Little Feat ace Sam Clayton, a Fallbrook resident, discusses storied band’s 50 years

Long a favorite of Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and other rock legends who embrace musical excellence and versatility, Little Feat is now embarked on its 50th anniversary tour. This fact both delights and surprises Sam Clayton, the group’s ace percussionist and periodic singer.

“If anyone had told me in the 1970s that we’d be doing this tour in 2019, I would have said: ‘No way, man’!” said Clayton, speaking recently from his secluded Fallbrook home.

“Now, you look back, and say: ‘Fifty years? Fifty years!’ I’m 70 years old and on a 50th anniversary tour? Wow!’ ”

Not coincidentally, “Wow!” was the frequent reaction Little Feat received from its fellow artists and savvy audiences alike during this quintessentially American band’s heyday in the 1970s. The group performs Friday at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay.

Drawing from rock, blues, funk, country, soul, jazz and more, Little Feat created an enduring legacy. That legacy has far outlived the 1979 death of the band’s co-founder, singer-guitarist Lowell George, and the eight-year hiatus that followed before Little Feat’s surviving members reunited and added a new guitarist and singer.

Much beloved by other musicians, the songs of Little Feat have been covered over the years by such disparate artists as Bob Dylan, Van Halen, Miranda Lambert, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Steve Earle, Gregg Allman, Carly Simon, Garth Brooks and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. The members of top jam-band Phish are such devoted fans that, at a 2010 concert, Phish performed 16 of the 17 songs from Little Feat’s landmark 1977 live album, “Waiting for Columbus.”

Linda Ronstadt, who had a brief fling with the then-married George, recorded two Little Feat songs “Roll Um Easy” and “Willin’,” on her solo albums. Less than two months after George’s 1979 death, she performed several numbers at a Little Feat benefit concert for his family at the Los Angeles Forum. The lineup also included Raitt, Harris, Jackson Browne, Nicolette Larson and Michael McDonald.

Raitt has long credited George as one of her biggest influences on bottleneck guitar. In 1977, she and Harris sang with Little Feat when the band performed on the live music TV show “The Midnight Special.”

In 1974, rising English vocal star Robert Palmer featured George on his first solo album, which opened with the title track from Little Feat’s 1972 album, “Sailin’ Shoes.” All six members of Little Feat performed on Palmer’s second album, 1975’s “Pressure Drop,” after which Palmer accepted an offer to go on tour with the band — as a backing singer.

Two years earlier, jazz drum great Chico Hamilton hired Little Feat to be his band on his 1973 album, “The Master.” That was the same year Little Feat released its third album, the classic “Dixie Chicken.” In 1989, its title track inspired the name of a then-new Texas group called the Dixie Chicks.

The Rolling Stones were in the audience when Little Feat performed in Amsterdam in 1975 and befriended the band. Tellingly, the Stones’ 1976 album, “Black and Blue,” contained two songs — “Hot Stuff” and “Hey Negrita” — with a pronounced Little Feat flavor.

The mother of invention

“Mick (Jagger) hung out with us,” Clayton recalled. “The Stones have a couple of songs that have our sound. They are not our songs, but they have our sound.”

Clayton chuckled knowingly when asked if it was frustrating or flattering that the Stones were just one of a number of major bands who emulated Little Feat in varying degrees.

“It wasn’t frustrating to me. It was flattering. It meant we must be doing something right!” said the veteran percussionist, whose sister — singer Merry Clayton — duets with Jagger on the Stones’ 1970 classic, “Gimme Shelter.” His older brother, Joe Clayton, was a percussionist for Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye.

Little Feat was co-founded in 1969 by singer-guitarist Lowell George and bassist Roy Estrada, who had become friends as members of the Mothers of Invention, the genre-leaping band led by former San Diegan Frank Zappa.

George and Estrada teamed with two fellow Los Angeles-based musicians, keyboardist Billy Payne and drummer Richie Hayward. Their self-titled debut album as Little Feat came out in 1971 on Warner Bros. Records and, while rich in promise, made little impact.

The band’s next release, 1972’s “Sailin’ Shoes,” was a notably more confident and accomplished album — and the last to feature Estrada, who soon left to join Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. That opened the door for Clayton and bassist Kenny Gradney, both former members of Delaney & Bonnie. Paul Barrere was concurrently added as a second guitarist and singer.

The expanded, six-man band then made a series of consecutively excellent albums, beginning with the aforementioned “Dixie Chicken”; 1974’s “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now”; 1975’s “The Last Record Album”; and 1977’s two-disc “Waiting for Columbus.” (“Time Loves a Hero,” released in 1977, was the only release in that five-year run to fall short of the heady mark set by the other albums.)

George was an exceptional singer, guitarist and songwriter whose lone solo album, 1979’s “Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here,” is a largely unheralded gem. He would have been a standout in nearly any other group, but Little Feat was a band of equals.

Like few ensembles before or since, Little Feat showcased superior musicianship in service of first-rate songs that could rock and romp one moment, shimmer and ache the next. Those songs drew from familiar stylistic sources, but combined them in uniquely fresh new ways. The results often suggested a felicitous meeting between Los Angeles and New Orleans, big-city ambition and down-home grit, sinewy syncopation and crisp counterpoint.

Moreover, while all of Little Feat’s members could play with electrifying virtuosity on record and in concert, they wisely left room for each note to breathe and fully resonate.

“The band was fine when we joined, but it totally changed when we came in,” Clayton said proudly.

“We made it funkier and more Louisiana-styled, with much more energy, rhythm and in-the-pocket, second-line grooves. It just happened and we left the spaces for everybody to play. When it connected, it came out like a nice stew.”

Alas, cocaine and heroin use soon became debilitating habits — at least for half of Little feat’s six members — as Barrere acknowledged in a 2018 Union-Tribune interview.

“That was a time in our lives when — not the whole band, but certainly three of us in the band — partied and partied pretty hard,” Barrere said. “It wasn’t the keyboard player (Payne), bassist (Gradney) or conga player (Clayton). So you can figure it out ...”

George died in 1979 from a cocaine-fueled heart attack. Barrere later contracted Hepatitis C, but has happily regained his footing. Hayward died in 2010 after contracting pneumonia, which became fatal because his lungs had been previously damaged by untreated adult respiratory fibrosis. At the time of his death, he was also battling liver cancer and had been hoping to undergo a transplant.

“I was an athlete in high school and college in Los Angeles, and I took a lot of pride in that,” Clayton, a Louisiana native, said.

“I didn’t drink or smoke; that was just my upbringing. I thought it was ugly when people started drinking. With cocaine, I said: ‘No, man, that’s not for me. I’m not that guy’.”

George’s death saw Clayton begin an extended stint as a member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. Payne who is now a longtime member of the Doobie Brothers, joined Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band. Clayton also amassed an array of recording credits, performing on albums with everyone from Seger and Buffett to Timothy B. Schmit of the Eagles and Ringo Starr. He is also featured on albums by Duane Allman, Freddie King, Travis Tritt, Kathy Dalton Gloria Jones, among others.

The percussionist played briefly in rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard’s band, but said he quit after Richard made a pass at him. Clayton’s one regret is that — during Little Feat’s hiatus — he got cold feet when invited to play with jazz organ colossus Jimmy Smith, who died in 2005.

“I just didn’t want to mess up; I respected him so much that I just freaked out,” Clayton recalled.

“This was a cat that I idolized. To this day, I play (Smith’s landmark 1959 album) ‘The Sermon,’ and I think: ‘Man, you were really stupid to not go when you had a chance.’ I still regret it.”

Little Feat reunited in 1987. George’s role was jointly filled by guitarist Fred Tackett and former Pure Prairie League singer and guitarist Craig Fuller, who left in 1993 and was replaced by Shaun Murphy until 2009.

The band’s current lineup features Clayton, Payne, Gradney, Barrere, Tackett and drummer Gabe Ford, who is the nephew of former Joni Mitchell/Miles Davis guitarist Robben Ford.

“When Little Feat got back together, Jimmy Buffett took us on tour with him as his opening act and I was playing in both bands,” Clayton said. “In fact, before Little Feat reunited, I played with Buffett in San Diego at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay. I’ve played at Humphreys a couple of times.”

Clayton and his landscape designer wife, Joni, moved in 2000 to Fallbrook, a community he regards as ideal for “kicking back and doing nothin!” They have two adult children and several grand kids.

“What I’m proudest of about Little Feat,” Clayton said, “is our being able able to play our own music and enjoy who you play with. Everybody in the band gets along. And that can be hard to believe, because there’s usually some kind of discrepancy in most bands. I like being around them. It’s like another family.”

Little Feat 50th anniversary tour

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Where: Humphreys Concert by the Bay, 2241 Shelter Island Drive, Shelter Island

Tickets: $55

Online: ticketmaster.com