I’m a huge fan (my wife would say obsessed fan) of Leo Kottke. In another thread, sunbear noticed his name in my profile and mentioned it and Uke chipped in too.
Kottke tends to have a small but devoted following. He’s been around for donkey’s years. Most guitarists, and almost all acoustic guitarists, have heard of him. But he’s not a Top 40 kind of artist. In fact he’s a little hard to classify, and he doesn’t get a lot of air time, so a lot of people have never heard of him. You kind of find him by word of mouth. Usually when I mention his name I get a lot of blank stares.
I’m curious how many of y’all have heard of him. Jump in and report whether:
You’ve never heard of him
Heard his name mentioned but don’t know much about him.
Heard him, know him, like him.
You are a Tab Pig. If you don’t know what that is, you ain’t one.
Heard him, know him, don’t like him. (But don’t expect any Christmas gifts from me this year!)
He appears on A Prairie Home Companion from time to time.
He’s coming to Western Washington in April. He’s playing four nights (Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday) at four different venues. I’m trying to talk my wife into going to all four but she’s being unreasonable. If I only get to go to one we’re going to the one in a high school auditorium near Port Townsend. He’s a very personal entertainer and smaller venues are better. Plus we can spend a romantic weekend on Puget Sound.
“pluto … a seriously demented but oddly addictive presence here.” – TVeblen
Yes! I knew I recognized the name from somewhere, but it’s been so long since I’ve heard PHC I can’t remember what he does: sing or play an instrument. I do like him as far as I know.
That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball!
Have had his albums for years. The man is truly a virtuoso on the guitar, and to make it better his music isn’t quite like anything else. Well, it’s a little like a lot of other things, but no one else seems to play in whatever you’d call his style.
Yes I have almost every thing he’s recorded. Paul Bunyon was bit odd.Jonathan Winters reads the story. I never tried to play the songs, so just a fan mostly. Lately it’s been his stories and the delivery of the songs and stories I get out of concerts. Last CD was good, though no singing. He canceled or someone did last time he had been scheduled to play here.So it’s been about 2 years.
For the general public, it’s a bit of an aquired taste.
I’m glad to see so many of you around. I was getting lonely. And, true to form, many of you mentioned having a large collection of his work. It seems to be one of those either/or things – you really like him or you really don’t.
The Tab Pigs are a group of guitar-playing fans who trade tabs of Leo’s songs. They’re not actually limited to just him, but he seems to be the central element that keeps them together. You can usually get a tab from them for just about any song he’s done. (I have a lot of them, I just can’t play them. That would mean practicing!)
His most recent, “One Guitar, No Vocals”, is one of his best. My personal favorite is “A Shout Toward Noon”. His best-selling album is an oldie but a goodie entitled “6 and 12 String Guitar”. (In fact it’s the best selling steel-string acoustic guitar album of all time, or something like that.)
He’s in the middle of a nationwide tour right now (he tours a lot) and is going to be in Europe in the spring sometime. Check out his website www.leokottke.com for tour dates and discography.
For the record my favorite tune is “Snorkel” from his latest album, but there are a lot of close seconds.
“pluto … a seriously demented but oddly addictive presence here.” – TVeblen
We (Deb and I) like him. We aren’t fanatics, but we enjoy his stuff. (Of course, I’ll just get myself thrown off this thread by mentioning that I really like Peter Ostroushko. I know, I know, he’s better known on the mandolin.)
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
– **Diane Ackerman **
Essential Leo Kottke gives you 22 cuts on Chrysalis. Does not have his Greatest, but gives a very good idea.“Rings” is a song he himself loves and hates.Not his song.
Well, his voice sounds like geese farting on a muggy day. (One of the all-time great similes.)
I’ve known of Kottke since his Tacoma Records days. Saw him in concert back in the 70s. And his most famous piece was the one stolen from him – “You’ve got a lot to live, and Pepsi’s got a lot to give” (Actually I think the jingle was composed independently, but Kottke’s song sounded so much like it that Pepsi approached him and paid for it.)
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Ah, okay…just read your “Kottke-vs.-Fahey” contribution to the “Celebrating Myself” thread.
My feeling, for what it’s worth…Fahey was there first, and it took huge balls to do the steelstring-guitar-picking-and-no-vocal thing in the late '50s. Kottke came by ten years later, when there was greater freedom within the record biz to try new things. He MAY be technically more proficient, but he’s still following a path carved out by another.
Plus, Kottke sings, and his stuff is (slightly) more commercial, so purity-weenies like me prefer Fahey.
Okay, pluto, there’s my two cents, and here’s my nose, available for punching.
[Incidentally, I hope everybody’s more pleasant and polite in THIS thread than they were when Frankd6 started up his Grateful Dead thread…that got to be painful after a while.)
I love Kottke, although I’ve only got two of his albums (so far). I’ve seen him “live” 4 times, and I look forward to seeing him again. Great guitar playing and a funny story-teller in his own low-key way.
No doubt that Fahey was the pioneer that opened the door for artists like Kottke, Uke. The contrast for me is that Fahey’s style is very clean and more straightforward than Leo’s, and one of the things I enjoy most about Kottke’s music is the complexity. It’s just a matter of taste, I’m sure.
I’ve been putting off getting another Fahey CD just to see if I would be more impressed with some of his other work. Now I’ll have to go and get one. I’ll have to sneak it into the house though – a certain someone I am married to (SWMBO) is not going to welcome another guitar CD! (There’s a lot of Chet Atkins on the shelf too.)
As far as vocals I have to say that, as big a fan as I am, he has put out some real stinkers when he sings. His voice is okay – it even has a certain appeal with the right song (“Rings”, “Pamela Brown”) but it’s limited and when he does anything that isn’t “mellow” there’s a lot of straining and reaching. I think it took him a while to figure it out but his later vocal efforts seem to be confined to songs that work pretty well. BTW, when I had the nerve to denegrate his voice on the Kottke Newsgroup I was soundly thrashed by fans who thought he sings great, too. But I stood my ground!
The Rhino double-CD is one that I don’t have. I’ve looked at it but I already had most of the songs on other CDs so I didn’t buy it. I just now took a peek at the song list on his website. Yeah, it’s a pretty good sample. It misses a lot of his later stuff though, which appeals to me more and more as he and I age.
“pluto … a seriously demented but oddly addictive presence here.” – TVeblen
I forgot the Rhino album. Yes, if you have nothing yet, start with that. Then you can just pick whichever. Some have awful cover pictures, but only one or two are below his usual level.
Uke:The Fahey CD of Blind Joe Death is odd. I really don’t like the oldest versions, so I start palying about half way thru. I have one LP which is called after the ball, an odd jazz experiment. God, time and Causality(sp?)was a recent favorite. Only saw Fahey live once. Rumor had it it was his first gig after a long break, in 81 or 82. He wouldn’t come out of the bathroom dressing room for 20 minutes. And he wasn’t rusty at all.
