Leo Kottke.
Photograph by Steven Stone.

ONE GUITAR, NO BORDERS

The new solo adventures of Leo Kottke.

By Russell Letson

It is hard to exaggerate the impact Leo Kottke has had on the evolution of modern fingerpicking. Among post–Chet Atkins players, perhaps only Michael Hedges has found as many new and surprising sounds for the acoustic instrument or developed as distinctive and personal a compositional style.

By the time Kottke's 6- and 12-String Guitar LP appeared in 1969, the folk revival had been pretty much overwhelmed by rock 'n' roll, but Kottke showed acoustic guitarists a way of getting some of the same propulsive excitement out of their instruments. Tunes like "Jack Fig" and "Busted Bicycle" were the folkie's equivalent of rock 'n' roll: melodically innovative, drivingly rhythmic, and (especially) real fast. The effect of 6- and 12-String Guitar, writes Mark Humphrey in his notes for the CD reissue of that seminal album, was to "rip, roar, and revolutionize" our idea of what the instrument could do.

As the title of his 24th and latest recording indicates, One Guitar, No Vocals represents a return to the pure Kottke experience: just the instruments, the fingers, and the unmistakable musical voice. Perhaps the most striking feature of the new CD is the reappearance of some previously recorded tunes in new and sometimes greatly expanded forms. "Bigger Situation," for example, combines three earlier pieces ("Big Situation," "I Yell at Traffic," and "Room Service") into a nine-and-a-half-minute extravaganza. I talked with Kottke about his new music and the reincarnation of some of his earlier classics.

There are several waltzes on your new CD: "Three Quarter North" from the Alan Sharp film Little Treasure, "Retro Grade," and "Even His Feet Look Sad." That's unusual for you, isn't it?

KOTTKE Yeah, sometimes I do something radical, like venture away from 4/4 all the way to 3/4. These tunes just happen—I never have any idea of what I'm looking for. I keep playing, and every now and then something pops up.

Is it associational, one 3/4 tune leading to another?

KOTTKE No, it's far more random than that—it's just lint blowing by. I've learned to depend on it and expect it. It's when I try to do something that I fall flat on my face.

I think it's dangerous to try to figure out where the music comes from. You don't want to question that, and you certainly don't want to understand it, because it's the writing of these things, and the playing of them, that really answers that question.

Actually, I want to contradict everything I just said, because that one tune ["Three Quarter North,"]—and it's not really a tune so much as a sort of corner—I actually dreamed up a melody in my head and then played it on the guitar. I may have whistled it and then figured it out on the guitar—or I may have written it. It was during the [making of the] movie Little Treasure that I sat down and wrote a couple of things on paper. I didn't have a melody, I didn't have an idea; all I had was the paper, and I thought I'd see what would happen if I did it in the opposite direction and never touched the guitar. I wrote out the whole thing and then played it.

What I learned from doing it was, first of all, that it's kind of fun. It's nice not to have a guitar anywhere when you're writing something, and then when you read it you find out that you can be somebody else. You have to take a different road. In this case, it was sort of your bad Bach road.

The combination of old and new material on this CD makes me wonder about your attitude toward some of your earlier work. For example, on a recent Prairie Home Companion broadcast you said that you now think that parts of "Fisherman" are lame. Which parts and why?

KOTTKE Oh, everything except the theme of the tune. After that there are a couple little things that kind of work. You know, Guy's All-Star Shoe Band [A Prairie Home Companion's house band] worked up an arrangement of that tune. I've heard them play it a few times in rehearsal, but I don't know if they've unleashed it yet on an unsuspecting public. But I interfered with them. When I heard them doing it, I approached them with a plea to throw out—I don't even know what to call it—the C section. There's some real drivel in there. I like the fundamentals of the tune, but I could have put in a lot more thought so it would hold up a little better.

As far as bringing back stuff, "Morning Is a Long Way Home" [originally recorded on Ice Water, 1974] has never been recorded as a solo, and I play it differently, kind of with a different feel.

Tell me about the reworking of "Big Situation."

KOTTKE Originally I thought I had written three different tunes. The third one ["Room Service"] began to change, and I discovered what I should have done with it when I recorded it [on Peculiaroso]. When that happened, I realized that they were all of a piece. That tune, which is uncharacteristic for a solo guitar tune that long, really works live. The audiences like it a lot, and I do, too. That one knocks me out, because it finally found out what it was.

Would you call it a suite, at nine minutes?

KOTTKE Well, not really, because if it were a suite you'd be able to hear three distinct tunes. The original "Big Situation" [Peculiaroso, 1991] is a different form from the way this tune starts, but that beginning is separate from what follows. But after that, they mortise rather than follow each other, so it has a nice . . . I don't know, I always think of music as geography, and I like that place a lot. "Ice Fields" was like that, but I hadn't managed to record any of the pieces of "Ice Fields" earlier. That one managed not to make it onto a record until it was done.

So on this CD you are rethinking some of the older pieces?

KOTTKE You don't rethink it, that's the thing. It presents itself to you. It just shows up. These things have a life of their own.

How did you get the sound on "Three Quarter North"? Is there some kind of signal processing there?

KOTTKE It's a couple mics and a thing called a VG-8, a device midway between an effect and a synthesizer that Roland made. It's triggered by the pickup, and the rest of the sound is the guitar itself.

It sounds like something between sustain and reverb.

KOTTKE It's just a smear of some kind. I used it on some of those tracks and also on the last record, Standing in My Shoes. You can go in there and build your own stunt, or you can use the patches they have, about eight billion of them. It's mainly devoted to giving you, at the tap of a switch, the various metal sounds, but there are a few plain old patches you can fool with. You can get in there and do whatever you want and make a complete mess of things. It's very dangerous to fool with that stuff, very very dangerous, because your first reaction is to fall in love with it, and the minute you feel yourself doing that with anything, including a guitar, you should run like a scalded ape, because that's really a guarantee that you're about to put your ass in a sling. I fell in love with a chorus pedal for about a year and damn near ruined my career.

Chorus is one of those things that seems to seduce everybody at some time.

KOTTKE It just sucks so badly. It's just awful, and for some reason you just fall for it. It happens to everybody. The VG-8 can do that to you, although it has a much wider bandwidth and a lot more character in what's available out of it, so it doesn't have the built-in nauseator that the chorus does.

There seems to be a kind of break in the material on the CD between older-sounding pieces like "Peckerwood" and newer-sounding pieces like "Too Fast." How do you explain that?

KOTTKE I should speak for myself, but I suspect it's true for everybody. When you first start to write, you're excited about this new geography. You've never been there before. As a writer, you've found your place. It's just like any writer, whether it's music or prose. Eudora Welty found the post office, Faulkner found the pawprint of a bear, Henry James found the semicolon. If you're lucky, you find this place. Bill Evans found this place that he's got, that beautiful place of his. So I found whatever I found.

The point I'm getting at is that when you first get there, it's easy. You've never been there before and you're running around like a pig in shit, and then you get past that and you're not as easy to please. It doesn't mean that the music gets any better or that it was lesser stuff when you started out, but it means that you need more to satisfy yourself as you continue to write. So things are going to change.

I don't think that you can impose change from the outside, but you have to allow it to happen. Stuff starts happening. For me, you just impose more curiosity, you start bringing more tools with you, you do more homework, you learn a little harmony, you maybe study something about rhythm. You can go into this geography in your bare feet and with blinders on, or you can go in with a whole arsenal of stuff. You can have your pup tent and your Sterno, and make more of it and stay there longer. I think that's what's happening. "Too Fast" is more recent for me, in terms of the stuff I'm drawn to.

I'd say "Chamber of Commerce," too, because the rhythm is more angular. I can hear the familiar Leo Kottke, but as if he's been listening to much more modern and formal music—post-Bartók stuff.

KOTTKE [Fingerstyle guitarist] Tim Sparks told me he thought I was deconstructing myself. He really likes that piece. He's one of my favorite players, and if he has something good to say about what I'm doing, I'm delighted.

Something else that's on this record is improvisation. There's a lot in "Too Fast" and "Three Quarter North," and I do a lot of it now on stage. "Retro Grade" is entirely improvised. I [originally] hated improvisation. In the beginning it was like not paying any attention to the geography, it was like ignoring it even, but I don't feel like that anymore.

To flog the metaphor to death, is that because you have the map in your head, you have internalized the contours of the landscape so you don't feel lost?

KOTTKE In the beginning, I was kind of awed by sound, period. But now I'm half deaf and I need to fool around with it a little more. Also, I've been affected by the listening that I've done. I love jazz, I really love it, but I love it for the playing, not for the music. There's not much of the music that I actually like. I love the playing and the invention and some of the tone. Jimmy Raney, when he recorded with Stan Getz, left us some of the greatest guitar music that I know about.

A friend of mine, when I was briefly in college, said that improvisation was conversation. That's not an original idea, of course, and it should be obvious, but I didn't know that at the time. I'm drawn more to that, more to the idea that the guitar sings and you can let it do that. In the very beginning all I wanted to do was find these structures and treat it like a piano. I probably lean more in the direction of a horn these days, which is shocking to me, because I've always thought that's a very reductive way to approach the guitar. But it doesn't have to be exclusively either one.

I remember one night a long time ago in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, I was not having a good night. I started playing a tune called "Constant Traveler" and got immediately sick of it, so at the first turnaround I just left and went somewhere. I got in more damn trouble than I think I've ever gotten into, and it was wonderful. I got so spooked and so panicked that I couldn't think, and all I could do was barely hang on, and stuff started to happen. It was my first clue that this could work and mean something, that I could let that rip.

And there is that really strange thing about an improvised piece being unrepeatable. We've all done it. You sit down and learn what somebody just found on the spur of the moment, and you cannot make it sound anything like what they did—and neither can they. You're never going to get that quality with composition. That only happens with improvisation.

[On TV once] I heard the entrance to a phrase played by a guy named Bismillah Khan, who is a shehnai [an Indian, oboe-like instrument] player. He was on a little raised dais with his tabla player and the harmonium or whatever, and he hit this phrase, and it was like somebody reached inside and grabbed me by the stomach and just threw me onto the TV set. I was instantly overcome. There were only about six notes in this phrase. I don't remember the phrase, but in a way I don't have to, and I never have to hear it again. It was as good as you could ever hope for music to be, and his little audience was all in tears. He was lit, this guy was done, he was all wrapped up and glad to be there. I've never forgotten that, and I hope that I could come, not to play it, but that somewhere I can hear something like that again, because I think it can only happen every eternity or two. It was so perfect.

You've got people who can write tunes, like me, and people who are phenomenal musicians but don't write, and then you have that real weird bunch who can write and play. But they're so rare, like hens' teeth. What gets me is the guy who can play what he thinks, who is just fluent, completely there. The ones that I've met who can do that don't have any standards anymore; there's just good and bad, and they don't care what it is.

I remember talking to Joe Pass about "Twilight Time." To my amazement, Joe started playing it. It's not his cup of tea, but he liked the tune, and he knew all about it. He could trace that tune from [the Three Suns] through the Platters, through this guy Buck Ram. If there was something worth hearing, he would hear it. He'd gotten past the burden of being good, he just was, and it didn't matter anymore. I really admire that and I love to see it, because it says something about music itself, that if you're really and truly fluent and developed and you've done your homework, it doesn't leave you in some ivory tower, it actually does the opposite. It puts you right back in this really humble and all-inclusive place.

Excerpted from a longer story that appears in Acoustic Guitar December 1999, No. 84. That issue also contains a transcription of Leo Kottke's "Three Quarter North."

Read about Leo Kottke's instruments in the What They Play department.

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