[Applause]

LEO:

Good evening ladies and germs.  I'm Natalie Wood.

[Applause]

[Leo plays medley of "Mona Ray" and instrumental version of "Morning is the Long Way Home." ]

[Pauses briefly in middle of "Morning is the Long Way Home." ]

LEO:

Just had to get in tune.

[Continues "Morning is the Long Way Home"]

[Applause]

[Tuning]

[Leo plays medley of "Ojo" and "Eight Miles High."]

[Applause]

LEO:

Can we get some of these lights out.  It's really... it's really...

[Leo plays "Eggtooth."]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Power Failure".]

[Applause]

LEO:

This is a song about a drunk that I've played here before.  I think tonight, though, I'll...

This is a guy that I took home one night.  He didn't know where he lived, which he confessed after I'd driven him around for about an hour.  So I just let him off and wrote this song out of sympathy for the people whose house he decided to walked into.

But I'd like to play it tonight, instead of playing it for that drunk from Minneapolis... or actually, I should say "ex-saxophone player," that's probably kinder. I'll play this for the guy who came here tonight dressed as a Quaalude.

[Applause]

LEO:

He was up there.

[Leo plays particularly bluesy version "A Sailor's Grave of the Prairie" with same pedal effects he used on much of "Chewing Pine" album.  During the song, he admits...]

LEO:

Shameless.

[Continues playing "A Sailor's Grave of the Prairie".]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Pamela Brown".]

[Applause]

LEO:

When I was a child, or something resembling a child, about the time my family moved to Wyoming, which put me... well, I was old enough for the neighborhood kids to come around and pound the shit out of me every other day or so, mainly because I was a fruitcake and secondarily because I was new there.  And my father noticed this.  He'd been an instructor when he was in the Navy, and he'd taught martial arts, which was jujitsu at that time.  And I suspect that anybody who under his training went off to Bataan or Corregidor or wherever, stayed there.

What happened was that he decided after seeing me falling into these traps with people like Tinker Graf, for instance, who later on fell off a rocket gantry that they were replacing at Warren Air Force Base, so I didn't have to worry about him.  He would notice, or my dad noticed, these guys were beating me up all the time.  Probably more than that he noticed that I didn't seem to mind a whole lot.  I wasn't...  so he took me out in the back yard to teach me how to become a man, or at least how to defend myself.  Which meant of course that that summer instead of the neighborhood kids beating the shit out of me, my old man did for three months.

It was clear to him that it wasn't going to work.  And I gotta tell you that jujitsu was...  that's not too sophisticated or subtle an approach.  There's things like "find a stick and shove it in your opponent's eye." That's one of the back chapters of the book, you know, the chapters you wouldn't understand without being slowly introduced to this.

So, out of desperation, but more than that out of the fact that he grew up with eight brothers and two sisters, my father finally confided in me that probably the best form of self defense was the fart.  And this... 

[Audience cheers]

LEO:

Right.  You've been on the bottom of the pile every now and then.  Yeah, you...  when you're down like that you can either say that you see Jesus floating in the air and they'll get up and leave you alone, or you can fart a whole lot and it'll have somewhat of the same effect.

So this was written, see he...  well, so I wrote this song about it.  It's called "Can't Quite Put it Into Words," and it covers -- this is the philosophy of self-defense from an anal point of view.

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Can't Quite Put it Into Words".]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Tiny Island"]

[Kottke sings last verse as " ...just endless waves and the love that you gave washing over me," which are the words he said he'd forgotten when he recorded the song on Greenhouse]

[Applause]

[Tuning]

[Fan calls out (unintelligible) request]

LEO:

I'll get to that thing.  It's kind of a grim tune.  I like to put it later on in the set to give everything a little lift, a little death to warm things up.

[Tuning]

LEO:

I've spent the better part of my life playing this thing [the 12-string], and I can't even get it in tune.

[Leo plays medley of "Bean Time" and "Monkey Money" ]

[Applause]

LEO:

This is a song that I thought was...  originally I was accused of stealing it from Scarlatti.  It bears little resemblance to anything he's ever done, but I'm stuck with the title so I accuse it of being a rip off of the entire Italianate renaissance tradition of music.  This is a lot of crap, since I don't know what that's about anyhow.

This is more or less the way Lawrence Welk would do it, if he were going to do an Italian hour.  I assume he does things like that.  I think he does.  I know he does -- I should admit to that.  I follow his career because my father-in-law used to play with him.  He was a drummer for him in Woonsocket, North Dakota, which is... 

[Fan yells]

LEO:

Yeah, what's Woonsocket?

He played there for about 10 years before he...  excuse me...  he went off on the road, which for Lawrence Welk amounted to 32 years in a bus.  The night that he was supposed to play, this was for a seed company in Woonsocket.  It's not Burpee -- it's the other great megalopolis, or no, agri-megalo...  it's a seed company that has more seeds than most companies have seeds.

And Lawrence Welk was the fill-in like the breakfast table on Don McNeil's show.  Lawrence Welk was the breakfast table.  And they'd tape a show at night, and his drummer was beheaded one night in a car wreck.  He'd been drinking, well not the drummer, but the driver had been drinking what they called "South Dakota Champaign."  Which was, you pour a beer out of a bottle down to bottom of the label, the upper label, and you fill it up again with raw alcohol which is, you know, it came from Canada.  But if you didn't shake it up, you'd drink it and it would constrict your throat and you'd suffocate and die.  That's what happened to the driver of the car that the drummer was riding in, and they went under something or over something and the drummer lost his head.

So Sir Lawrence, or Larry, hired my father-in-law to replace him, which I thought -- on the drums -- was creative on his part seeing as how my father-in-law is a violin player.  And he went out shortly after that to try his hand at a career on the violin.

He's back in Minneapolis now.  Sleeping in the mashed potatoes.  So if you can imagine this tune being...  I don't know if I'd suggest that or not.

[Fan yells, "What?" ]

LEO:

No, I was going to have you imagine Lawrence directing me here.  Coming up and goosing me with his baton and telling me to smile.

[Fan yells, "Bubbles!" ]

LEO:

What?

[Fans yell, "You need bubbles!" ]

LEO:

Oh, bubbles.  Okay.  Is there anything arcane about those bubbles?

So this has a big hole it sounds like it's ended there but it hasn't.  I just did that to be dramatic.

[Leo plays "The Scarlatti Rip-Off".]

[As tempo changes, Kottke says while continuing to play...  ]

LEO:

Bubbles.  Where's the bubbles?! C'mon!

[Continues playing "The Scarlatti Rip-Off".]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "June Bug".]

[Applause]

[Leo plays medley of "San Antonio Rose; America the Beautiful" ]

[Applause]

[Reacting to something in the audience...]

LEO:

Aw, throw it back up there...  you can chuck it back out there...  don't drink it.

I'd like to play a couple more of the new things.

I wrote this behind the stage at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.  It's part of... 

[Fan yells "All right!" ]

LEO:

Woonsocket and Tanglewood -- [somebody's] real cosmopolitan over here [in the audience].

I wrote it...  people who've asked me to teach them how to play guitar are always really disgusted with what I can come up with.  The best of it is that I figure anybody who is writing music or words or painting something is tracking along with something else that's a picture of what they really want.

Right? I mean I...  at least I don't sit here and play and listen to what I'm doing.  I'm listening to some other thing that's cranking along on its own speed in my brain.  Some people consider that an affliction.  Myself, I feel I've put my schizophrenia to good use.

[Laughter, applause]

LEO:

But if I tell that to somebody who wants to learn to play the guitar, they get...  like I said, they get disgusted.  So, the best I can do is demonstrate it

This is about the first thought I had that I think generated some tunes.  This is in regard to the Sargasso Sea.  It also got me off of the trombone and onto the guitar, which Carl Fontana is eternally grateful for.

[Leo laughs]

LEO:

I wanted to amuse myself there for...  pardon me.

[Leo laughs]

LEO:

Excuse me, I'm still amused.

So, I heard about this place called the Sargasso Sea, which you probably know about it...  it's filled full of weeds -- the long, snaky types of kelp that exist around Santa Barbara also.  But in the Sargasso Sea, there's enough of them that if you get in it, you can't get out of them again.  Maybe nowadays there's been a change, but I kinda I doubt it.  Columbus got stuck in it.  It's one of the earliest records we have of people getting stuck there.

Now once this happens, there's nothing for these sailors to do except sit and watch the other guy get a little nuttier than themselves until finally they would die.  Well, this...  and then rot.

[Laughter]

LEO:

Well, see there's nothing more to do.  See, that all appealed to my sense of romance, and I started writing some tunes.  That's at least 50 percent of why I started writing, and the other half is that I couldn't play anything that anybody else wrote.  And this is a refinement of that whole...  you should be able to picture this whole scene in your mind while I'm playing this song.  Don't be disappointed if you can't.  It's probably kind of a grim scene -- they're all dying.

[Leo plays "Range".]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Grim to the Brim".]

[Applause]

[Tuning]

LEO:

I said I'd... 

[Tuning]

LEO:

There it is.

I said I'd do this one.  This is...  this always reminds me of when the...  you know, when you're driving down the road late at night, and you're kind of falling asleep at the wheel, and in your doze you kind of glide over into the oncoming traffic.  You know, and somebody will honk their horn at you, if they have time, and when that happens, you know, you...  you don't say, "Whew, thanks a lot!" you say, "Fuck it!" you know. "Mind your own business, leave me alone," because you're asleep.  You don't want to be bothered with it.

Well, I suspect it's that attitude...  I shouldn't indict myself.  Of course, I did that when I walked out here.  But that's what this is about...  I suspect that's what this is about -- that frame of mind.

[Tuning]

[Leo plays "Louise"]

[Applause]

LEO:

Can we get those side lights off? Those things up here?

[Tuning]

LEO:

This is a lullaby pervertimento.

[Leo plays "The Tennessee Toad"]

[Applause]

LEO:

Thanks.  Thanks a lot.

[Leo plays medley of "Hear the Wind Howl" and "Busted Bicycle". ]

[Applause]

LEO:

Good night.  Thank you.

[Applause]

[Fan calls out "Fisherman"]

LEO:

You know I got something I say in case this happens.  I'm kinda stuck with that one [motioning to guitar].

[Tuning]

[Fan yells, "Get down!" ]

LEO:

It's kinda hard to imagine me "getting down." I was...  I was, well, you know what I mean.  I was in Germany getting some pictures taken one time.  The guy told me...  he looked at me -- kinda frowned -- and he said, "well, look mean." Which is kinda, which is...

[Tuning]

LEO:

I'm not so much interested what happened in Germany as I am in getting in tune here...  but I told him that was like getting blood from a turnip.

I had a road manager who was asked where to find me -- this was at Tanglewood, as a matter of fact -- by someone who didn't know what I looked like.  And in order to straighten it out for him, he said, " just look for the guy who looks like he doesn't belong here."

This is something I used to do all the time 'til I figured people might be getting sick of it, so I quit doing it in the set, but I'll play it now because it's...  since you're hogs enough to ask me back.

I'd like to thank my favorite American, Leon Redbone.  [Redbone was the opening act.]

[Leo plays medley of "The Crow River Waltz," "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," and "Jack Fig".]

[Applause]

[The End]