Various Artists - Lowell George Tribute Concert, The Forum, Los Angeles, CA, 8-4-1979

Lowell George was the lead guitarist and a key songwriter for the band Little Feat throughout the 1970s. In 1979, the band split up due to creative differences, and George released a solo album. He announced plans to restart the band with a slightly different line-up. But on June 29, 1979, while on tour to support his solo album, he died of a heart attack related to an accidental heroin overdose. He was only 34 years old. Only a couple of months after his death, a tribute concert was held in Los Angeles to celebrate his life and his music. Here is what remains available from that concert.

I'm posting this album almost entirely due to the efforts of musical friend Lil Panda. A couple of days ago (as I write this in August 2025), he sent me this concert out of the blue. He'd found a video from the concert on YouTube. The sound quality was fundamentally good, but had issues. I asked him what he did to fix it, and this was his reply: "Phase correction, azimuth adjustment, de-clicking, music rebalance (different for almost every song... trial and error), the repair assistant (vocal work), and spectral repair." So, thanks to his work, this should sound much better than ever before.

Furthermore, I made some additional changes, since I'm more willing to make changes to bootlegs if I think it improves the overall recording. I noticed some minor drop-outs here and there, usually only a second or less of silence. I patched those up when I found them. That's why three of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. 

In addition, the video did something strange with the songs "Running on Empty" and "All That You Dream." If you watch the video, they're edited to seem complete, but in fact both of them were edited way down, to less than two minutes long each. By sheer luck, the only officially released performance from this concert is "All That You Dream," from the Little Feat album "Hoy Hoy," and it's the entire song. So I used that instead. For "Running on Empty," most of the song except for the first verse and some of the end was missing. I used a different live version of this song, from the 1979 No Nukes concerts that I've posted elsewhere on this blog, to fill in the missing part of the song. But there are some differences between the versions, so you might notice the edits. Still, I prefer that over having a weirdly short version. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title too.

In addition, I made another edit to all the songs. That's because the video usually cut the cheering at the ends of the songs short, to just a couple of seconds. It didn't sound right to me. So I did some copying and pasting of cheering from one song to another until all the songs had a decent amount of applause. 

I found a 1979 New York Times article about the concert, so I know a little bit about it. Here's the article link (though it may not work for you if you don't have a subscription):

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/06/archives/pop-coast-tribute-to-lowell-george.html 

According to the concert, the proceeds from the concert were given to George's family. The concert lasted almost three hours. In addition to the big names included in this album, some others also took part, like Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, Eric Kaz, Craig Fuller, J. D. Souther, Ted Tempelman, and the Tower of Power. But the video here is less than an hour long, and a lot got cut out. Either their roles were cut entirely or they only had minor roles. For instance, Michael McDonald sang back up on one song here, and the Tower of Power horns played on a few of the songs. Generally speaking, Little Feat was the backing band. But I didn't include them in most of the song credits because that would have made the song names longer and I didn't know for sure who played on which song.

The article states that some big musical stars, like Bob Dylan and the Eagles, wanted to perform at the concert as well. However, the surviving Little Feat band members who organized the concert decided to keep it to just the other musicians who knew George well. There also was pressure to have more than one concert, since interest was extremely high, but they decided not to go that route either.

The concert was filmed and recorded with the idea of later releasing an album or film of it. But so far, only that one song mentioned above has been officially released, on a Little Feat album. I've read on social media that it is believed the rest of the film footage has been lost. So this is probably all we're ever going to get. I couldn't even find any information about what other songs were performed, though there must have been many since this is only about one-third of the entire concert.

Thanks again to Lil Panda for digging this up, improving it, and sending it to me. 

This album is 53 minutes long.

01 Tears, Tears and More Tears (Nicolette Larson)
02 Rhumba Girl (Nicolette Larson & Linda Ronstadt)
03 Oh Atlanta [Edit] (Little Feat with Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt & Nicolette Larson)
04 Runaway [Edit] (Bonnie Raitt with Michael McDonald)
05 Here, There and Everywhere (Emmylou Harris)
06 For a Dancer [Edit] (Jackson Browne)
07 Running on Empty [Edit] (Jackson Browne)
08 talk (Jackson Browne)
09 Your Bright Baby Blues (Jackson Browne)
10 Poor, Poor Pitiful Me (Linda Ronstadt with Nicolette Larson)
11 Blowin' Away (Linda Ronstadt & Bonnie Raitt)
12 All That You Dream (Linda Ronstadt with Nicolette Larson & Rosemary Butler)
13 Willin' (Linda Ronstadt with Emmylou Harris, Rosemary Butler & Nicolette Larson)
14 Dixie Chicken (Little Feat & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bLDhuADx

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/dwuvGZGMKED7Jiy/file

I had difficulty finding any decent photographs from this concert. There's an entire video of it on YouTube, as mentioned above, but the image quality is very low-res. I eventually found one image I was okay with, which I used as the cover. From right to left, it shows Nicolette Larson, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, and Linda Ronstadt. Souther's prominent role is a bit ironic, since he doesn't feature in the actual music here, due to whatever songs he was in not making it to the video. It kind of looks like I edited the photo to squish everyone close together, but in fact that's how it was in the original.

The image was still in pretty poor shape, so I tried to use the Krea AI program to improve it. But I could only do so much, so it's still rough. I also couldn't change the lighting that turned most everything orange, though I tried to make it more colorful.