H Lewis Allways

The Guitar Book by French-Algerian guitarist Pierre Bensusan.

My favorite guitar(cook,poetry,art) book. (The best guitar book?) I’ve had it for a very long time. It is falling apart.

“And you will kill your heart because it will become too difficult to live with” ―Jean Giono

Leo Kottke - Standing in My Shoes, Live 1998, Memphis, TN

Somebody recently upload this show. I was there. This video gives me great pleasure. A song from an album, 6- and 12-String Guitar, released in 1969 to which I spent from age 12 onward listening.

Mississippi John Hurt Make Me a Pallet on the Floor

John’s guitar talks to me. Always has.

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.