The band Little Feat can be hard to describe.
The song catalog, the history across 56 years, the grooves, the way influences have manifested themselves in that song catalog, the way these musicians take something old, something new, something broken and put it all back together with sonic glue—it’s all about feeling and mood and the spirit of a song.
Little Feat is like a classic car from the 1950s. These automobiles, though decades old, have chrome that shines in the sun and engines that roars. Sure, the bones are old, but you’ve got parts that are new and the engine, quite simply, roars as it did when it rolled off the assembly line. And that roar is as much about vibration and rumbling and quaking—in other words, feeling—as it is about sound and listening.
The same could be said of Little Feat.
The band’s iconic songs include, “Dixie Chicken,” “All That You Dream,” “Time Loves A Hero,” “Fat Man In The Bathtub” and “Willin’,” the timeless, open-road anthem of endurance and resilience. The geographical coordinates of this ensemble’s sound maintain proximity to New Orleans but remain something of a moving target, defying description but always maintaining an identity that, while difficult to lasso, remains distinctly Little Feat.
On Labor Day Weekend, the roar of this band’s engine could likely consume the Woodstock whole as this six-piece ensemble unleashes its fury on intimate audiences during a three-night run —August 30, August 31 and September 1—at the Bearsville Theater.
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Little Feat on their current tour, in support of their Strike Up the Band album, has been playing larger theaters that have included the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, with a capacity of 1,800. Little Feat is scheduled to play the Count Basie Theater, in New Jersey, which holds 1,600. The Bearsville Theater marks a drastic pivot as far as capacity is concerned, as the historic venue in the Bearsville Center complex will host a capacity of 550, each night, for what is being called “Feat Fest 2025: Little Feat and Friends.” The chance to see Little Feat in such a small venue represents a rare opportunity for the band’s legions of fans.
The Capitol Theatre is operated by national venue owner and concert promoter Peter Shapiro, who took over operations at the Bearsville Theater in June 2024.
Bearsville Theater Talent Buyer Mike Campbell booked the three Little Feat shows. And he says the relationship that Shapiro and his Dayglo Productions team—which includes Campbell—built with Little Feat, which played The Capitol in May, set the stage for the band to play the intimate venue in Woodstock over three successive nights on a holiday weekend.
“The word intimate is the word to use,” says Little Feat keyboard player Bill Payne, an original member of the band that formed in 1969. “It’s that type of thing. We’re going to have a lot of friends there and we’re going to have friends on stage with us. Who knows who else might pop through the door? I don’t know.”
Adds Payne with a laugh, “We’re not going to police the area.”
Two of Payne’s closest friends, with whom he has collaborated often in Woodstock, are Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams. The husband-and-wife musical duo, Woodstock residents and former members of the Levon Helm Band will serve as the opening act for the opening night of Feat Fest 2025.
Campbell first saw Little Feat in the early 1970s at Max’s Kansas City, the legendary New York City club. “It was mesmerizing,” says Campbell, a three-time Grammy winner and former member of Bob Dylan’s band. “I had never heard anything like it. There was no other band like Little Feat at the time—and there never has been. Like The Band, like the Beatles, like the Rolling Stones, they came to the music scene with their own sensibilities. They invented a genre—not a lot of groups out there can say that. They’ve done it and they’ve held on to it for this long. We’re just lucky to have them in town.”
Little Feat in Bearsville will showcase a lineup that has undergone transformation since its inception. Founder, guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Lowell George died in 1979; and drummer Richie Hayward passed away in 2010. The current incarnation of the band includes original member Payne; bass player Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton, who joined Little Feat not long after it was formed; and guitarist Fred Tackett, who joined in 1988.
Guitarist and vocalist Scott Sharrard, formerly of Gregg Allman & Friends, joined Little Feat in 2019. Drummer Tony Leone, of Ollabelle, Chris Robinson Brotherhood and Phil Lesh & Friends fame, was enlisted to join Little Feat in 2020. Both musicians have worked extensively in Woodstock across decades, largely at Levon Helm Studios.
Payne said the essence of Little Feat remains entrenched, embedded, nestled in the songs.
“It’s about the music itself, the lineage, the legacy,” he says. “What we write, what we play.”
And that extends through time, from the band’s original members to the current lineup.
“Tony and Scott,” Payne says, “were listening to our band when they were kids.”
Payne attributes the endurance of Little Feat to “elasticity.”
“It’s a vision Lowell and I had in 1969,” he says. “Elasticity—keep the form of what we’re doing musically elastic, because a lot of cool things are going to come down the pike in terms of influences, and that’s where we reside and where our musical tastes reside.”
Adds Payne, “We’re still playing ‘Dixie Chicken’ all these years later and people ask, ‘How do you keep that sounding so fresh?’ Well, what do you do when you sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to somebody? You sing it from the heart. That’s what we do as well. We keep it coming from the heart.”
This article appears in August 2025.
