Little Feat
November 28, 2004
I don’t get a chance to listen to much music. Sometimes, in the car, I get an uninterrupted 30 minutes or so, and I lean pretty heavily on the cassette tapes close at hand—a lot of Springsteen, some Dylan, and small equal parts of Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, and Van Morrison. I also like acoustic music; I could listen to Greg Brown all day.
Of course, I don’t have all day, so a lot of stuff goes unlistened. Take Little Feat, for example. They were my lifeline, for a few years at the very end of high school and the beginning of college. Then founder and lead singer Lowell George died in my sophmore year of college. I wrote a horribly bad tribute to him for my college paper, but then moved on. By the end of college I was seven parts Bruce Springsteen to three parts acoustic music, and I haven’t moved much from that since.
But Little Feat has such a great sound, and when I hear them I rocket back to a time when listening to music was pure joy. My friends and I had a blast, with Little Feat as a backdrop. Yes, if you know Little Feat you know the many obvious allusions to drugs in their lyrics. But it was more than that. It was offbeat, playful songs like “Dixie Chicken” and “Tripe Face Boogie,” and sweet plaintive songs like Missing You.”
Something the other day got me thinking about the Little Feat song Willin" and the silly little argument my friends and I used to have over the lyrics in the refrain. The correct lyric is, "And if you give me weed, whites and wine/ And you show me a sign/ And I'll be willin' to be movin'..." Some of us would argue that it wasn't "weed, whites, and wine"; rather it was "weed, rice, and wine" or "wheat, rice, and wine." I forget how we ever settled it, but we finally did.
I have this pet theory that the ready access to the Internet basically puts an end to all such squabbles. Have a question? Google it, and voila, there is the answer. So I googled the lyrics, and not only did I find the correct ones, but I also found a Google answers discussion correcting someone who made the "wheat, rice, and wine" mistake.
Here is the really funny thing, though. The "wheat" vs. "weed" line isn't even the tricky part of the lyric though. The refrain actually begins with a couplet that we obviously never figured out, and never even bothered to argue about:
And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonopah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the backroads so I wouldn't get weighed...
My recollection is that we knew to sing... "Tucson to Tucumcari," but the next line is only a vague memory. I asked my wife, also of that era, and she thought the line mentioned "Chesapeake," but I completely drew a blank. Did any of us even have a clue?
Posted by Bill Trippe at November 28, 2004 11:25 AM
