Little Feat – Sailin' Shoes

This has to be the some of the best cover art that came from the era. It just makes me feel good to stare at it. Also an amazing sounding album, great balance and warmth. Gold. I have the original 2600 pressing

Little Feat delightfully turned the world on its heels back in 1972, deciding to do something dangerous and exciting, and that was to bring a bit of fun back into music that had become far too serious and much too complex.

Though … all of that nearly didn’t happen, as Feat’s first album simply bombed, and then they were saddled as a musician’s band, a fate nearly worse than death, yet the Feat rose to the occasion with Sailin’ Shoes, delivering a jazzy combo of rock meets R&B meets country and along the way managed to pick up Miles Davis hitchhiking somewhere across the southwest, to jump full throttle and walk a precarious line, simmering a grab bag of southern rock with a bunch of heady boogie infused caucasian blues laden tunes that were both swaggering and radio friendly.

The band didn’t hold back either, opening the album with the blistering single “Easy To Slip,” an infectious number that took the world by storm. With the door open, the Feat doubled down with “Cold, Cold, Cold,” a dynamic number, a howling lament filtered through the hands of Ted Templeman’s studio wizardry, where Lowell’s vocals were recorded through an amp that was locked away in a bathroom with him … hence the genesis for the song “Fat Man In A Bathtub.” Though it’s the track “Willin’” that rose to the top as an underground classic that summer, an anthem for white-line weary truckers, bestowing life on the road, the need for a wide-eyed slow motion amphetamine (whites) fueled backroads, making for an easy going journey across the heartland of America with a load of marijuana (weed) in tow.

Yes, the album does have a few weak spots, though on the whole cannot be denied as a seminal point in the history of rock n’ roll, and an album to which countless musicians have turned to time and time again for inspiration, if not to simply bring to life their own versions of several of these numbers.

*** The Fun Facts: As to the album’s artwork, the design for the ‘sailing shoe’ of a cake swinging on a tree swing, the album's front cover was created by Neon Park, and is professed to be an allusion to the painting "The Swing" by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Park himself said of the cover, [i]”The Sailin' Shoes” was inspired by Louis XIV. I'd just seen Rossellini's film about Louis XIV, and it seemed to relate a lot to Hollywood, where the situation was ruled by someone who kept everybody under his thumb, keeping them in hock from buying fancy clothes, cars and of course drugs, it all seemed to relate to Hollywood somehow. Actually, the only thing that was missing was the Hollywood sign, which I was going to put in the background, though thought that would be gauche. But I had a chance to pick up on that later with "The Last Record Album" cover. The cover design also includes a giant snail and Mick Jagger dressed as Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, as Park had been inspired by the film Performance.

The “Cocaine Tree” referred to in the song, “Sailin’ Shoes” is formally known as Erythroxylum coca, is actually a diminutive shrub typically no more than seven to ten feet in height. This seemingly insignificant form of plant life is native to western South America, the primary object of Lowell George’s “Sailin’ Shoes” affection, and is the source of one of his favorite psychoactive alkaloids … which no doubt contributed to his death.

Review by Jenell Kesler

This cover is a "spoof" of a pretty famous painting. Google painting of woman on a swing to see what i mean! #KnowledgeBombs :) Complete with creeper in the bottom corner trying to get a peak!