Lowell George died on June 29, 1979, at thirty-four years old, on a solo tour supporting his only solo album, Thanks I'll Eat It Here. He left behind seven studio albums with Little Feat, a live double record that most serious listeners rank among the greatest ever made, and a slide guitar vocabulary so original that it quietly rewired the way a generation of players thought about the instrument. The rewiring was quiet because George himself was quiet about it, and because Little Feat, for most of their commercial life, were a band whose records critics loved and radio ignored. That gap between respect and reach is exactly why George's influence runs so deep and so strange: it spread person to person, player to player, the way the best ideas always do.
The starting point matters. George's early slide playing came directly out of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and he has said as much on record. You can hear it on cuts like "A Apolitical Blues" from Sailin' Shoes, the 1972 second album that producer Ted Templeman helmed for Warner Bros. But George was also listening to Ry Cooder, and to the Meters, and to the entire musical culture of New Orleans, and he was doing something that, according to Meters bassist George Porter Jr., had essentially never been done before: applying a country and blues slide technique to a New Orleans rhythm and blues format. Porter put it plainly, saying there were no New Orleans slide guitarists, no black slide players in the Crescent City at all. George walked into that empty room and built something in it. His slide was fluid and vocal, played with a spark plug socket on his ring finger, tuned to open A or open D, and his bandmate Paul Barrere remembered that it could conjure Hawaiian melodies or pedal steel, sometimes in the same phrase. That is a wide tonal range for one piece of hardware.
Dixie Chicken, released January 25, 1973, is where the synthesis locked in. George produced it himself, having taken the producer's chair after Sailin' Shoes, and he rebuilt the lineup around it: Kenny Gradney on bass, Sam Clayton on percussion, and Paul Barrere on second guitar, freeing George to concentrate entirely on his slide work. Gradney and Clayton joined drummer Richie Hayward to form a rhythm section that recalled the Meters in its pocket, and the result was a record that moved like New Orleans but breathed like Los Angeles. George wrote or co-wrote most of the songs, covered Allen Toussaint's "On Your Way Down," and pulled in Bonnie Raitt and Bonnie Bramlett for background vocals. The album peaked at number 205 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart, just outside the Top 200. George's own explanation was that it was "too diversified to be digested properly," which is the most accurate self-diagnosis in the history of commercial failure. The title track opens with a guitar figure that sits somewhere between a Delta blues riff and a second-line parade, and by the time "Fat Man in the Bathtub" arrives, George's slide is doing things that had no obvious precedent and no obvious successor for years.
Waiting for Columbus, recorded across seven performances in August 1977 and released February 10, 1978, is the document that sealed George's reputation among musicians even as it remained a cult object for the general public. The shows were split between the Rainbow Theatre in London on August 1 through 4 and the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. on August 8 through 10, with the Tower of Power horn section alongside the full six-piece band. George produced the record himself. The version of "Dixie Chicken" on that album is its own argument: Bill Payne unspools a lengthy piano solo, the Tower of Power horns push the arrangement into Dixieland territory, and then George and Barrere trade slide and lead guitar in a dual jam that makes the case for Little Feat as one of the great live improvising bands in American rock. Pitchfork gave Waiting for Columbus an 8.4. The record still sounds like it was recorded last week in a room where everyone knew exactly what they were doing.
The downstream current from George runs in several directions at once, and some of them are not where you'd expect to look. The obvious line goes through Bonnie Raitt, who sang on Dixie Chicken in 1973 and absorbed George's approach to slide as a melodic rather than percussive tool, a lesson that shows up all over her own work in the decade that followed. Sonny Landreth has said directly that George was one of his heroes and that the melodic approach, the slow vibrato, the sense of the slide as a singing voice rather than a wailing one, all came from studying George. And Phish covered Waiting for Columbus in its entirety on Halloween 2010 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, a choice that says everything about how the jam community received the album's architecture: as a master class in how to build a live set that has both discipline and room to breathe.
The deeper point about Lowell George is that he solved a specific problem: how do you take the most regionally rooted instrument in American music, the slide guitar, and make it work inside a band that is pulling simultaneously from New Orleans funk, country, blues, and rock without sounding like a genre exercise? His answer was to make the slide sound like a human voice at all times, to give it the phrasing and dynamics of a singer rather than an instrumentalist, and to put it inside a rhythm section that had its own gravitational pull. The players who came after him and got it right, Raitt, Landreth, Derek Trucks, all understood that the secret was in the phrasing. George never played a note that didn't belong to a sentence. That is a harder thing to teach than technique, and it is why his influence is still moving through the music more than forty years after he left.
