{"id":16005,"date":"2019-01-30T05:30:16","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T10:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=16005"},"modified":"2019-01-31T07:49:19","modified_gmt":"2019-01-31T12:49:19","slug":"its-just-a-box-of-wood-a-conversation-with-leo-kottke-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/30\/its-just-a-box-of-wood-a-conversation-with-leo-kottke-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Just a Box of Wood: A Conversation with Leo Kottke (Part Two)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"You were fairly early on in your professional career when you cut the \u201carmadillo\u201d album. I know you said you cut it in just a single session; when you finished making it, did you have a sense that you had created something special?<\/b><\/p>\n

I had no sense that it would do<\/i> anything or was<\/i> anything. This doesn\u2019t sound very reasonable, but at the time, I just wanted to get all of those tunes located in one place. Because I knew I\u2019d start losing them, and I had this idea that I would teach. I wanted to be an English teacher. I\u2019m so glad that didn\u2019t happen. Those poor people would really suffer. But it was the guitar that I really wanted to do.<\/p>\n

I was very nervous because I\u2019d never had to live with what I was doing. So we recorded in about three hours and that was it. I wasn\u2019t sure it would even be released, and it wasn\u2019t \u2026 for over a year.<\/p>\n

You tour a good bit, but you slowed down \u2013 or possibly even stopped \u2013 releasing albums some time ago. Can you tell me a little bit about that?<\/b><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t stop. I\u2019ve interrupted it, but it\u2019s just pure disinterest. I have material, I\u2019ve got stuff that I can record, but I left my label, which is \u201cRCA\/BMG\/Sony\/Private Music\/your uncle\u2019s name\/my grandmother\u2019s maiden name.\u201d Among other things, I looked at that masthead one day and I knew I owed them two more, and I knew that they no more knew what they wanted from me than I fit in the collapse of the record industry.<\/p>\n

[They let me out of my contract.] They can make a lot of trouble for you, and \u2013 very kindly \u2013 they did not. And I just have been enjoying not having to make a record. My first contract, I had to turn one in every six months with Capitol. And I\u2019m not a cover band: I like to try to write as much of it as I can. I did them in a real hurry without much help in the production.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always resented the idea that any player had to go in and record an album. Why do we go in and record a pile of stuff? I much prefer the old singles approach; then later those are collected into an album. I am working on stuff with Mike Gordon again. I\u2019m also playing a lot with David Balakrishnan, offstage, and we\u2019d love to do some things. In the interim, I think I\u2019m going to make some singles. In other words, I\u2019m going to give them away.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know anything about how to do this. So, my management will get this set up, and give them away on YouTube with better production than you get from a fan with a cellphone in the wrong seat where it just sounds dreadful.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worse than bad sound. That\u2019s the thing that the other musicians can understand, but that does something to the very character of the playing and of the music. It\u2019s just really ghastly. It\u2019s like turning a ten year old child into Dracula after five thousand years when he has the flu and he has a bad day. It just does something. You can\u2019t imagine that that is you, and we\u2019ve heard it happen.<\/p>\n

The Beatles are a good example. When they first transferred their shit digitally, it ruined it. I remember an interview that Paul McCartney did \u2013 out of the several that he has done \u2013 where he really liked the mix and the mastering of Cirque Du Soleil\u2019s run at the masters for that production they did called Love.<\/i> I heard some of those, and those are the only digital remasters of the Beatles\u2019 stuff that sounded like them. The others just sound like a bad lounge band. That\u2019s a really critically awful thing to do to music like that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve raved on until I forget what we\u2019re even talking about!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That\u2019s perfectly okay. Playing as a solo artist is obviously a very, very different situation from playing in a band because, obviously, it\u2019s all on you to get and hold the audience\u2019s attention. In what ways does the audience\u2019s reaction color your performance?<\/b><\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t. Though, there is one instance where it does<\/i>, and what it does is it takes all the fun out of it, and that\u2019s an indifferent crowd. A hostile crowd, you can have fun with. You are in concert with a hostile crowd. You\u2019re in concert with a crowd that enjoys it.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re nowhere<\/i> with a crowd that\u2019s indifferent, and I\u2019ve had that happen twice. Once in Ottawa when I was opening for Lyle Lovett and once in Dusseldorf on my own show. And who knows why that happens? But that\u2019s when you really notice the crowd.<\/p>\n

Arthur Rubinstein talked about this. I bring him up a lot because he mentioned this. He said that there is a current that happens in a room \u2026 (Which by the way, the perfect sized room for him was 3,000 seats, and I agree with that. That is the perfect size. Smaller than that, you\u2019re playing for a bunch of people. Bigger than that, you\u2019re playing for kind of like a lawn or something. There\u2019s so many people you\u2019re not there, or they aren\u2019t, really.) \u2026 But he said there is this current, and he gave it a terrible name: the Secret Current. But he\u2019s dead on about that, and all that is, is everybody is there for the same reason.<\/p>\n

You can feel that same thing in a purpose-built empty hall. You can feel it. Yyou can almost push on it. It will push back a little, and you just follow that. You\u2019re not reacting or responding to what the crowd is doing because you really are in concert. The crowd is as much on the stage as the act is. It\u2019s unspoken. It doesn\u2019t carry.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t talk about it too much because it starts to sound really ridiculous. We are all in that thing, and the crowd knows it. When I\u2019m sitting in the crowd, we\u2019re waiting, we can feel that thing and then the act is sort of like the switch. The act isn\u2019t really running things. It\u2019s a mutuality that I don\u2019t see anywhere else. It\u2019s what makes music so mysterious.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… You were fairly early on in your professional career when you cut the \u201carmadillo\u201d album. I know you said you cut it in just a single […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,41],"tags":[3714],"class_list":["post-16005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-folk","category-interview","tag-leo-kottke","cat-30-id","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16005"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16032,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16005\/revisions\/16032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}