A graduate of both Hollywood High School and Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, LOWELL GEORGE’s gifts were boundless: singer, songwriter, producer, arranger, frontman, slide guitarist supreme… Now, 45 years since his untimely death, his former LITTLE FEAT bandmates and assorted collaborators hymn their fallen comrade with tales involving swimming pools in Topanga, suitcases full of cash, heavy drugs and a sublime mastery of groove. “Lowell was right up there with the very best,” learns Rob Hughes. “I didn’t think anything could happen to him. To me, Lowell was invincible.”

Photo by MICHAEL PUTLAND

FEBRUARY 13, 1972. Little Feat are due to support Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band in Cincinnati, but Lowell George has disappeared. With showtime looming, there’s still no sign. “The venue’s equipment had broken down, so Lowell said, ‘I’m going ice skating,’” recalls keyboardist and co-founder Bill Payne. “I decided it was best to go with him. So he’s out there on the ice for an hour, doing figure eights and little spins. Eventually I say, ‘C’mon, Lowell, we’d better get going.’ We jump in the cab, run back in and there’s a line of people – including members of both bands – staring daggers at us. It turned out they’d fixed the sound system 15 minutes after we’d left.”

Such unpredictability wasn’t uncommon in Lowell George’s world. He was a man of capricious whims, a contradictory figure who could infuriate and delight in equal measure, his behaviour heightened by a propensity for self-ruin. Yet it all came with the territory.

The undisputed alpha leader of Little Feat during their classic ’70s run, George’s formidable talent and creative drive were apparent to all who worked with him. No two albums were the same. His imagistic songs often felt like surreal portraiture, full of vivid wit and strange characters, touched by pathos and desolation. “Satire was rife in Lowell’s works,” observes his great friend Van Dyke Parks. “But in the main, I sensed tragicomedy in just about everything he wrote.”

His gifts seemed boundless: singer, songwriter, producer, arranger, frontman, slide guitarist supreme. Jackson Browne called him “the Orson Welles of rock”. Another ally and admirer was Bonnie Raitt. “Lowell was so smart, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” she says. “He had this incredible appetite for new music and for a wide range of world music, so he opened my eyes and ears to a lot of that. Every slide player on Earth is a Lowell George fan. He really was an inspiration.”

Under George’s stewardship, Little Feat morphed from leftfield eccentrics to perhaps the quintessential American rock’n’roll band, offering a sinuous, syncopated mix of blues, country, soul and second line funk. George was no showboater. Instead, prime Little Feat operated as one mighty rhythm section on peerless works like Dixie Chicken and Feats Don’t Fail Me Now.

High-profile fans included the Stones, Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead and Jimmy Page, who declared them his favourite American group in a 1975 interview with Rolling Stone. “I’d never heard anything as inventive or funky,” adds Raitt. “They weren’t interested in saying we’re a rock band or country band or anything like that. The thing that I loved about Lowell and Little Feat was that it was limitless.”