstein of rock, Lowell George and Martin Kibbee developed their boyhood friendship into a talented songwriting partnership that produced such Little Feat classics as "Dixie Chicken," "Rock and Roll Doctor" and "Easy to Slip." Known to many Feat fans by his early liner credit, Fred Martin ("I wasn't sure this was good music at the time," he explains of the need for pseudonymity), Kibbee went on to collaborate with Bill Payne, Van Dyke Parks and, most recently, with Catfish Hodge on a blues album for children. The 50-year-old lyricist talked with <I>FeatPrints<I>'s Marty LeGrand about his partnership with Lowell, the Sixties scene that influenced their music and his candid views on Little Feat's new sound.
FP: You go way, way back with Lowell George. You went to high school with him?
MK: Even farther back than that-junior high, if not actually grammar school. I knew him since I was a kid.
FP: How did you two decide to join forces on a musical project?
MK: Well, we were very friendly in high school. As soon as I got out of college, I decided to take a shot at the music business and he was the guy I thought of immediately. He was very much into it already. That was, as you remember, an exciting time musically-we're talking about 1966-67. We had Bob Dylan and the Byrds and all that stuff.
FP: You're first collaboration was with The Factory?
MK: We were on Uni Records, an album of which has just been re-released. Actually, we never got an album released in 1967; we did several singles. Last year, Herb Cohen, who was our manager, found an album's worth of material in his closet, and around town we found MCA tapes of an album we'd cut that, honestly, the other band members and I had not even remembered that we'd done. Rhino put it out last year to good reviews and considerable interest. But that [band] was our first effort together. It was interesting because Herbie became our manager almost immediately and, of course, he also managed Frank Zappa. So Frank became our producer and we went on the road with the Mothers [of Invention] for a year or two. I think that was a very important and formative experience for Lowell . . . Frank became his role model in many respects. Richie Hayward also was in The Factory. Richie and I subsequently joined a group called the Fraternity of Man, which lasted a couple of years.
FP: You had two albums out as the Fraternity of Man?
MK: Yea-that famous hit, "Don't Bogart That Joint," our claim to fame. We sort of fell apart. We had an interesting record producer too, Tom Wilson, who produced Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone."
FP: Tell us a little bit about "Don't Bogart That Joint." You wrote that with. . . .?
MK: No, I did not write that, I have to admit, but I played bass in that band. It was written by "Dash" Wagner and Elliott Ingber, who was one of the original Mothers of Invention.
FP: The re-release of the material you did with The Factory, after all these years how does it sound to you?
MK: Well, it sounds, you know, it sounds actually . . . dreadful. But it is very interesting. I'm surprised at the reaction people have to it. It was obviously learn while you earn, in our case, but there are a couple of good songs there. It's very interesting because it was, I think, Lowell in a much different mode than the Little Feat mode which we ultimately adopted. It was a more or less Byrds, British-invasion-type, "up" pop record. Marshall Leib, our producer of these Uni sides, was an interesting guy who was a partner of Phil Specter; he was in the Teddy Bears, a group of Fairfax High School graduates like Herb Alpert and Phil Specter. His song choices for our singles were our most psychedelic material. Actually, the unreleased stuff was much better.
FP: What influenced Lowell the most at the beginning of his career? Certainly, you were in an interesting area as far as musical influences and growing up in Hollywood must also have had some impact on him.
MK: Absolutely. We were both born, basically, in the shadow of the "Hollywood" sign. His dad was a furrier to the stars-a famous Hollywood furrier, who came up with mink coats for every single Goldwyn girl and hung out with Wallace Beery, W.C. Fields and people like that. It's true we were influenced oddly by that.
Lowell started out in the gut-string guitar, coffeehouse, black-turtleneck-sweater groups. He was in the high school orchestra, where he was really a standout musician, a great talent recognizable at an early age. He played harmonica on the [Arthur] Godfrey show as a youngster. He started out with the Beatnik, jazz, Herbie Mann type of thing. He was a wonderful flute player, and that never really survived. I don't think he ever played flute on a Little Feat record-I may be wrong about that. It's too bad because he was real good.
I think one of his main influences was Rashaan Roland Kirk [jazz composer and instrumentalist]. He was a very strong influence on him musically. Basically after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, we hit Howlin' Wolf. If there was one musical influence that influenced him more than any other, it would be that. It was a blend of that really down, with-it electric blues sound and the rejection of what Marshall Leib was telling us, that treacly pop sensibility, which I think he abandoned completely at that point. I know we studied those Howlin' Wolf records all during the Factory years and it finally started coming out. "Forty-four Blues" was a song that transcended dope group. I would say those were some of his strongest influences.I don't think any of us could help but be influenced by all the other stuff: the Stones, the Beatles, Elton John. We were reacting to them, I think, maybe more than imitating [them], but they were certainly influences.
FP: What was it about the blues that appealed to you? That part of California doesn't inspire one to think of Chicago, Memphis or the Mississippi Delta.
MK: I remember we got the 'Rockin' Chair' Howlin' Wolf album and everything else sort of paled against the reality of that. I think we pretty much stuck with that influence, but it was grafted onto an odd Hollywood sensibility, like you say, with kind of a fractured look at lyrics. We would do songs out of Marx Brothers movies. There was a song, "Alone," in a Marx Brothers movie that we did a rock arrangement of. We realized we could not be Howlin' Wolf or Chuck Berry. We tried to elevate that [music]-not that it really needs to be elevated-and at least blend it with our white-boy, Hollywood, humorous sensibilities. I think we gave it a lyrical twist. This is where Bill Payne's influence comes in. At that point, Lowell basically abandoned the flute for the slide guitar. In The Factory he mostly played regular guitar. When he recorded the first Feat album he injured himself rather badly. He cut his hand on a model airplane propeller and subsequently he had difficulty with his chording hand so he switched to a slide style. I think his approach to slide guitar was totally unique. Really his tuning was totally unique. His sound, everything else changed; that became his musical signature. That was more the basis for the Feat sound than anything else.
FP: Do you think the switch to slide was really a direct result of his accident?
MK: He was into it before he cut himself, but it became very difficult for him to play the other side. I know he didn't want to let on about the severity of his injury, but it was to his left hand so his difficulty was in making those chords. Adding the slide and playing just melody obviated that necessity. I think that's why he added Paul to play the orchestral parts.
FP: Why do you think Lowell abandoned the flute?
MK: I don't know, but I think it was because it is the antithesis of a rock instrument, as was proved so obviously by Jethro Tull that [Lowell] never touched it again. I even encouraged him to do otherwise, but I think it was perhaps a wise decision.
FP: Tell us about your collaboration on song writing?
MK: Unlike garden-variety rock writers of that period, I was aware of the classical repertoire. Not only that but Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, or any of that kind of thing. That was both a problem for me and an asset. I thought it would be possible to bring [that influence] to rock music, which I hadn't really thought of as "good music." We thought of "West Side Story" as good music in my neighborhood. I admit that when I heard Little Richard it rocked my world; I thought all that other stuff was just as cornball as anything else.
On the other hand, the lyrical and musical excellence of Gershwin, for example, was obvious to me and I aspired to that and also to some kind of literary content. I was an English major and brought to [my music] the kind of sophomoric, Paul Simon sensibility. These are incongruent influences, when you mix them up with Howlin' Wolf.
Certainly this wasn't calculated; we were experimenting. We were in the great cultural wash and musical explosion that took place at that time. And Lowell loved any kind of music; he listened to all kinds of music, from Bulgarian folk choirs to something maybe ahead of his time, like Tony Bennett.
MK: Lowell was certainly a big fan of country music. He was certainly a big fan of Linda Rondstadt in the Stone Pony days, that's I guess when it was. She was doing a Monkees tune, as I recall, who were also friends of ours. Peter Tork was a great friend of Lowell's, and in those days had an amazing house in Laurel Canyon where David Crosby and Jimi Hendrix would be hanging out. Lowell was also an amazing fan and supporter of almost everyone who started up in this town in the Sixties: Jackson Browne, Rickie Lee Jones, he went to hear her play and eventually recorded her song "Easy Money" and brought her to the attention of Warner Brothers Records.
Lowell was an amazing supporter of musical talent of people he liked; there were certainly people he didn't like. A little of his what-is-hip sensibilities rubbed off on other people. In other words, the Howlin' Wolf side was injected a little into their lives, I think, because of his influence.
FP: Was this before the Stones and people like that discovered Howlin' Wolf?
MK: No, but I think that Lowell was one of the few local practitioners of that sort of musical sensibility. He did, as I recall, play with the Stones. He played guitar on the "Performance" soundtrack with Mick Jagger.
FP: So Lowell became an arbiter of musical taste in L.A.?
MK: That's absolutely right. I think most of these people looked up to him as someone who was hip. I think he brought, maybe not entire success, but a little harder edge to Jackson Browne or Linda too. She certainly got into her most fruitful rock-n-roll period right after that. She is someone I admire for her eclecticism: she can sing anything from operatic to ranchero and does a Gershwin tune.
FP: How has your own career evolved? You started out playing bass with The Factory and you were doing songwriting at the same time. Where did you go from there?
MK: When Little Feat started up I had been on the road as a bass player for quite a few years with the Fraternity of Man and wasn't really sure I liked that life-style. It was very grueling. When Little Feat came up there came a time when I would have to more or less fight for my position as the bass player, and also maybe I didn't really have total confidence in my chops. I sort of shied away from the player part of it since I was more interested in becoming a writer.
FP: What are some of the Little Feat songs you are proudest of?
MK: Well, obvious ones like "Dixie Chicken" and "Rock and Roll Doctor." I love some of the stuff I've done with Bill [Payne] lately too, like "Let it Roll" or "Cajun Girl," a really good song we've written. I like "Down In Flames." Certainly the songs with Lowell, "Teenage Nervous Breakdown." I'm a big fan of the old hits.
FP: Are there any good stories you can tell about the writing of any of those?
MK: On "Dixie Chicken" Lowell and I had been up all night trying to write a song. We had the Ace Screen Door factory down on Laurel Canyon. As I was leaving, there was a chicken place with a sign that said, "Dixie chicken." He'd been playing the damn thing all night, you know, "duh, duh, duh," which was going through my brain. By the time I got home, I had written this song. When I came back the next morning to the rehearsal hall at the Warner Brothers' soundstage, I went, "I've got it! I've got it!" And they all looked at me, like, "Puh-leeze, you're kidding!" and resisted the notion for weeks, but eventually wound up in chicken suits.
FP: So "Dixie Chicken" was really a restaurant?
MK: Yea, but it did remind me of a girl I knew too.
FP: Did you pretty much stay with the band during those years or did you collaborate with other people?
MK: I did collaborate with other people, but I certainly tried to stay on Lowell's case as much as possible. He sought me out just as often. We literally spent years writing songs. Our routine used to be we'd show up and have espresso coffee and just write songs 'til you drop. The amazing thing about Lowell is that the guy is irreplaceable. We had a simpatico that was so rare. I would have an idea and think it or sing it to him and he would do it exactly as I had thought it. It didn't occur to me at the time how unusual this was until subsequently I've tried to communicate musical ideas to people with no success at all. It's probably because I knew him so well for so long; we could finish each other's sentences. I have had no other collaborator like that. Working with Bill I enjoy so much because he writes great music. He writes wonderful songs, but we don't have the simpatico that I had with Lowell. That was certainly something special.
FP: What was your main contribution to that partnership?
MK: The lyrics were entirely my focus. I basically followed Lowell around with a typewriter and we would work on the lyrics to songs for months. I think it shows. We would also record only one out of maybe 25 songs that we wrote. We were sorting through a lot of material to arrive at what we did.
FP: How important was a sense of humor to what you and Lowell were doing?
MK: The problem with a lot of the stuff that we didn't record was that it was a little too funny. It's like Paul Barrère always said, "Not another novelty tune." I think we tended towards that. Certainly with The Factory, some of the stuff we did with Zappa was just the zaniest you can image. [With Little Feat], we wanted to get past humor to wit, if you know what I mean, because I think if you do funny songs you're inherently in trouble. Certainly the Chipmunks went through the roof, but it's tough to make a career of it. The Beatles are a great example of a group that was humorous and witty and did it to great effect.
FP: How do you see Little Feat's evolution post-Lowell and what has been your part in it?
MK: They had a long hiatus after Lowell's death and then they called me up for "Let It Roll". That seemed to go so smoothly and so well; I think it was an unguarded moment in which that album slipped out rather magically. It was very encouraging to everyone about the band's career.
I'm a huge fan of Shaun Murphy: I think she represents the hope for the future. Craig [Fuller], who did a great Lowell George imitation, was accepted more readily [than Shaun]. It's tough pleasing the old fans and trying to make new ones.
FP: What is it about Shaun you like so much?
MK: She's just a tremendous talent. I think she's probably the best singer the group has had in terms of pure vocal ability; certainly a better "singer" in terms of being able to sing all those notes.
FP: What other things are you working on these days?
MK: I just finished a kids' album with Catfish Hodge and Ira Ingber, which Music for Little People is very interested in and I hope they'll release early next year. I went and heard [Catfish's band] one night and was struck by his stage persona: he struck me as an amazing kind of cartoon character. I met him backstage and he said, "You know, I'd like to do a blues album for kids." I thought that's a great idea because it sort of runs against the grain. For quite a few years now we've been working on it in our spare time and finally completed the thing. It kind of blossomed into an idea for a television show too. I also do a lot of work for the theater these days. I collaborate with Van Dyke Parks. I'm writing a musical version of "Tale of Two Cities" that has just been commissioned by a theater in Seattle for next year. We're very excited about that.