Songfacts®:

• In 1979, nine years before The Beach Boys released their #1 hit "Kokomo," Little Feat released this song with the same title. They're very different songs: the Beach Boys invented an island paradise for their "Kokomo," but the Little Feat song is about a young lady who breaks hearts all over town. In that one, "kokomo" is a verb, but it's never defined. We know she can do it in a China cup, but what she's doing is left to our imagination.
• "Kokomo" was written and sung by Little Feat frontman Lowell George not long before his death, which came on June 29, 1979 when he was touring as a solo artist. The band was fractured at this time but required to deliver another album, so George contributed "Kokomo" before hitting the road. He was just 34 but in bad physical condition; he died in a hotel room with his family there.
  
  The band put the song together from his recordings and included it on the album Down On The Farm, released that November and dedicated to George. Little Feat broke up after making the album but returned to action in 1987 with keyboard player Bill Payne leading the way.
• This wasn't the first song called "Kokomo," but it is the swampiest, and the only one we know of that uses the word as a verb. In 1961 the doo-wop group The Flamingos recorded "Ko Ko Mo," where it's the name of a girl. Other songs with that name in the title refer to a real place: the city of Kokomo, Indiana. Aretha Franklin's 1972 song "First Snow In Kokomo" is an example.