“Buzzby”
Leo Kottke
That’s What
1990, Private Music
This Exit: The eccentric, artful current that Leo Kottke employs to inform his somewhat odd and intellectual approach to playing Delta and Piedmont influenced six- and twelve-string acoustic guitar comes to a head in “Buzzby,” a half-boogie-slide-guitar-spoken-song-poem from his 1990 album, That’s What. Kottke, who began his recording career in 1969 with the live album 12-String Blues (recorded at a Minneapolis folk club called The Scholar), was embraced early on by the even more eccentric and artful (albeit lesser known) fingerstyle master John Fahey, who released its follow up the next year, the classic Six & Twelve String Guitar, on his Takoma record label. Primarily known as an instrumentalist throughout a long career since then, the few times where Kottke actually does sing—from the tongue-in-cheek Tom T. Hall gem “Pamela Brown” on 1974’s Ice Water, to “Buzzby,” which sounds like Primus’s “Tommy The Cat” dragging itself along the shoulder of the Interstate after being hit by Tom Wait’s “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today“—Kottke’s baritone always brings with it a satisfying glimpse deeper into the self-taught virtuoso’s inner-oddball. On the other end of the spectrum, Kottke supplied textbook gorgeous slide-guitar playing and sensitive backing vocals sprinkled throughout Rickie Lee Jones’ 1993 album, Traffic From Paradise, and then invited Jones to produce his 1994 album, Peculiaroso.
