Leo Kottke - Airproofing
The second post for September brings a milestone birthday of a first fret legend of guitar wizardry.
I know Autotune and influencer culture (now there's an oxymoron) make it hard to remember, but there was a time when this thing called "playing an instrument" was the yardstick by which musical talent was largely assessed, measured and, if you were good enough, valued.
To do this antiquated practice of epochs gone by, you had to do things that aren't a whole lotta popular these days.
Among these things were Long Game activities such as listening to all your pals have a great time playing outside whilst you sat in your bedroom for 12 hours at a time, practicing your axe until the callouses on your fingers spurted blood like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for strings.
Nowadays it's very easy to make the machines do the heavy lifting so we can slink away to count the YouTube views. There's a couple, but overall there's very few virtuosi around, wielding (for instance) acoustic guitars and with blazing chops that make jaws drop at twenty paces as the minds attached to those mouths process how much effort must have went into learning to play that darn well.
These days the mouths are flapping but the practice is lacking, and you're getting a lotta music people that are effectively in the Here Today, Gone Later Today category of fame for fame's sake and no other there there, to paraphrase the great Gertrude Stein.
Leo here is from the old times, before side chicks and mouse clicks counted more than guitar picks.
As skillful and expressive a guitar player as any that has existed in our lifetimes, he must have spent his whole childhood practicing until his fingers about fell off, and none of the strain was from clicking either.
I dunno about you, but I liked the old times -- and the one-off, irreproducibly individuated talents they produced -- quite a bit better.
Let's have our latest octogenarian explain, using only a couple of old acoustic guitars and the occasional sound of his voice, in beautiful Sonoma County a little over 40 years ago.
Leo Kottke
Cotati Cabaret
Cotati, California USA
5.1.1985
01 Little Beaver (2nd segment)
02 Airproofing
03 Last Steam Engine Train/Stealing
04 talk: A Corn Tyrant
05 Sleepers Awake
06 Everybody Lies
07 From the Cradle to the Grave
08 talk: My own protoplasm
09 Pamela Brown
10 Mary
11 Bean Time
12 Jack Fig
13 Saginaw, Michigan
14 Up Tempo
15 Standing In My Shoes
16 Three Quarter North/Four Four North
17 talk: Self Defense/Theme from "Doodles"
18 Airproofing (2nd segment)
19 Little Beaver
20 Bean Time
21 Ojo
22 Pamela Brown
23 talk: Glued to the guitar
24 Three Quarter North/Four Four North
25 A Trout Toward Noon
26 Eight Miles High
27 talk: A guitar I got from John Lundberg
28 Saginaw, Michigan/June Bug
29 The Train and the Gate/Vaseline Machine Gun
30 Little Martha
31 Echoing Gilewitz
32 Cripple Creek
33 Louise
34 Rings
35 Julie's House
36 Little Beaver/Embryonic Journey
Total time: 2:24:39
disc break goes after Track 17, at set break
Leo Kottke - guitars & vocals
Easy Ed's beautifully captured master soundboard cassette of, essentially, the complete performance
slightly retracked, edited and repaired -- with track-to-track volume fluctuations smoothed -- by EN, September 2025
Tracks 34-36 are bonus tracks from grner1's transfer of a soundboard/audience matrix capture of The Catalyst, Santa Cruz CA 5.9.1985
reoriented to natural stereo and slightly remastered by EN, September 2025
861 MB FLAC/direct link
861 MB FLAC/direct link
So yes, the acoustic geetar shaman we call Leo Kottke is 80 today, and he still can play an instrument, without even the need for amplification or electronic assistance, better than just about anyone any of us will ever personally know.
I will be back in a few days with a centennial guaranteed to give you The Blues, even though this blood-besotten, autogenocidal anti-culture probably made sure you got them long before I ever learned to work the Sound Forge 11 Graphic Dynamics tool.
Until then, let's all Airproof ourselves with 2 1/2 full hours of sumptuous solo flight from the birthday boy Leo the Virgo, shall we? He has more imagination in his aged, calloused little fingers than most of today's gold medal contingent, here in the Olympics of Unwarranted Attention, has in their whole endorsement deal.--J.J.
