Music Review: Little Feat – ‘Live in Holland 1976’ [CD+DVD]

What a a treat Eagle Rock Entertainment has given Little Feat fans! Now we can all happily travel back to the ’70s and the days when Lowell George was still here among us, making music with the best lineup Little Feat ever had. The package includes both a live CD and a DVD.

The CD includes 11 tracks, including favorites like “Dixie Chicken,” “Oh Atlanta,” “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” “One Love Stand,” and “Rock and Roll Doctor.” The sound quality is not perfect but, aside from a bit of a rough start on the first track, “Skin in Back,” it is quite good for audio from a live performance from the ’70s.

The CD is fun, but the real treasure here is the DVD. There’s never enough footage of the band at their peak during the Lowell George period and here the band seems to be having  a lot of fun, just like the stoned and happy crowd at Holland’s Pinkpop Festival. It is too bad that we do not get to see the performances of “Oh Atlanta” and “One Love Stand” but the rest of the songs are all there, with the usual extended jams.

The quality of the DVD is not very good by our present standards. It is quite grainy but not bad for a film based on a 38-year-old videotape. It’s far more important to get to watch the band in action than to be able to see them with perfect clarity. In fact, there’s a good chance that if we had been in the crowd we would still not have seen them clearly.

The band played in the daylight on a high stage, so the angles are sometimes a bit odd. There are some crowd shots but they are usually between songs because it was obviously hard for the cameramen to catch the band and the audience in the same shot. They mostly concentrated on the band, which was a wise decision. We get to see the tandem percussion of Sam Clayton and Richie Haywood on “All That You Dream,” the perfect unison between the band members, and most of all the great, casual, amazing stage presence of Lowell George. We lost a treasure when he died in 1979 but at least we can look back and enjoy the band and George again through CDs and DVDs like this.

Any Little Feat fan should hurry to add this great CD/DVD combination to his or her collection.