Album Reviews

Before there was an Internet, before cell-phones but after smoke signals, news of this remarkable Leo Kottke album with the black and white armadillo cover spread throughout the “underground” almost immediately upon its release in 1969 on John Fahey’s Takoma Records label.

Acoustic guitar fans were already steeped in Fahey’s own fingerpicking recordings and those of UK Transatlantic stars Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, but this Kottke album punched through to the kids worshiping electric guitar gods and it hasn’t stopped making new fans.

Minnesota native Kottke came to Fahey’s attention via a cassette he sent. Even though Kottke’s sound was similar to Fahey’s, he decided to sign and record Kottke both because of his astonishing playing and the beauty of the Kottke composed tunes.

The entire album took three hours to record. The songs are presented on the album in the order in which they were recorded at Empire Photo-Sound in Minneapolis. It wasn’t really a recording studio. Instead, Kottke played shrouded by sheets hung in a warehouse.

Kottke doesn’t sing here, but his famous line that “…Kottke’s voice…sounds like geese farts on a muggy day” does. It’s included in the liner notes he wrote for the album that bear the unmistakably droll sense of humor shared by Garrison Keillor. It must be something in the local water. For instance about his transcription of Bach’s familiar “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Kottke writes “Bach had twenty children because his organ didn’t have any stops.”

Kottke’s intricate, spider web-like technique on steel string produces a profusion of shimmering tonal, textural and percussive colors packed into impossibly short time frame.

Most of the highly melodic material charges forth with an ear stimulating energetic rapidity that doesn’t diminish after decades of listening. While the British pickers back then tended toward the folky, melancholic side, Kottke’s strain exudes a uniquely American high-energy optimism. His vibrato, combined with the metallic tonality, especially on the tunes where he uses a bottleneck, produce waves of LSD-like psychedelic shivers that shift the mind between wondrous abstract patterns and specific images of Americana.

I’ve owned an original pressing of this album since it was first issues and it always struck me as an odd sounding production: dark, yet shimmering, cleanly rendered yet somehow confused, especially when Kottke poured on the energy and speed.

It has always sounded vaguely abstract—more like the suggestion of a guitar than an actual one and never has image specificity intruded upon the picture.

That is until this absolutely astonishing-sounding Classic reissue. Layers of image obscuring muffled crud have been removed. Now the strings glisten naturally, shining and shimmering exquisitely against pitch-blackness. Transients are fast, sustain appropriate and decay natural. Yet it’s not bright-sounding, thanks in part to Classic’s new Clarity vinyl.

In case you don’t know the story: Classic’s Mike Hobson visited last year (or was it two) and I showed him the Furutech record demagnetizer. Hobson smirked and rolled his eyes as everyone does at first, as I did when it arrived. What nonsense! Mine sat here for 3 months until I finally tried it.

I asked Hobson to choose among his reissues in my collection and he picked one of his favorites: the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack (C2K 90618-1). We played some and then I demagnetized it and played it again. Hobson immediately heard what I and everyone else heard. “What’s to demagnetize in plastic he asked?” The theory is that the carbon black or whatever is used to make the clear vinyl black contains metallic impurities that are easily magnetized or are inherently so when mixed into the vinyl formula.

Hobson left and soon started experimenting with clear vinyl. Sure enough, he easily heard the difference between it and the black formulation. So he came up with Clarity Vinyl SVP-II—a milky-white translucent formulation that doesn’t contain the magnetizing material.

For this release, Classic sent along two copies: one on conventional vinyl and one on Clarity Vinyl. The differences were easy to hear and all favored the Clarity Vinyl, which now sounded, silky smooth and detailed like a demagnetized record. When I demagnetized the conventional copy it sounded very close, if not identical to the Clarity Vinyl. I’m not surprised.

I’m also not surprised to find myself playing this revelatory sounding reissue incessantly since it arrived. I’ve been playing the original for decades but it’s never sounded remotely as vibrant, three-dimensional and spectacular as it now does. If you don’t think a solo guitar record can sound spectacular try this one on.