Instruments of pleasure: (3) Leo Kottke and All I Have To Do Is Dream
August 18, 2020
Image: Anthony Pepitone
For part three of my little series on folk and folk-related instrumentals, I have chosen a recommendation from a friend that is neither folk nor folk-related ...
From about mid-teens, my best friend and occasional protector was Len.
He was confident, worldly wise and tough in ways that I was not. When trips to the North East were rather more regular than now, we'd call in and see Len and Sue at their home in Newton Aycliffe.
Len and I once plotted to run away to London until our parents, mainly his parents, put their foot down.
Only some of our interests were shared.
We both liked chatting up girls but Len was miles better at it. He could handle himself in a tight corner; I couldn't and he got me out of at least one scrape.
I loved football and he sort of tolerated it (my abiding memory of taking him to see Sunderland play at Blackpool is his acute observation of Jim Baxter tracking an opponent all over the field before until a quiet moment came for him to get in some belated retaliation for an earlier foul). These days he prefers rugby.
But our musical tastes, then, were very similar.
We both loved the blues. Len stuck more rigidly to the Mississippi style when I started to lean towards the meatier Chicago variant and the British bands especially John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.
But i have never lost my affection for the blues, however played.
And one of my recent lists of favourite tracks - it may have been those by duos, or singer-songwriters - showed our wider musical interests had remained, up to a point, similar.
When this series kicked off. I half expected Len to come up with something from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Instead, he chose an Everly Brothers cover. "Whenever I need a bit of a lift I play All I Have to do is Dream by Leo Kottke and I can't help but smile," he wrote.
He's right to smile. It's lovely.
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