Electrif Lycanthrope is the finest live album never commercially released.
The gig was recorded in front of a small audience in a radio studio in New York State.
I remember the Manchester Free Trade Hall, The Rainbow, Birmingham Odeon, Hammersmith Odeon, Charlton football stadium, supporting the Who. And interviewing them for The Scotsman many years later, after Lowell George was long gone.
Manchester : Chris Briggs bootlegged the show on a Sony dictaphone and we listened to it all the way down the M6 and the M1- me, Briggsy and Stewart Joseph, singing along, high on music and nothing else, getting home about 3.30 am. Stewart later managed Generation X and took my kids to the Junior Gunners for 4 years. And took them to the Millennium Stadium FA Cup Finals. Briggsy still works for EMI and still has that cassette.
After the Rainbow I went back to the hotel with Lowell George and he gave me a cassette of a comedian who was unknown in UK. It was That Nigger’s Crazy by Richard Pryor, who was also on Warner Bros.
I adored Pryor’s wildly original genius and played the album to everyone who came round to our flat. Most people were baffled. But me and cartoonist pal Malc used to roll around the floor giggling, choking and foaming at the mouth. We hadn’t done that since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was first published in Rolling Stone magazine.
Birmingham Odeon was me, bass player Andy Brown, who was in The Catch (which became The Tourists) and Annette, my anglicised American friend. Just after the show started, when the lights went down, we had to stand up while two people came along our row to occupy the empty seats next to Annette : Mr & Mrs Robert Plant.
Charlton was me and Annette sharing an umbrella as the hugely metallic guitars sounded like battleships colliding. Awesome.We left before the Who came on.
Little Feat are the ballsiest American group I’ve ever seen and the most laidback. No other rock band had six phenomenal players and no other rock band had such an original sound. They were, I suppose, a group’s group.
As Briggsy said in Manchester, “They make the Stones sound like a bunch of art students.”
You can listen to it here and download it for free !!!!