(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros Records)
Sun 4 January 2026 16:15, UK
Everyone knows that Jimmy Page‘s favourite American band was, and always will be, Little Feat. And if you don’t, well, every day is a school day. He insisted that they were a “musician’s band”.
Very well then, why don’t we let the music do the talking? Honing in on their 1974 album, cheekily titled Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, the band seemed to give an eerie premonition of their own downfall that’d play out by the end of that same decade.
Their fourth studio album contained five tracks on the first side and three tracks on the second side. The final track of the first side was the three-minute groove fest, ‘Spanish Moon’. A lick of keys here, a sure, sexy bassline, and soft, hypnotic vocals beneath Lowell George’s prowling voice make it a sure hit with almost every type of crowd.
It’s a feel-good track, evoking grand dance halls and streamers shimmering silver atop a sweaty conglomeration of bodies, but it has a darker story behind the fruity facade. Vocalist and guitarist George also wrote the song. It conjures up the fictional location of the Spanish Moon, which is a seedy club with whiskey and terrible cocaine.
The best and worst thing about the Spanish Moon was the women. “I pawned my watch, and I sold my ring / Just to hear that girl sing,” George howls. After a funky, futuristic key break, he goes on: “I don’t care who, you can wake up ruined / You can lose it all down at the Spanish Moon.”
The world might have come from his imagination, but he lived through the gritty realities beneath the magical surface. Whiskey and bad cocaine? He saw the lot of it. Around the time of writing, his health started failing, due in part to his cocaine addiction. He soon developed hepatitis; Feats Don’t Fail Me Now was the last Little Feat album where he led with clear decisiveness.
From there on, things went from bad to worse. In 1979, the year the band officially split, he released a solo album; it was in support of this album that he died from a heart attack, at the shockingly young age of 34.
Despite this tragic backstory, ‘Spanish Moon’ has a special power: It was the only Little Feat song to be produced by Van Dyke Parks, who was famed for his work with The Beach Boys. Parks and co recorded the song in Sound Factory Studios in Los Angeles, the one chance they were given, despite the financial strain they were facing.
An incredible story reaches us from this time, when the white powder was flowing, and the “hookers and hustlers” were seemingly trapped in a revolving door. Sax player Emilion Castillo recounted Parks, who strutted into the recording session and said: “I want the horns on this track to sound the way it does when the cow pie hits the side of the barn.”
Listen to the track. You can hear it, can’t you? The band might have fallen off, but darn it if the smash didn’t make one hell of a noise.
Related Topics