HOST(voice-over):

Good evening and welcome, I’m your host Chris Douridas.   Tonight on Sessions, the solo virtuosity of Leo Kottke, who showcases his classical influence as well as exposing his links to bluegrass and folk music.

CHRIS:

How many of you have picked up a guitar because of Leo Kottke? Anybody in the house? [some applause] You put it down because of him? [laughs] I know I picked it up and put it down shortly after as well.   You know, I think that’s one of the true tests of a virtuoso.  Please welcome Leo Kottke.

[Leo plays "Airproofing II"]

LEO:

Thank you.

[Leo plays "Deep River Blues"]

[Lyrics:]

Let it rain, let it pour,
Let it rain a whole lot more,
Cause I got those deep river blues.

Let the rain drive right on,
Let the wheels sweep along,
Cause I got those deep river blues.

My old gal’s a good old gal
But she looks like a water fowl
and I got those deep river blues.

Now I’m going back to Muscle Shoals
Cause time’s are better there, I’m told
Cause I got those deep river blues

I got no one to cry for me
The fish all go out on a spree
When I got those deep river blues.

Now I’m going back to Muscle Shoals
Cause time’s are better there, I’m told
Cause I got those deep river blues
Cause I got those deep river blues

[Cut to shot of Chris Doritas, standing next to Leo on the waterfront.]

CHRIS:

The trombone was the first thing musical that you gravitated to?

LEO:

Yeah...actually, it was the flute.  Uh, there was a...

CHRIS:

The flute?

LEO:

Yeah.  I was living in Cheyenne.  A guy came through town with a truckload of instruments and the deal was if you could make a sound on it, you could take it home it for a year.  And He was down in the basement next to the boiler and the cement was sweating and it was dark.  And I couldn’t play a flute.  It was like foam — the sonic equivalent of foam.  And he said "your mouth is too big," and he handed me a trombone.  And I played it for 12 years, which means either I’m easily lead or I really wanted to play.

CHRIS:

You’ve lived all over the country.  I mean, I know you’ve lived in like a dozen different states growing up?

LEO:

Yeah, I was born in Athens, Georgia.  

CHRIS:

This is pre R.E.M.?

LEO:

Yeah, yup.  And I left before they started.  I lived about a year and a half...From there...my dad was a golf pro, originally, and then a coach and then a...taught some high school and wound up working in the VA.  Most of the time, he was an entertainment director at VA hospitals.

CHRIS:

An entertainment director?

LEO:

Yeah, he was a living...

CHRIS:

Like bringing in entertainment?

LEO:

No, no.  He would, I never...there were pool tables involved.  He was an oxymoron is what he was, a living...and, so we moved a lot.  And it explains some of the guitar and the time I spent on the trombone because you have to spend a lot of time in a little room somewhere to get away with learning how to play.  But...and so it suited running around all the time — it gave me something to do.

CHRIS:

Of course, the guitar’s mobile, too — you can just pick it up running out the door.

LEO:

That’s right, and you can play it lying down, unlike the trombone, and that appealed to me.

[Cut to Sessions stage]

LEO:

Charlie told me about a friend of his — I mentioned Charlie Richards who was...who is an accordion player — who stopped at a bar somewhere on the way home from work, a wedding or something, and hesitated for a moment because he’d locked the accordion up in the car, but it was in the back seat where it could be seen.  But who’s going to steal an accordion? So he went on in.  And sure enough, when he came back out somebody had broken the window and put three more accordions in there.

Charlie, uh, has been blind twice in his life and somehow it’s the funniest story you’ve ever heard.  I won’t attempt to repeat it because I think you have to be blind to get away with it.

I will play this though.  This is a song called "Peckerwood." And the only other place it’s been recorded, obviously in an unfinished form, was another situation something like this, in a public setting, in Austen City Limits.

And the name came to me not so much I didn’t know what it means.  I have a hunch.  Actually, I looked it up.  It’s in the dictionary, if you want to find it...

And I’ve talked about this a lot, but it’s necessary to introduced the tune, so I’m going to do it again.

I had a tune in my head and it was stuck.  I played a job with David Lindley in Bozeman, Montana.  And if anybody could help me with this it was David, because at the time...well, never mind.  So I said, David, I have a problem.

He said, "Oh yeah, what is it?"

And I said "I’ve got this tune in my head."

He said, "What is it?"

I said, "It’s ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy, I’ve Got Love in My Tummy.’"

And he said, "Oh, yeah."

Which sounded like doom to me.  By the way, I met the guy who wrote "Yummy Yummy Yummy"...his name’s Reid Whitelaw...and I met him years ago, but I didn’t hurt him.

At any rate, he said — David said — what you do is play it backward in your head and that way it’ll be 180 degrees out of phase with itself and it’ll cancel.  It works.

So I went looking for anything I could find that I didn’t want in my head — and, uh, don’t do that — and found Woody Woodpecker, who I have...got stuck there because it was Woody Woodpecker who demonstrated to me that I really do have a hearing loss.  I caught myself trying to read his lips one night.  That’s a dark moment.

And I couldn’t do it — I couldn’t play it backwards, but I could steal it and play it frontwards, and it’ll show up in here after awhile.

[Leo plays "Peckerwood""]

[Cut to interview with Chris Doritas, standing next to waterfront.]

CHRIS:

Do you remember the moment that you sort found your voice and went ah, I got it I got it?

LEO:

Oh yeah.  Yeah, it happened for me about six years in.  which is a little I mean, most people it’s two, three years.  It’s like the first time you rode a bike.  The first time you could do it.  One second before, you couldn’t do it.  A second later, you can do it.  And you can play.  All of a sudden you can do it.  And you never get another leap like that.  After that, it comes in centimeters.

CHRIS:

And then you think how did I ever not know how to play?

LEO:

Exactly, it’s natural.  Before...one second ago it was impossible, and now it’s natural.  And that’s why, that’s why you know it’s real.  Up until that point, you wonder if you’re wasting your time, or if there’s something you’re missing.  After that point, it’s real for you.  You may be terrible.  Maybe it’s awful, what you’re doing.  But it’s the real thing.  So you’re happy.  You can get along for the rest of your life.

[Cut to Sessions stage]

LEO:

I had an opening act once in Kansas City.  I’ve talked about this guy a lot.  But he’s a true emblem.  This guy’s "it" as far as show business is concerned.

He was 92 years old.  They’d gotten him out of a nursing home to play this gig.  And he was seven feet tall — which meant he was eight feet tall when he was 23 — and he was a ukelele player.

And to see a seven-foot 92-year-old man in a powder blue leisure suit with a little plastic hat on playing a ukelele is like watching a guy play his tie tack — there’s nothing about it that looksright.  And he stank! He was the most wretched ukeleleist I’ve heard in my life.  And so of course the audience worshiped him.  You know, they brought him out again and again and again.

And how, you know, how do you follow that? You know? You can’t go out and out-stink him,

you know.  That’s not right.

So he came off, and I said, "Is it true they got you out of a nursing home to do, to play?"

He said, "Yeah."

I said, well, "Man, why do you do this?"

And he looked at me — he looked at me [looks way down as a seven-foot man would look at him] — like I was nuts, which I was, I was really off the beam there.

He said, "This is what I do."

Ah! [taps himself on forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to say, "duh!"] I get it.  So...

[Leo plays "Hear the Wind Howl".   While singing, he forgets the lyrics and substitutes "and you remained" for "and time remained" in second verse.]

LEO:

I used to play in Yugoslavia all the time, and I was...I would...and, uh, I met a lithographer there named Seka Tavcar, a lithographer from Ljubljana, which is in the northwestern part of the...what used to be the country — it’s in Slovenia.

When she was, uh, three years old, her father had been, uh, arrested, and, uh, when she told me this story, we were standing next to a bridge that he’d designed and built.  And I said "Well, what’d he do?" You know, it seemed a likely question, but it was...it branded me as a Minnesotan right away.

And she said, "He didn’t do anything.  You don’t have to do anything.  He was just arrested, that’s all.  We weren’t told why he was arrested.  We weren’t told where he was being kept.  We weren’t told how long he would be kept.  And, uh, after 26 years they let him out of prison."

During that 26 years, all that she and her mother and her older sister ever got in the way of information was two letters.  The first one — at 12 years in, I think — telling them that he was alive.  That was it.  So, um, while she...when she told me this — he’d been, he’d come home the year before; they’d let him out to die — and that’s when she found out.  And she’d lived and had grown up in the same apartment all her life...she was still in it — at this point, all herlife — her whole family was there...or what was left of it.  And when he came home, that’s when they all found out that he’d been imprisoned across the street from her apartment house.  He was in a basement cell, and he could look up every night through a slit window that he had, and see Seka and her older sister playing on the balcony, and he watched them grow up from down there.

[Leo plays "Across the Street"]

[The End]