Little Feat were at a crossroads.

The Los Angeles band had formed in the late ’60s when Frank Zappa encouraged one of his sidemen, the gifted slide guitarist Lowell George, to start his own group. After releasing three albums for Warner Bros. Records, Little Feat had the respect of critics and fellow musicians, but little commercial success.

“At that time, they were a really inclusive, ‘It’s about music’ kind of label,” keyboardist Bill Payne recently told me over the phone from California. “It wasn’t run by the bean counters quite yet.”

In early 1974, the band was as close to breaking up as they’d ever been, briefly firing founding drummer Richie Hayward and struggling financially after a tour was canceled at the last minute.

“We’d been undergoing some pretty dramatic ups and downs, we weren’t quite sure how we were gonna keep everything together,” Payne said. Then Little Feat’s manager Bob Cavallo brought the band the opportunity that would turn their fortunes around. One of Cavallo’s other clients, Lovin’ Spoonful bassist Steve Boone, had acquired a studio in Hunt Valley, Maryland, where Little Feat could book lots of affordable studio time.

“Bob came up with this plan, and really solidified things,” Payne said. With a Warner Bros. recording budget approved, Little Feat were ready to make their fourth album, and it brought in enough money for Boone to formally launch Blue Seas Recording Studio. The members of Little Feat rented apartments in Towson and Cockeysville and spent about eight months, the majority of 1974, living in Maryland, trying crab cakes for the first time and soaking in the local flavor. They already had the basic tracks for one great song, “Spanish Moon,” that had been recorded in California. Soon more great songs would begin flowing.

“It’s a wonderful place,” bassist Kenny Gradney said of Little Feat’s time in Baltimore County. Gradney had joined the band in 1972 along with guitarist Paul Barrere and percussionist Sam Clayton, expanding Little Feat from a quartet to a six-piece to complete the band’s classic lineup.

“It did really change the whole perspective of the music and Lowell just loved it. It was a lot of fun,” said Gradney.

The album Little Feat recorded at Blue Seas would become a breakthrough moment for the band. Released on August 9, 1974, “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” peaked at No. 36 on the Billboard 200 and also placed on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics poll at the end of the year. Songs on the album have been covered over the years by Cher, Phish, Eric Church, and Eddie Money.

Tracks such as “Rock & Roll Doctor” and the title track, which name-checks Baltimore, have remained mainstays of Little Feat’s live repertoire. The town where they’d recorded, however, was erroneously referred to as “Hunts Valley” in the album’s liner notes.

Lowell George performed live on the air on the legendary local radio station WHFS with rising star Linda Ronstadt, who was also recording in Maryland in 1974. Her hit album, “Heart Like A Wheel,” would include a cover of Little Feat’s “Willin’.” In between recording sessions, Little Feat would gig around the area, playing at the Dulaney Inn in Towson and opening for Three Dog Night at the Capital Centre in Landover. “From that we sort of inadvertently found out we actually had a big fan base in the area,” said Payne.

One of the new fans Little Feat made that year was actually my father. Rick Shipley was a recent graduate of Towson University, singing in a cover band with his friends one night when he struck up a conversation with a musician who was in town. It was Lowell George, who invited my dad to hang out at Blue Seas and watch the band record that night. Little Feat never quite became a household name, but I grew up listening to the band because of that chance meeting, and my dad went to many Little Feat shows until his death in 2017.

“It’s a small world,” Payne said after hearing my story. “Our connections with people always astound me.”

“Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” is Little Feat’s most upbeat album, with no ballads or acoustic tracks, and epitomizes the band’s distinctively swampy mix of rock, funk, country and blues. “With Little Feat, you’d have to play 10 to 12 bands to embrace and encompass the amount of genres that we attempt to tackle at any given time,” Payne said. “The connection between things has always been what Little Feat is about.”

“Oh Atlanta” is the most popular Little Feat song written and sung by Payne, though the band didn’t seem impressed when he first wrote it.

“They weren’t enthusiastic about it at all,” Payne remembered. “I knew it was a good song. I thought, ‘Well, we gotta plow ahead.’”

On June 14th, Little Feat returned to Baltimore to celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” at Pier Six Pavilion. The band played the entire album in a somewhat shuffled order to tease out new connections, including a medley that connected “Spanish Moon” to “Skin It Back.” When the band kicked into “Oh Atlanta,” most of the audience stood up in recognition, pumping their fists to the chorus of Payne’s signature song.

Lowell George and Elizabeth Levy, who’d marry in 1976, were expecting a child when Little Feat arrived here to record, and Inara George was born on July 4th at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. The couple even decided to give their daughter the middle name Maryland to commemorate her birthplace.

Inara George grew up to be a successful musician in her own right, fronting the band The Bird & The Bee and recording with artists like Foo Fighters and even Little Feat, occasionally singing her father’s songs. “I might see Inara two days from now,” Payne said. “We’re trying a couple things recording-wise, we’ll see what happens.”

Lowell George befriended British singer Robert Palmer many years before he became a pop hitmaker in the 1980s, and members of Little Feat played on all of Palmer’s early albums. In fact, Palmer came to Maryland and recorded his 1975 album “Pressure Drop” with the band on the heels of the “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” sessions.

Blues Seas Recording Studio didn’t stay in its original Hunt Valley location for long, with Steve Boone deciding to outfit a boat with his state-of-the-art recording gear and record bands in the Baltimore harbor. Lowell George recorded some demos on the boat that were sadly lost when it sank under mysterious circumstances in late 1977, just a couple piers down from where Little Feat performed in June at Pier Six Pavilion.

Little Feat’s original run came to a sad, abrupt end when Lowell George died in 1979 of a drug overdose at just 34 years old.

Little Feat disbanded for nearly a decade, but the band’s catalog kept finding new fans. In 1986, “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” became the first Little Feat studio album to be certified Gold for selling 500,000 copies. A year later, the band reunited, and has kept touring and recording for over three decades. Payne, Gradney and Clayton still remain from the band’s classic era, though Hayward died in 2010 and Barrere died in 2019. Fred Tackett, who co-wrote and played on some of the band’s ’70s songs, also joined as a full-time member in 1988.

In June, Rhino Records released a deluxe 3-disc reissue of “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” on the same day Little Feat celebrated the album at Pier Six Pavilion. A disc of demos and alternate takes recorded at Blue Seas includes early versions of Little Feat classics that would appear on later albums, like “All That You Dream” and “Long Distance Love.” Like the original album, the liner notes say “Hunts Valley” instead of “Hunt Valley.”

Payne, the only member of Little Feat who’s remained a constant in every iteration of the band from 1969 to 2024, has been in a reflective mood lately. He’s writing a memoir, “Carnival Ghosts,” about his long career in music, which includes stints as a member of the Doobie Brothers and Leftover Salmon, and playing on albums by Pink Floyd and Jackson Browne. And next year will bring the first collection of new Little Feat songs in over a decade. “We were in the studio in Nashville, for 2025 we have a brand new album coming out with all-original material,” he said.

In 1966, Payne went to see the Yardbirds, without realizing that the British blues band’s star guitarist Jeff Beck was no longer in the group. He’d been replaced, however, by another great guitarist — future Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page. “We were like, ‘Where the hell’s Jeff Beck?’ Then Page starts to play, we go, ‘Oh, this is cool, what’s that?’” Payne remembered.

That memory helped inspire him to continue Little Feat after George’s death.

“I said, ‘As long as we sound like Little Feat, we’re not denigrating Lowell.’ I think we point the spotlight at Lowell George every time we can. People are putting him into a shrine, I don’t think he belongs in a shrine,” he said. “My feeling about it is this guy’s a part of our family, and will always be a part of our family.”