Roll Um Easy Easy To Slip Can't Be Satisfied Little Feat

Roll Um Easy Album: Dixie Chicken (1973)
Easy To Slip Album: Sailin' Shoes (1972)
Can't Be Satisfied Album: Sam’s Place (2024)
by Little Feat

Video features "The Big Easy"

Little Feat, like any other good gumbo, is a rich, dark stew of influences. They'll stir in folk, rock, blues, country, gospel and a bit of funk. The secret spice in this strange concoction was originally the late Lowell George, a man of both prodigious talents and appetites. He oversaw their transformation from an off-kilter post-Frank Zappa hybrid group into a rollicking, rootsy delight before he was felled by a massive heart attack on June 29, 1979, at just 34 years old. Little Feat had already begun drifting away from him, turning a little more jazzy, but promptly broke up anyway.

Easy To Slip was written by guitarist/singer Lowell George and his frequent collaborator Martin Kibbee. Kibbee had the original idea, then played it for George, who added the guitar part.

Easy To Slip is probably the song that convinced Warner Bros. not to drop the band because it showed their commercial potential. Ironically, neither the song nor the album charted.

Kibbee and George started their own publishing company around this time called Naked Snake Music because they had lost the rights to their earlier songs.

Kibbee was often credited, including on Easy To Slip, as Fred Martin. This meant that the writing credit would go to "George/Martin." George Martin was the producer for The Beatles and this was their way to pay tribute to him.

The inability of Easy To Slip to chart led to the personnel changes that added guitarist Paul Barrere and expanded the lineup from four people to six.

Little Feat would become more song-oriented as they trained a sharper spotlight on the underlying musical elements that always made this band so intriguing. Tending to their roots with far more care than seemed possible with Little Feat's rangy late frontman, the group eventually found themselves recording their first all-blues, Clayton-sung LP. For some, the genre turn on Sam's Place may have seemed as unlikely as Clayton moving from behind the congas. After all, Little Feat had always been one thing – and that was never any one thing. Yet Clayton's infectious passion for the music is clear, and there's always been a bright blues thread winding through the group's career.

Roll Um Easy

Oh I am just a vagabond
A drifter on the run
And eloquent profanity
It rolls right off my tongue
And I have dined in palaces
Drunk wine with Kings and Queens
But darlin', oh darlin'
You're the best thing I've ever seen
Won't you roll me easy
Oh slow and easy
Take my independence
With no apprehension, no tension
You walki' talkin' dream paradise
Sweet pair a' dice
Well I been across this country
From Denver to the ocean
And I never met girls who could sing so sweet
Like the angels that live in Houston
Singin' "Roll me easy, so slow and easy...
Play that Concertina, I'll be your temptress..."
And baby I'm defenseless
Singin' harmony
In unison
Sweet harmony
Gotta hoist your flag and I'll beat your drum

Easy To Slip

It's so easy to slip
It's so easy to fall
And let your memory drift
And do nothin' at all
All the love that you missed
All the people that you can't recall
Do they really exist at all

Well my whole world seems so cold today
All the magic's gone away
And our time together melts away
Like the sad melody I play

Well I don't want to drift forever
In the shadow of your leaving me
So I'll light another cigarette
And try to remember to forget

It's so easy to slip
It's so easy to fall
And let your memory drift
And do nothin' at all
All the love that you missed
All the people that you can't recall
Do they really exist at all

Can't Be Satisfied

Well, I'm going away to leave
I won't be back no more
Going back down south
Child, don't you wanna go?
Woman, I'm troubled
I be all worried in mind
Well babe, I just can't be satisfied
I just can't keep from crying

Well, I feel like snapping
A pistol in your face
I'm gon' let some graveyard
Lord, be your resting place
Woman, I'm troubled
I be all worried in mind
Well baby, I can't ever be satisfied
And I just can't keep from crying

Well, now all in my sleep
I hear my doorbell ring
Looking for my baby
I didn't see not a doggone thing
Woman, I was troubled
I was all worried in mind
Well honey, I could never be satisfied
I just can't keep from crying

Well, I know my little old baby
She gon' jump and shout
That old train be late, man
Lord, and I come walking out
I be troubled
I be all worried in mind
Well honey, ain't no way in the world for me to be satisfied
And I just can't keep from crying