Willin'

Lowell George died at 34. Like so many who died so young, he really wasn't very good at living, even if he was gifted beyond belief. The drugs and the booze; bottles of brandy and pencil sharpeners full of coke for lunch; well, they got him, not that he didn't know. Listening to Little Feat now, and especially 'Willin', probably their best known song (and certainly my favourite) has me asking why I like this song so much? What is it about it; a truck drivers lament for Dallas Alice as he remains 'Willin'' after diving 'every kinda rig that's ever been made' to be 'movin'?  Really that has fuck all to do with me.
George was notoriously unreliable, and he knew that too. He let people down, but he could write it. His trio, 'Long Distance Love', 'Willin' and 'Twenty Thousand Things To Do' resonate of his failure to do stuff, but  also of the hope that he might. How can that not bring tears to your eyes? It should certainly give us a new perspective on 'Fatman in the Bathtub' (with the blues), a song that doesn't make any sense at all when you are eighteen, simply because when you are in the bathtub at that age, you are likely preoccupied with other things.
So it is perhaps George's distress and self awareness, as well as his hope against all odds, that gets to me. 'Willin' is one of very few songs I can think of that talks of simple, stoic, optimism, or perhaps, resignation;'Yes I'll do it....' and I'll do it again. It's not Springsteen, it's not licking the chrome off the fender, it's not Jagger/Richards, that glorious, boisterous, swagger, it is a poetic, plaintive thing, and that would seem to me to be very hard to do indeed in the theatre that is rock n' roll.
Perhaps he was a git, but you recognise a difference between any Feat track where he's on it and any that he isn't. He wanted it perfect, whilst he wasn't.