When Leo Kottke came on the stage of the South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center, he looked a bit of a lonely, quiet figure, but when he touched the strings of his guitar, the world’s sounds, songs, and stories resonated strongly and loudly, the reverberations creating a community space within this beautiful auditorium. My thoughts came in quick runs much like the finger-style guitar playing that inspired them. . .
Kottke gets to every nook and cranny of that guitar sound—jazz, blues, folk—where a strum jumps out like a pop song after the running, finger-picking patterns. Or maybe those strums come within his songs like when a jazz combo hits that melody again and you hear what they’ve been vamping on.
He appears to be awkward with his stage banter, but really, he tells great stories, such as when he a teenager “lunging at the 14-year old Ramona who was repelling his advances” and yet he still spoke about the song on the radio and said, “This could be our song.” Kottke admits that he was the guy in high school who had a butterfly net and a stamp collection, although here he is in front of a filled auditorium, with a tremendous music career in his pocket, an amazing talent, and a humble set of stories that can even make the cool kids stop and wonder.
Singing just one verse of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter” (with the carol tune by Holst), Kottke’s gravelly voice is that of a guy whose experienced midwinter by almost losing both feet to frostbite but a guitar that resonates with the beauty captured by Rossetti’s verse.
Picking up a tune from One Guitar, No Vocals, it’s the blues that are run through a steel string vibration that reverberates like a metal outbuilding on the farm in a wicked wind humming with a comfort you wouldn’t have guessed you could find in such trembling.
“Gewerbegebiet” (Try and Stop Me) sounds like a German Latin torch/torchbearer song meant to be sung by Juliet from an Italian balcony while she cries her eyes out with a bridge that reaches beyond that to something much more like the stars of a lonely night, all seeming to spin around you and your brokenness until they come crashing around you.
From Standing in My Shoes, Kottke chose the traditional “Corrina, Corrina” on which his voice becomes a combination of the dark, bluesy Chris Smither and the country, whine, twang of Willie Nelson, with a hauntingly, halting guitar.
Kottke doesn’t like song titles much, and often wishes he could change old titles. Not yet available on a recording, “Ants” is a tune named as such because of a book he was reading about every genera of ant. However, he does admit that the song sounds ant-like. If they made full-on production music videos of guys like Kottke, imagine the “Ants” one like this: Kottke is playing the song as the floor of the auditorium became swollen with ants from back to front until they covered Kottke. He plays on; the ants dance and retreat.
After playing the song for us live at the South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center, he stood and acknowledged the standing ovation, holding out the guitar as if the guitar was the machine that kills ants. Woody Guthrie would be proud that those fascist Formicidae insects had been defeated.
