4. Leo KottkeMy Feet Are Smiling
This was the first fingerstyle record that I had heard and there has sort of been this false dichotomy of [John] Fahey versus Kottke because Fahey is way cooler in the underground, especially post Jim O’Rourke and after the article that Byron [Coley] wrote in Spin magazine. And I like Fahey too, but it’s almost like Kottke, he has some moments that are a little more ‘dad joke’ maybe, you know, he’s not as cool of a guy.
When Kottke came out, the joke was that some people thought it was John Fahey on speed playing a joke. And then this record sounds like Leo Kottke on speed! All the songs are way faster than what he plays on the studio records. It’s just this absolute onslaught of finger picking that’s so dense it doesn’t make much sense. It’s denser than [Robbie] Basho. So as unhip as Kottke is in the underground, this record does everything for me that anything could possibly do.
There’s a song at the end of the record where he’s doing a medley, and he busted into one of the songs by playing just a melody of the last song. Then he fingerpicks with all of his hands, and I’ve never heard such a wall of sound come out of fingerstyle before. Like I said, even Basho, even the best of them, it just slams you in the face and it’s like a runaway train, that’s what it feels like, it feels like getting hit by a runaway train.
