69 – Mona Ray – Leo Kottke – 1974

Mona Ray - Leo Kottke

                As I wrote in my opening post (“What’s all this then?”), I came to Leo Kottke after reading  an interview in Stereo Review with Cat Stevens in 1974 where he gave Leo a shout out as an influence. The next time I went to Skipper’s record store in the Meadowdale Shopping center (home to Carson,Pirie, Scott and Weiboldt’s department stores and the Wintergarden indoor ice rink, all long gone), I specifically looked for Leo Kottke.

They had several Kottke albums in the Folk section: Ice Water, Greenhouse, 6 and 12 String Guitar, Leo Kottke/Peter Lang/John Fahey, and the one that caught my eye, Dreams and All That Stuff.

On the album cover a 29 year old Leo is seated next to a guy in a flannel shirt and Mortimer Snerd-like mask. I don’t know what the hell is going on; Leo seems to be laughing at something as he looks over at his friend.

So, of course, I bought it.

When I got home I opened the album and placed it on my Garrard Zero100 turntable and dropped the tone arm. Mona Ray is the first song on the album, so it was my first exposure to Kottke and it was so cool!! It is a beautiful song and it sounded like 3 or 4 guitarists were playing at once (It turns out Michael Johnson played a second guitar on it, but still…) with gracefully interweaving melodies.

And each song that followed was just as good, and some of the titles (“When Shrimps Learn to Whistle”, “Vertical Trees”, “Taking a Sandwich to a Feast”) seemed to go along with the cover photo. And anyone who’s seen Leo in concert knows his between songs patter is unlike any other. He’s funny and self-effacing and sometimes the story goes nowhere, but is funny none the less.

Back then I would listen to the album once or twice, then I would make a copy on my Sony (then Advent, then TEAC) cassette deck to play and also to play in my car. At that time, I had a 1967 Austin-Healy Sprite, with no radio, just a Radio Shack cassette player.

But, on my second or third playing, I dropped the tone arm and created a scratch which popped every time I played it and that pop remained when I made my cassette copy, so for 20 years, until I got a CD of the Best of Kottke, I always heard that pop and I still expect to hear it when I play my clean version.

My bedroom, when I lived at home, was above our garage and it was on the same electrical circuit. I still have a cassette of James Taylor, I think, where in the middle of a song, my dad came home and turned on the fluorescent light in the garage and the “zap-zap” became a part of the song.

Dreams and All That Stuff, and Mona Ray in particular, remains my favorite Leo Kottke album, even though it has no vocals, “Geese farts in a fog” he famously referred to his voice on the liner notes to the Greenhouse album.