Of all the genres spawned by blues
and folk music in the 1960s it would be hard to find one more inventive than
that of the acoustic guitar instrumental. It was unmistakable on free-form
radio: the bright, full, ringing chords, the impossibly complicated finger
picking with the occasional harmonic chimes, backed by a throbbing bass pattern
on the low strings. And all of it played by one human being with just two
hands.

The two best-known practitioners of
this art were John Fahey and Leo Kottke. But there was another great guitarist
on Fahey’s Takoma Records label. His name is Peter Lang, and after a couple of
decades of absence from the scene, he’s back, recording and touring. His recent
albums, Dharma Blues and Guitar, leave no doubt that his chops
are intact.

Lang traces his interest in guitar
picking back to the folk boom of the early 1960s. He would get together with
friends in Minneapolis to have a little hootenanny.

“One of their older brothers walked
in,” says Lang. “He said, ‘I cannot stand this. This is making me crazy. This
is not folk music.'”

He insisted on taking them to the
Coffee Break at the University of Minnesota where they would see “guys playing
real folk music.” The guys were Dave “Snaker” Ray, Tony “Little Son” Glover,
and “Spider” John Koerner, white college students hooked on blues.

“It shocked me,” says Lang. “There
was so much power. They had a huge influence on people. Dave Ray was the
guitarist who I modeled my finger picking style after. He showed me my first
open tuning.”

It wasn’t long before Lang discovered
original blues legends like Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie
Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake — “a lot of
blind guys.”

Lang learned something from each.

“John Hurt’s style is very simple but it’s one of those deals
where less is more,” he says. “Every time I practice I play one of his tunes.
Blind Blake was very sophisticated and Reverend Gary Davis was also
phenomenal.”

In the late 1960s Lang went to Los
Angeles to see if he could make a go of it as a folk singer/guitarist. He’d
arrived too late. “They were looking for pop stars.”

So he enrolled in college and studied
epidemiology. But not before circulating some tapes. One of them found its way
to Takoma records and owner John Fahey liked what he heard.

Lang traveled to Takoma Park,
Maryland, where he recorded a demo and was promptly signed. An associate of
Fahey gave him a stack of Fahey records.

“He said, ‘you have to listen to all of these and learn the names
of the songs. You’ll be tested.’ They were joking,” he says, “but I was like
the Minnesota kid who had just fallen off the pumpkin truck. I put the stuff on
and said, ‘Wow, how did this guy fall through the cracks in my world?’ It was
like an epiphany.”

Lang had a record coming out but in
the meantime he didn’t have a job, so Fahey hired him. He became “king of the
mailroom.”

Kottke was already turning heads on
Takoma. So it was the ultimate honor when in 1974 Takoma released an album
simply called Leo Kottke, John Fahey
& Peter Lang.

By the 1980s Lang’s career had begun
to slide. He attributes part of this to the homogenization that began to take
hold on the radio and continues to this day.

“I firmly believe you wouldn’t have
seen a lot of the bands that came out of the 1960s if they had to face what’s
on the radio today,” he says. “They wouldn’t have gotten airplay and probably
would have ended up being bakers and insurance salesmen.”

He took a couple of decades off from
recording and performing. Although he continued to play, he concentrated most
of his energy on his family and running an animation studio.

Now he’s back to the guitar,
full-time, writing every day.

“I’ll just start improvising around
something. I’ll find an interesting chord and then see if I can find one that
fits with it,” he says. “It’s kind of like building with Legos. I work almost
exclusively in open tunings. You throw the guitar into a different tuning, all
the rules are gone. It’s kind of like painting with a blindfold.”

Peter
Lang performs Saturday, November 19, at Milestones, 170 East Avenue, at 7
p.m. $15. 325-6490. Lang conducts a workshop for all skill levels Friday,
November 18, at Lehmann’s Instruments, 34 Elton Street, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. $20.
461-2117

This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2005.