Screwtop Winebottle

Leo Kottke - Across the Street - Sessions at 54th Street, Dec 20, 1997

Of all the stories I’ve heard Leo Kottke tell, funny, weird, sad, this is the one I always think about. Listen.

Leo Kottke playing a show at Fermilab, May 8, 2010

In my quest to find recordings of musicians I like performing at high energy physics laboratories, here is number two. Apologies for the quality or lack thereof. I respect anyone who talks on stage as much as they play and does it with such command. He calls it “stumbling in elipsis…” which is something I resemble. He also describes his voice as sounding like “geese farts on a muggy day” and devoted one of his albums to Flannery O’Connor. This is all trivia I learned from a childhood holding his CD liner notes in one hand, my guitar in the other and the CD player remote in the other.

Paul Simon - The Northern Line

Paul Simon performed an anecdote and its song in a barn in Exeter in 1965. Evidently the reel-to-reel this came from contains 14 more songs.

Related: BBC Radio 2 2007 - Mr Simon’s Big Trip (living and playing through England)

An exploration of the ‘missing’ 13 months in the life and career of Paul Simon, immediately before Simon and Garfunkel hit the big time.

Paco Peña - Bulerias

When I was 15 I would fall asleep and dream of right hand technique like this. Effortless.

Today I’m realistic and would settle for the HANDCLAPS.

Paul Simon and his son Harper Simon in the studio recording the song Bingo; also, video of the vinyl record making process. My life as a guitar is a series of strums and it goes a little something like this.

Friday Night in San Francisco is a 1981 live album by Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia.

This album marks the period in my life that I like to think of as the greasy years. This is not where my life as a guitar started but where it was soon to go. These stories will all take place in my bedroom.

Leo Kottke eventually singing Julie’s House. I could listen to a whole show of Leo’s noodling and stories. But when his stories and noodling end up being some sort of existential introduction to the next song and illustrative of human life you just can hardly figure out what to do other than smile.

“Usually these things go by four times and then the vocalist sings but I’m the vocalist and I’m not ready. I was doing a show with Al Franken and he brought up this tune to me and he said it was the best I’d done and was one of his favorites. I said thanks for listening. And he said would you do it tonight. And I said I can’t. I injured myself on it on a job one night. It’s a dangerous tune for me now and it’s a dangerous tune for me now i can return to it without threat you know to my career and well-being. But i could tell he didn’t care about that. So you know I thought about it there in the interim before the show started and I realized that the danger was in the fancy stuff I was trying to pull off and I had jammed my pinky and then tried to recover and missed. Just really bad application. And you know this thing just fell apart for a couple weeks. It was a finger now it’s a thing. So I simplified it back in the dressing room and I went out and played it and I was really happy to have it back. I felt safe. And I like the tune. And on the last verse Al Franken came out and started to sing along with me and it was one of the worst moments of my life.”

Leo Kottke - Medley: Part Two/June Bug/Train And The Gate

It’s Friday afternoon, things are finally looking up. Leo Kottke has agreed to play me out.

It generally takes a long time for a musician to get his songs up to the stage. And it’s a dear soul who still makes himself belly laugh on stage while playing them.

I think that goes for just about everything.