Video box from Home and Away

Nashville

[Inside Gruhn guitar shop, Leo tests out a guitar.]

LEO:  This is.. this is slick.

[Leo walks through the store.]

LEO:  Well...let's go down and look at this guitar farm on the next floor and then I gotta go.  

[On the next floor, there are shelves of guitars on both sides of a long darkened room]

LEO:  When I go down this row, all I'm going to do is breathe.  I want to inhale.  There's a special smell, it's one of the greatest there is.  

[Leo walks down the aisle.]  

LEO:     Oh boy.

Bathurst St. Theatre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

[Leo walks on-stage with a 6-string guitar to applause.  He sits on a stool.]

[Leo plays "Taxco Steps"]

[Applause]

LEO:

I've learned that it's really necessary by this time in the set to speak, to welcome everybody to the hall, and to say hello and so forth.   And I've learned the hole I can dig for myself by not opening my mouth -- 'cause there's a kind of a tension and then a hostility that develops if there's this complete silence -- the hole that I dig by not saying anything is much deeper than the one I'm digging right now.  So I go ahead and begin to speak, wondering at least as much as you what the hell it is I'm gonna have to say.

When I was starting playing in Minnesota in a little coffeehouse, I wouldn't speak.  I thought all I had to do was just really get off on what I was doing.  I had the habit then of just closing my eyes all the time, and sort of lowering my head toward the guitar, and then tilting all of me including the guitar kind of down to the left like this [tilts down].  I thought that was getting off at the time.  Then I opened my eyes one night -- a rare occurrence -- to find that I had drooled on my twelfth fret.  And the lights were -- this drool was the only thing anybody was looking at.

Drool is like rain, it doesn't -- I mean, rain doesn't fall is just one big drop -- or maybe it's not like rain.   I mean, drool is contiguous so...there's a pulse to drool, and what I'm saying is I was connected to my fingerboard.  It wasn't like I had drooled:  I was drooling.  

Maybe an appropriate spot for a ballad in the set.

[Leo plays "Ojo"]

[Applause]