Edition: U.S. / Global

Punch and Swagger From Little Feat

Published: July 11, 1988

Little Feat's reputation kept on growing after Lowell George, its lead guitarist, singer and main songwriter, died in 1979. A reconstituted Little Feat, which included the band's survivors plus a singer, Craig Fuller, and a guitarist, Fred Tackett, appeared last Wednesday at the Ritz. The group carries the band's good name and the punch and swagger of its rhythms, but it has absolutely nothing new to offer; a handful of songs from the band's forthcoming album, due Aug. 2, sounded like the old Little Feat minus its brains. For earlier songs, Mr. Fuller tried to match George's vocals phrase for phrase.

The results were both danceable and dispiriting. In the early 1970's, Little Feat brought Los Angeles absurdism to music from across the South and West - blues, country, gospel, rockabilly, New Orleans funk -writing songs with deep rock roots and sly, skewed lyrics and structures. Mixing down-home familiarity and wild-eyed inventiveness, George's songs would leap and lurch as if the song's logic itself was syncopated.

Little Feat was, and is, a band of virtuosos. Richie Hayward on drums takes basic rock and funk rhythms apart and reassembles them as pauses, flurries and stomps; Kenny Gradney, the band's bassist, and Sam Clayton, the conga player, fill in a few of the spaces. Bill Payne splashes gospel and barrelhouse chords all over the piano, while Paul Barrere and Mr. Tackett trade lead, rhythm and slide-guitar parts.

Wednesday's set largely duplicated Little Feat's 1978 live album, ''Waiting for Columbus.'' Now, as then, the best songs were George's tales of women and high-rollers - ''Fat Man in the Bathtub,'' ''Dixie Chicken,'' ''Willin' '' - but while Mr. Fuller shares George's range, he has none of his bluesy depth; sustained notes revealed the bland tone of Mr. Fuller's previous band, Pure Prairie League. Little Feat's surviving songwriters come up with more pallid songs, sometimes adding forced musical quirks, and they're already running so thin on material that they trotted out what is probably the 873d song entitled ''Cajun Girl.''

Little Feat remains a master of rhythm, and it's easy to sympathize with musicians trying to re-create the best band they ever played in. But the laurels on which Little Feat is resting belong to Lowell George.