Favourite old saying/put-down:
People in Hell all want ice water
At eleven am on 16 October 2019 we were circa two Mount Kosciuszkos high, on a Tibetan Plateau backroad, between Yushu and Nangchen/Nangqian in Qinghai, China.
We were as high as that road went, with jaw dropping views into valleys below, but also plenty of mountains to look up at.
By local standards, it was a mild autumn day.
The sun had shone down on us for most of the several hours since it had risen, but the puddle at my feet was unlikely to liquefy, that day.
I remembered a beautiful guitar solo that I had first heard 48 years earlier.
Leo Kottke’s The Ice Miner involves an altogether lower, more prosaic, almost infinitely flatter place and circumstance.
However, its American day was – necessarily – very much colder than our Tibetan one.
The version above is from Mudlark, the 1971 Leo Kottke album.
Also from 1971, this “live” version includes Leo’s characteristically quirky explanation about the now-extinct occupation which inspired this composition:
More than one admirer has observed that “Leo Kottke, tuning a guitar, sounds better than most of us do, playing one”.
This observation is not only about Leo’s musical gifts.
If he breaks a string, or struggles to “tune up”, Leo talks.
Many “professional” comedians are lesser comedic talents than this “concert guitarist” – most especially when it comes to timing .
Click here to hear what happened when Leo met Bob Dylan. (If you are impatient, skip the video’s superfluous first 25 seconds)
Very different, Ice Water is a Peter Case song, from his eponymous 1986 album.
Peter put to very good use the aforementioned saying.
Case set his otherwise-original lyric to a tune and guitar pattern that he mostly borrowed from a recording of bluesman Sam ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins (1912-1982), performing Tell Me Pretty Mama.
In pleasing contrast to far too many other “post-Blues” songsters, (hello there, Jimmy Page) Peter Case does not steal song credits and royalties.
Unprompted, Case credited Hopkins as co-writer, thus ensuring that half of the royalties (for a song that Case still performs) would go to Hopkins’ estate.
Case’s original studio version is excellent, but I like this more recent, “live”, solo performance even more.