Digital Interviews: When did you start playing music?

Paul Barrere: At the age of five, in Los Angeles. I took piano from the time I was five until I was eleven, at which point I complained voraciously to my parents, that I was tired of practicing in the same area daily. By that time, they had discovered that I had not learned how to read music. I was playing everything by ear, so they thought, “Okay, we’ll stop the piano lessons, and as soon as you figure out another instrument to play, let us know.” So I went and did the usual kid stuff that I had really liked doing, playing baseball, you know. Then, when I turned 13, I asked my parents to get me a guitar, and they did. I took two lessons from this lady who then took off for the Newport Folk Festival. She never came back. So there I was, stuck with a guitar. I’d learned five chords. I was fortunate enough to have two older brothers who had an extensive rock 'n' roll collection -- Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley. I just started playing with records. Eventually I got turned on to playing more folk music, Bob Dylan being one of them. From there I got introduced to the blues. When I was 15, I got a record by Mississippi John Hurt, and I started playing that style of music. By the time I was sixteen, I started playing some slide. Someone showed me that you tune it to an open tuning, and I dove in and found Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and I just loved playing. Having a guitar now, I could take it up to my room and be on my own. I just, kind of, taught myself how to play.

DI: Who did you play with before you joined Little Feat in 1972?

PB: I had various sundry gigs with garage bands and so forth. I was playing in a band…we had the name Led Enema, because we wanted to have a record called Hot Sh-t from the Led Enema. It was hard-rockin’ loud music with very Captain Beefheart-type lyrics. We were very tongue-in-cheek, and I caught the interest of Lowell that way. I’d known Lowell since I was in junior high school, because he was in high school with my older brothers. He was, at this point, starting to play with The Mothers and all that kind of stuff. He came and saw us play, and he couldn’t believe it. He thought, we were just as wacky as a bunch of kids in Laurel Canyon could possibly be. He asked me to come and audition as a bass player for Little Feat in 1969, and I failed miserably. Three years later they asked me to join up as the second guitarist.

DI: How did it feel going into a band that had already started?

PB: It was great. First of all, I had known Lowell a long time. I had known Richie for about three or four years, at that point. I had just met Bill on the audition, and we got to get together and jam a little bit over the couple years before I joined the band. I thought, “This band is a great band.” They knocked me out when I saw them, when it was just a quartet. I thought, given the opportunity to play with these guys, I could add something, and I could learn a lot.

DI: You’ve performed with Bill outside of Little Feat, with other artists.

PB: Exactly. Billy and I made a very strong connection when I first joined the band. The first songs I was involved in with Little Feat were co-written with Bill. He’s such an accomplished musician. He really knows music. I wouldn’t say I’m the opposite, but I’m an ear player. I’m not really well read and technically schooled. It was a good marriage in that regard, because here I was bringing a sort of streetwise, tongue-in-cheek humor to someone who was very serious about their music, and yet, could appreciate it. It really blended well.

DI: What was it like playing with Lowell George?

PB: It was fantastic. Lowell taught me many things about music -- to become more diverse in my directions, more involved in the writing aspects of it.

DI: What happened to the band after Lowell George died?

PB: We all split apart. Little Feat was like that Nick Nolte line in 48 Hours, “It was a very stormy romance.” We loved each other, yet we fought like cats and dogs. There was no central focus on direction, at that point. It really split us all apart until we could go out and find ourselves, and then finally get back together. We needed a break. When we broke up, I didn’t think we would ever get back together again. It was really quite a fluke that we did.

DI: Between the two incarnations of Little Feat, you played with T Lavitz.

PB: When I did my first two solo records, I had T play, as well as the other rhythm section players from the Dixie Dregs. I had Rod Morgenstein and Andy West. T and I made a very good connection. When Catfish Hodge and myself started the Bluesbusters, we had T come out and play. We spent three or four very good years together, touring and having a good time.

DI: What else was happening around that time?

PB: At that point, I was mostly taking a step backwards from Little Feat, back to playing clubs -- blues clubs in particular. We were playing what they call the “chitlin circuit,” a lot of small clubs, traveling around in vans and humping your own gear and so forth. It was a good reality check for me.

DI: Was it difficult to put the band back together with the founder not there?

PB: It was easier than you would imagine, because we set guidelines for ourselves, saying, “If we can’t be equal to, or better than, we were before, then there’s no point in us doing this.” Everybody, after that little hiatus, was much more prepared to play music -- much more focused on the music and much more creative. In each and every individual case, it was quite amazing. And then, we added Fred Tackett, who was the consummate musician, and Craig Fuller, at first.

DI: He had to step into a very unenviable position.

PB: It was very tough. I think that really wore on him, and that’s probably why he decided to hang it up. Those are large shoes to fill -- no pun intended.

DI: Were you surprised when you put out the first album as the new group, and it did so successfully?

PB: It was amazing. The amount of success was a surprise. I thought we would have our core fans going for it. There would be those who would be doubtful about it without Lowell, but I thought that, once people heard the music, they would say, “Oh, yeah. This is Little Feat.”

DI: When you changed vocalists after a few albums with Craig, did it free you from the Lowell George days -- although you may not want to be freed from it, but you’re a new band now?

PB: Not so much freed from that, but I think those expectations are no longer there. What Shaun brought back to Little Feat, that Craig didn’t have, is more of that R&B, bluesier feel. Craig is a wonderful singer and all, but he’s really based in country, and country rock. Shaun brings an element of soul that Lowell really had. So, in a lot of regards, it’s more like Lowell than Craig was, even though Craig sounded more like Lowell.

DI: What would you say to the people who shy away from seeing you because Lowell isn't there?

PB: I’d say please open the door and don’t be living in the dark ages. Billy has a great quote -- if you want to pray at the altar of past demigods, then fine. Let that be your lifestyle. But if you want to experience, and be free and enjoy, then you have to open your ears, your eyes, and come and see for yourself. If it moves you, great. If it doesn’t, great. But at least you’ve taken the chance and the opportunity to see if it would move you.

DI: When you did the 1996 Live From Neon Park CD, was that a tribute to what had come before and also a leap forward?

PB: We figured it was time. We had made four studio records. If you include Down On The Farm, five records -- six if you include the studio cuts that were on Hoy Hoy. So there was an abundance of material to do another live recording, and to portray the band as it is now. The best part about that record is we did a great job. The worst part is, it was on a label that soon folded its doors, and that record’s very hard to find. We’re hoping to change that around by bringing up the perception of Little Feat, making more people aware of us.

DI: Distributing them on a wider basis?

PB: Yeah. We’re releasing the new record, Chinese Work Songs, and it seems to be getting some favorable airplay on the radio for a change. Perhaps people will start reinvestigating Little Feat, seeing that we’re still out here doing it some 30 years, and they’ll go back and say, “Oh! What was this Live From Neon Park all about?”

DI: You recorded a lot of the 1998 album Under The Radar at your house. Was that different than previous albums?

PB: Yeah. Oh, we’ve never done any home recording.

DI: Do you have a studio there?

PB: Basically, it’s a converted garage that we do a lot of rehearsing in. It’s actually a very nice room. Now that my third child is in the house [laughs] and growing rapidly, it’s soon going to become less of a rehearsal space and more of a bedroom, I think. But, it’s a fairly large size, and we’d been rehearsing there for the last four or five years, before we’d go out on the road. We’d just get together, small amp, small drum kit, just run through things. It’s pretty comfortable. We’ve done a lot of demo work there over the years. At first I had a Fostex 8-track recorder, and just a 16-track board, some outboard gear and so forth. We decided with Under The Radar to get into this digital age. We went out and got some DA-38s. TC Electronics laid on us a bunch of outboard gear. Our friends from George Massenburg and his folks…we managed to get a few really good compressors. We just decided that, we had done some really good recordings on 8-track analog at the house, why not try and do a whole full-blown record? We mixed to a hard drive using Sound-Forge, and did some editing work. At Billy’s house he has this keyboard rig set up in his workroom that has multitemporal synths, so he could take home a slave tape and work at his leisure to do things. He could bring down songs of his that we could layer. That was interesting. It was not unlike some of the things we’ve done in studio, with Billy and Richie and Kenny doing the basic tracks, and then we come in and layer the guitars; or recording with just guitars and drums, and then layering everything else. It was the next step forward for us. We figured it would be a much more comfortable environment to work in.

DI: Was this the same way you recorded Chinese Work Songs?

PB: No, we took the next step. We pushed it all the way through into the complete digital realm. [Drummer] Russ Kunkel’s son, Nathaniel, worked on Live From Neon Park and Representing The Mambo. He was George Massenburg’s second, and now a wonderful recording engineer in his own right. He came over with his system. We took all my little 8-track stuff, and he brought in this great system, and we recorded direct to a hard disk. This was amazing, because now we didn’t have to take up so much space with racks of recorders. This time, we set the whole band up in the room, except for Sam. We couldn’t get enough separation between the drums and the congas, having that many live mics in the room. The bass was going direct and Billy, for the most part, was going direct with his synthesizers. The drums, you have to have open mics. We built little guitar cubicles for Fred and myself. And when we record, we like using these. He’s got an old Fender Deluxe amp, which is a smaller amp, but it has a great sound. And I have an old Vibrolux that I used. We built these little cubicles and put furniture pads over them. It wasn’t completely soundproofed or complete separation, but you want a little of that saturation to make it sound live. We were all playing together for almost all the tracks. It worked out great. We even used my wife’s old acoustic piano, an old Yamaha upright out in our living room that our kids, literally, bang on, and throw things at and do all kinds of weird things to. But it had a nice little off-center pitch to it, so it worked great for the keyboards on “Eula” and “Rio Esperanza.”

DI: You’ve even got a few cover tunes on it. Going back, you didn’t always put even one cover song on some of your albums.

PB: There’s been very few over the years. We covered a Terry Allen song, “New Delhi Freight Train.” We covered Howlin’ Wolf back in the early days -- Lowell did “Forty Four Blues” and “How Many More Years.” Recently, there was a blues song that Shaun sang, ”Taking Up Another Man’s Place.” There hasn’t been a lot of them, to say the least. This time around, we were at a crossroads with material that we had, and material that we liked. We wanted to show relationships that we have with other artists, whether they’ve influenced us, or we’ve influenced them, or a little bit of both.

DI: Like Phish. You were a big influence on them.

PB: It wasn’t until I met Mike [Gordon], doing the Phil show, that we actually got to get that connection. I’d heard it secondhand, but you don’t want to walk around and say, “Oh, yeah. We influenced them guys.” [laughs]

DI: Groups like the Grateful Dead and Little Feat have been the genesis for a lot of jam bands. How does it feel to be one of the cornerstones?

PB: Well, we kind of got away from it. I think we got lazy. As opposed to jamming on songs, we would just play songs. Instead of doing 10 songs over a two-hour period, like we used to do, we would do 20, 25 songs. We were trying to fit more songs into the show, for some reason, as opposed to just letting it go, like we used to. We used to do some extended, real extended jams back in the days with Lowell. Even though he was quoted as saying that he wanted to get into that singles kind of thing, this whole band started, really, in that frame of mind of jamming and playing and being an ensemble and expressing yourselves freely.

DI: Are the new groups today bringing that back to you, reminding you?

PB: Absolutely, and playing with Phil definitely reminded us of it. So, we got into it a lot more.

DI: Are you familiar with the new breed of bands?

PB: Well, there’s Widespread [Panic], and there’s Leftover Salmon. I’ve been checking it out. I think a lot of it is very good. I think a lot of it is people just starting out, and that it will develop for them. There’s one band that I love, I mean, Gov’t Mule, to me, is, like, “Whew!” I love Warren [Haynes]. I love the way he plays. I love [Allen] Woody. I’ve known them since they played with the Allmans. That drummer that they have is fantastic.

DI: How did this version of Phil Lesh and Friends come about?

PB: He contacted us. He contacted me and asked me last September, or August, if I would be interested in being one of the Friends. I immediately got back to him and said, “Absolutely.” Back when I heard that Jerry had passed away, I didn’t know if those guys were going to continue on. I was going to try and get a hold of him, tell him that, you know, having gone through this experience with Lowell passing away, it’s okay to go on. You won’t replace Jerry because nobody can. Just like we didn’t replace Lowell because nobody can. But you can just bring in people. Let them come in and play with you, and still continue on. I had thought to get a hold of Phil or Bobby to lay that on them. They had to go through their whole scene of the loss and the closure and all the rest of it. So when Phil called me, I was like, “Wow.” I must have sent that vibe out into the universe, because here it is coming back to me. He said, “Do you think Billy would be interested?” I said, “Oh, yeah. I’m sure Billy would be interested.” [laughs]

DI: He might make time, huh? [laughs]

PB: Yeah. [laughs] It was wonderful. We got up there for the October gig. We went up there and rehearsed seven days, and ran through maybe 70 songs. Never did we come back and repeat any of these songs we had practiced. [laughs] When you get on the bandstand, you’re going, “What was this one like? Wait a minute!” [laughs] It makes it very interesting and very fresh every night.

DI: Were you familiar with the Dead songs?

PB: Some. I love “St. Stephen.” I like “Terrapin [Station]” a lot. We played “Wharf Rat” the other day, and that was just incredible. I think what we’re doing with Robben and Billy and I, is throwing a new slant on some of these songs.

DI: Pieces like “Pride of Cucamonga” are songs that the Dead only released on record, and you’re putting the first live slant on it.

PB: I have friends who are total Deadheads. When I tell them some of the songs we’re doing, they just can’t believe it. They say, “They never did that!” Or they’ll say, “Oh, they played that once in ’72.” or, you know… [laughs] I’m going, “Whoa,” because I wasn’t completely aware of the whole subculture, and it really is amazing.

DI: A lot of the fans remember Jerry Garcia as the guitarist. How do you pay tribute to that, and what things do you do differently?

PB: Well, you try and play some of the key licks. Basically. My style and Jerry Garcia’s style are completely different. Completely different. But you try and ape some of that material. It’s not unlike what I had to do when I took over the slide slot with Little Feat. I’d been playing slides since I was 15 years old, but when I got with Little Feat, Lowell played the slide. “Okay, I’ll play straight guitar.” That’s fine. But now I’m playing the slide in a lot of places that Lowell played. I’ll play some of the key licks, but, for the most part, I just play the way I play. People enjoy that.

DI: The structure of a Dead show itself had gotten very static, where a song was in the same place in the show.

PB: That’s what happened to Little Feat. That’s why we just completely threw out all the old set lists and stuff.

DI: Is it true that you paint?

PB: I do. It’s been a while. Whenever I can actually find enough time, I do a lot of drawing, and occasionally I like to do some painting. I was asked to do some painting for a booklet that MusiCares put out. I did one, and they came and took some photographs of some older work that I had done, some of the drawings and things, and put it in this book. It’s something I enjoy doing. It’s another creative process like music, where you can actually get lost -- you can go and sit in front of the easel and start working, and the next thing you know, it’s five hours later. With three young children and a pretty active home life when I’m off the road, I don’t find a lot of time to do it.

DI: What do you think of the Lowell George tribute CD Rock 'N' Roll Doctor?

PB: I like some of the performances. I love Inara [George]’s performance of “Trouble.” I love Taj doing his thing. I love Jackson Browne’s work on it, and Bonnie [Raitt]’s, and David Lindley just killed “Rocket In My Pocket.” They could have had all artists that were a little bit more connected with Little Feat. On that level, I think every night that Little Feat plays, it’s a tribute to Lowell George. You can’t do a Little Feat show without “Willin'” or “Dixie Chicken” or so many of his songs that we play. That in itself is a very fitting tribute. The unfortunate thing about Lowell’s solo record is that so few people have ever heard it, and it’s now so hard to get. That whole statement about “praying to the altar” before, some people have this image of the man that in some ways is not really true. I think the legacy of the man is his songs -- his singing, and his guitar playing, obviously -- but his songs more than anything else.

DI: You guys are very Internet savvy. Is that something you’re focusing on?

PB: We’ve been trying. As Billy likes to say, “It’s in the covered-wagon stage right now.” But faster than you know it, it’s going to be the rocket ship to the moon, and to get in on the ground floor -- it’s a perfect avenue for bands like ours that won’t get any attention from top-40 radio, or television or whatever. “Oh, they’re a nice old band.” You know. “No, we won’t play that.”

DI: Any other Little Feat projects in the works?

PB: We have a box set that’s going to be released in September -- a four-disk box set on Rhino. Three disks of all studio cuts, from the very first record up until Under The Radar. Then there’s one disk that’s all rarities -- outtakes, unreleased songs. There’s some great demos - the very first demo of “All That You Dream,” the very first demo of “Down Below The Borderline.” Some amazing things. Some people will go, “Why the hell did they put that out, man?” Other people will go, “What a great glimpse into how this whole thing takes place.” You know. [laughs]

DI: What advice would you give to somebody who’s just starting to play music?

PB: Unless you want to spend your entire life just practicing, really study. Learn music -- learn all forms of music. Don’t just take a guitar, and turn it up to 10, and play three chords and scream over the top, but learn how to play different styles of music. Investigate all the different forms of music. I was so lucky that I had older brothers and I got turned onto the blues, and I got turned onto jazz, and I got that whole rounded aspect of where this Americana music really comes from. Not just banging three chords out in a hard rock situation. There’s so much more to music. There’s a lot of classical pieces that I love.

DI: Do you bring some of that classical stuff to your compositions?

PB: It filters in, definitely, through Billy and Fred, who are classically trained. There are some things that they do in songs that just amaze me. Fred will take home a piece of music that Billy has written, and he’ll write a chart for himself to come and play, on mandolin or guitar or whatever. It’s phenomenal to me. Certain aspects of it are just classically oriented, or they’re like a big-band orientation. Really, the key to being successful at this, is that you know what you’re doing, and the only way to know what you’re doing is to study it.