[Leo plays medley of "Available Space" and "June Bug"]

[Applause]

LEO:

I know I should say something.  But I generally say too much, I've learned this lately.  More than a couple people have come back after a show and told me "Leo, we came to hear you play."  They may have a point.  But this much I have to do.  I have to at least, out of courtesy, say hello and welcome you hear.  I never have anything to say at this point, that becomes obvious to all of us.

[Audience member asks him something]

Where am I from?  Is that what you said?  Oh God, you don't want to know about that do you?  Hunger, that's a good one, I've always -- I remember that one.  I started playing guitar in Oklahoma. [some applause]  I had been abused by a trombone for the preceding six or seven years.  The guitar seemed fairly benign to me.

I wanted to hear some other guitar, which was at the time hard to hear in Muskogee.  I found a record that had Montoya on one side and Sabicas on the other.  These are two guys who rarely meet.  And I put Sabicas on first and the first thing I heard was a rooster.  So the first record I found while looking for guitar music contained a lesson in production for me that I didn't learn to appreciate 'till many years later when I had the urge to add animal noises to my own record.

[Leo plays "Arms of Mary"]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Oddball"]

[Applause]

LEO:

John Hammond was playing somewhere one night.  He was behind a curtain.  He was introduced -- "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Hammond" -- the curtain went up and John Hammond's guitars went up with the curtain.  So I'm all right.

But I think David Lindley told me the way to get a tune out of your head, especially the kind of stuff that you might have to play on a session that was unpleasant but paid well, is to play it backwards in your head.  Figure it out, run it backward, and it -- being 180 degrees out of phase with the previous input -- will cancel itself, erase, and you'll be free of it.  This actually works, I think.  It works for me at any rate.

But I have a problem which is what I want to get out of my head is a lick, it's not an entire tune.  And the lick is sort of complicated and thoroughly repellent to me.  It's Woody Woodpecker's lick.  I don't know if anybody else is haunted by that idiot bird but I hear it too often.  And since all bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker I thought I'd come up with -- join that club.  [While noodling on guitar] That's bad jazz.  I tried Woody Woodpecker backwards.  I don't think I figured it out properly.

[Leo starts playing "Peckerwood."  In the middle of the song, after repeating the infamous "ah-ah-ah-HA-ha" lick in reverse about five times, he asks the audience "Had enough?" and then continues to play ]

[Applause]

[Leo plays "Jack Gets Up"]

[Applause]

LEO:

Thank you very much.  Thank you for listening and thanks for coming.

[Leo plays "Times Twelve"]

[The End]