Owned since: 2022

Genre: Live American Primitivism acoustic guitar madness

Where I bought it: Dig It! Utrecht

Year: 1973

Label/pressing: Capitol

I barely go to record shops anymore. It’s not that the area where I live in has a ton of great ones, one in the city nearby and that’s pretty much it, but mostly just that I spent the last 3 years slowly re-listening and weeding out my collection. When I started writing these crate skimmers I was in the middle of the Herculean task of organizing my whole collection on loose genre and then alphabetical in that genre lines which took me around 12 full evenings. It was where I threw out/sold a lot of stuff also but this year is finally the time I really feel it could be expanding again in a healthy fashion. Through getting 250-ish records/tapes from my uncle earlier this year [Ed. That was 2022, it is now 2025. Oops. Bresson: I still mostly buy bad Dutch Dvds in record shops these days in place of vinyl] that got off to a terrible start but slowly but surely I’m filling up some real dead slots in the collection.

I hadn’t seen some of my Utrecht based friends in a bit so on a recent Saturday in the freezing cold I decided to make my way to Netherland’s historical second city and visit a record store someone has recommended me. The guy running Dig It! used to do weekly markets with vinyl, I even bought some stuff off him back then, but just before covid (or something) he opened up his new tiny shop just outside the main center of Utrecht stock full of mostly second hand vinyl. It’s really genre based, a delight in record stores these days, because I ran across psych-folk weirdos Holy Modal Rounders stuff beside Hendrix records. It’s mostly all at the latest early 00’s which is a time period a lot my vinyl is from anyway. Beside grabbing a very nice cheap copy of the Stones’s Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! and some other stuff there was a clear throughline to the 4 for 10 euro bin also. Which was well stocked and it’s where I ran across the record today. It’s maybe not the best copy, while perfectly playable it has a bit of static noise on the first side, but it kind of ads to the charm of it all. Anyway, music.

Leo Kottke is one of those guitarists I can listen endlessly to and never really got the cult following fellow acoustic genius John Fahey got. Even though Fahey did release Kottke’s legendary debut, 6- and 12-string guitar were far removed for that with My Feet Are Smiling. Released just before Kottke released his most successful records, it is a solo recording of him playing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis which is honestly the way beside his debut I like to listen to his stuff the most. It’s an endlessly impressive freewheeling affair of fingerpicking American Primitivism music, classic American folk and some slight blues stuff thrown together in a blender and played with Kottke, lighting speed pre-injury, he would injure his hand in the 80’s and change up his playing style. It’s all very dry since the other instrument beside the guitar on this is Kottke’s dry jokey banter between songs and even some of his talk-singing vocals which he never was really that fond of using. I’ve always really liked it, the version of Hear The Wind Howl on this is a great song that recalls some of the earliest recorded blues music even more with how untrained Kottke’s delivery is. He called himself sounding like ‘geese farts on a muggy day’ quite often which is about the level of jokes and references you get between the guitar playing here. 

It’s so easy for this guitar playing to fall into technical coldness, but Kottke always sidesteps this with his beautiful warm emotional acoustic guitar sound where you can really hear the guitar getting played also with heavy strokes of the strings and some on purpose off-notes. The variation of the tunes is a blessing also; from the slow-burn Delta blues of Louise, country insanity of Living in the Country and the ending medley where a bit of beautifully arranged Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring passes by that originally appeared on his debut record. Most of this remains instrumental but the sparsely sang songs on this might even be my favorites because Kottke’s monotone baritone vocals fits his guitar playing so well.

That is kind of what this record also, just wonderful but also one very likely destined to 2,50 euro bins. There’s nothing cool about Kottke beside the Fahey connection; his humor is horribly dad-like and his album always tended to be a lot more glossy then Fahey or Robert Basho. And if he is in demand it’s for his solo debut by modern music fans which is a shame because live records like this are as ‘pure’ you can get his sound and you get some fun jokes with it to boot. It was pretty big success also since it reached 108 on the billboard pop album charts while pretty much being the most anti-pop music you can be. Traditionalist it isn’t either since Kottke takes endlessly boring traditionalist tropes and plays with them; be an understandable singer and still sing, arranging classical piano music for guitars that isn’t robotic sounding and mostly just having a lot of fun with how far you push something as simple as an acoustic guitar.

Since we’re here anyway I should post the album cover of his tremendous Dreams and All That Stuff, which with the also great Ice Water follows up this record, here below because it is great. Just like this record.