Kottke's latest adds taste of Phish November 6, 2002 - Boston Herald by Daniel Gewertz Before making his quirky new album, ``Clone,'' with Phish bassist Mike Gordon, acoustic-guitar master Leo Kottke never had a musical partner. In his 34 years as a recording artist, Kottke never even fronted a touring band. There's a good reason for Kottke's musical isolation. One of the most idiosyncratic, complex and complete guitarists of any genre, Kottke is close to a whole band unto himself. ``I'm a road hog, crowding out other instruments, and I'm all over the bass territory,'' he said. ``Clone'' came into focus only when the duo decided to treat Gordon's bass as if it were a horn or a singer. ``The obvious thing was to use counterpoint and polyrhythms, things that would obviate the solution. But instead, we really tried to figure it out from the inside, to make it an absolute duet. We're awfully busy, but it's not cluttered,'' said Kottke, who plays in tandem with Gordon at Sanders Theatre tonight. Beyond the musical rapport itself, there are reasons why the Kottke-Gordon pairing makes a strange sort of sense. Both are cult acts, though of different breeds. With Phish, Gordon fills stadiums. Alone, Kottke fills medium-sized halls. Both acts are ignored by most commercial radio. The duo represents a coming together of two generations of independent thinkers. ``We both may be examples of how irrelevant the music industry can be,'' Kottke said. Kottke is beloved in concert for his brilliant bursts of semi-improvised logic, and the way he and Gordon came together sounds like one of his classic loosey-goosey tales. It all started with a word. And the word was ``eleemosynary.'' ``At one of my gigs in Burlington (Vt., near Phish headquarters), Mike gave me a book he'd written, `Mike's Corner.' In it, he used a word that no one uses. Except maybe John Fowles. It was `eleemosynary,' an adjective describing someone supporting charitable causes. That was the hook for me. I decided I had to maintain contact with Mike.'' Eventually, the two men found themselves in Phish's barn, improvising and thinking about an album. ``But we spent most of the day falling on our faces. It didn't work,'' said Kottke. One lick saved the project. ``We were about to call it quits, but we found this little lick. It became the motif in a tune called `June.' It clicked, and that was it. Everything followed from that. We committed ourselves to go to L.A. and record, and not on the label's money. It didn't occur to either of us that it might be a little ridiculous, given all we had was a lick. But it was probably as much fun as I've ever had in a studio.'' ``Clone,'' which is Gordon's first CD outside his work with Phish, was released by Kottke's label, Private Music/RCA. It contains 12 of their own alternately substantial and fragmentary compositions, music that runs a gamut from the gorgeously graceful to the overtly ditsy. Only one Gordon tune, ``Clay,'' annoys. There are also two interpretations. A Frizz Fuller song, ``From Pizza Towers to Defeat,'' tells of meeting Richard Nixon in a San Bernardino airport. The ex-president was in drag. ``I don't know if it happened, or was just in his head. I hope it happened,'' said Kottke. As a solo performer, Kottke feels ``you have to keep up a genuine element of risk. If that's gone, it's dreadful. You might as well be at the bier saying goodbye to your grandpa.'' Kottke, a true American original, knows he doesn't fit into any genre or category. ``I often wonder about that,'' he said. ``Not fitting in can feel really good or really bad, depending on the weather. That's one of the reasons it's so gratifying to work with Mike.'' © 2002 the Boston Herald