Consumer Guide Album

Little Feat: Dixie Chicken [Warner Bros., 1973]
The problem with Lowell George isn't so much that he doesn't write good songs as that he doesn't write great ones. He's immersed in blues--it's his idiom. But his own boast to the contrary, "eloquent profanity" doesn't come easy to him, and it should--in a real blues artist, the secret of a simple trope like "Two Trains" is that it seems spontaneous and conventional both at once, while George's clenched throat and staggering slide bear witness to his creative effort. None of which is to say that these aren't good songs--when George finds the right trope (or when Bill Payne finds a piano part like the one that hooks the title cut) the strain is part of the fun. B+