Toward the light
Revealing live performances by the mystic guitarist unearthed.
By David Fricke.
Fingerpickin’ good: Robbie Basho live – rarely this free and jubilant on record.
Robbie Basho
★★★★
Snow Beneath The Belly Of A White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings
TOMPKINS SQUARE. CD/DL
DURING ONE of the concerts in this box of acoustic steel-string alchemy, guitarist Robbie Basho cheerfully introduces Song Of The Stallion – a new composition of dancing-horse cadence, aggressively plucked harpsichord-like tone and operatically mannered singing – as “a minuscule history of California that will be on my new Blue Thumb-Capitol album.” He spoke too soon. Blue Thumb, an LA imprint distributed by The Beatles’ US overlords, had issued Basho’s 1969 LP, Venus In Cancer, but declined to release another. When Song Of The Stallion – actually cut in 1968 – finally came out in 1971, Basho was back where he started in 1965: on Takoma Records, the Berkeley label founded by his early mentor and fellow Maryland émigré, John Fahey.