Montreal's cityscape is even grayer than its endless concrete wardrobe tonight. It's a dreary early-November day and most locals are wandering the downtown streets wearing an icy look. It seems to foretell of the winter nightmare that will greet them in just a few days. But it doesn't mean a thing to the more than 2,000 people attending tonight's Guitar Summit concert at the Place Des Arts auditorium. They're all fired up, having just witnessed three of the world's finest guitarists perform: Paco Pena, Pepe Romero and Joe Pass.

Tuxedoed to the hilt with perfect posture and every note in place, the players flawlessly represented their respective genres of flamenco, classical and jazz. But a fourth guitar virtuoso is about to take the stage. He saunters out in a black suit and offers the crowd a shy glance. He proceeds to sit, hunched over his acoustic guitar. His bright blue socks beam at the onlookers while he fumbles with his shirt pockets looking for his slide. Finally, he finds it, but ends up dropping it in the process. He laughs to himself and then, at long last, the magic begins. Fumbling fingers are suddenly transformed into a dizzying blur of steel-string masterstrokes. His endlessly inventive folksy instrumentals proceed to leave the audience spellbound for the next half-hour.

The acoustic alchemist in question is Leo Kottke. At 48, he's released 26 albums that showcase his barnstorming fretwork and quirky songwriting. He's a true master of his instrument that's influenced generations of players. But get him alone for a conversation and the contrast between his polished playing and stream-of-consciousness thoughts is striking. He speaks at a deliberately leisurely pace in a rumbling voice so deep that he once compared it to "Geese farts on a muggy day." Although he rues the day he coined the phrase, it's hard to think of anything more apt. Kottke is also unafraid of tangents and disinterested in public relations posturing. He tells it like it is with a unique and witty tint.

"He's got a wry sense of humor that seems to soak everything he does," says Canadian guitarist Don Ross, who cites Kottke as one of his biggest influences. "He doesn't take himself very seriously. And he doesn't really take anything seriously. When you're around him, you feel like he's almost an observer on this world, sort of standing back and laughing at what goes on. He's not laughing at it, but finding the humor of every situation. That's who he really is."

With album titles such as My Feet Are Smiling, Burnt Lips, and Chewing Pine behind him, Kottke is the last to deny he's got a unique take on the world. The title of his latest release, Peculiaroso, pretty much sums up his world view.

"It's true as a one word description of what we see when we open our eyes—things are pretty peculiar out here," he explains. "They're contrary to expectations no matter how wise we are. We're continually surprised by the way things are."

No-one is more surprised than Kottke by the legendary status he's garnered in the music world. His self-taught rootsy, rhythmic approach to 6-and-12 string guitar and his resonant, baritone vocals have endeared him to leagues of devoted fans around the globe. Regardless of the publicity push behind his records, they always sell a respectable number based solely on his sterling reputation.

"Leo is a true example of a composer writing on the guitar," says guitar visionary Michael Hedges. He points to Kottke as his lone inspiration to start playing. "He's got so much soul, but he's also got so much rhythmic drive. He's a real groovemaster. You just can't beat him. And you'd never want to beat him. You just want to listen. He's got so much integrity and depth and he's just a sweet man."

Kottke admits to being uncomfortable with endless praise. He's even said his status as an American music icon makes him "feel a little bit like a stuffed fish." But that didn't stop Don Ross from gushing about him too.

"He's the single greatest influence on North American fingerstyle guitar players," says Ross. "He's had a long-enough career now that everyone that's ever played the acoustic guitar has heard of him. He's a guy that'll never have a song on the radio or hit parade, but millions of people have bought his records and think he's the cat's pajamas."

Like many of his records, Peculiaroso blends blazing acoustic instrumentals, meditative tunes and odd, yet endearing songs. And in addition to a cast of ace session musicians, the album features a string quartet. It's fresh, vibrant material that's a stark contrast to his last effort, 1991's pop-driven Great Big Boy. When asked to situate Peculiaroso in his recorded history, Kottke takes a long pause before responding.

"The short answer is I really don't know," he says with a laugh. "The short answer subtext is it's always the same old shit, because I'm the one doing it. It's made up of my limitations which are just as important as abilities." An awkward silence follows. Perhaps he's envisioning his record label's publicity manager having a heart attack upon reading his thoughts. "You know, I hesitate to say that because I'd like people to buy the record," he continues. "If I approached them and said 'Hey, would you like to buy the same old shit?' I might be turning off a couple of potential buyers!"

Kottke says it's too early for him to come up with a real opinion of the record. It usually takes him years to decide if an album is any good. His reticence to appraise Peculiaroso may be a holdover from the demands of his first record contract with Capitol Records in the early 1970s. To say he had little time to gain perspective on his work is an understatement.

"They required a record every six months," he recalls. "Since I write most of the stuff and I don't play with the same players all the time and never do onstage, it was tough to make records with that kind of deadline. But I got into the habit. The industry likes it if you churn a lot of them out. I'm definitely trying to slow that down."

Kottke's current label Private Music gives him more slack. He now releases a new album every two or three years. It's a more relaxed schedule that also gives him more time to spend with his wife and two kids in Wayzata, Minnesota. The Athens, Georgia native says he lives a happy and serene life in his neck of the woods. But the neck of the guitar still dominates his daily routine.

"The guitar is almost always by me, wherever I am," he says. "Before I'm out of bed, I'll reach out and grab it and play it for a few minutes and then it goes like that off and on all day long, unless I come up with an idea I really want to develop and then I might spend a couple of hours on it. Everything else is the usual stuff: make sure you get some food in ya and that kind of thing. I really don't do much. I read a lot. I'm a pig for reading. I'll read a cereal box or I'll read Moby Dick and it doesn't matter much."

At 48, Kottke's boyish face is remarkably free of worry lines. But even though he tends not to externalize his more extreme thoughts, he admits to experiencing severe moments of doubt about himself and the world at large.

"I go around saying 'Huh?' and 'Wow!' and 'I think I'll go hang myself in the closet with a necktie,'" he says. "That doesn't happen very often, but that surprise comes along too. It can be a bad day when it's all a mess and you'd rather be dead. I have met people who claim to never have that thought or get that down and they worry me. If you never feel that way, you're going to sooner or later and if you've had no experience with it, you might be one of those who believe that's something you should actually do, instead of something you just might want to do."

"World Made To Order," a quiet, soothing instrumental from Peculiaroso, reflects a time when Kottke faced severe self-doubt. It's about his Navy stint in 1964 serving on a submarine with an engineman nicknamed "Evil." The sub's name could easily serve as a Kottke track title: "The Half-Beak."

"Evil's nickname wasn't so much for being a bad guy, although I did see him stab a guy in the neck with a fork once," says Kottke matter-of-factly. "It was for the way he looked. He just looked evil. Engine rooms were pretty dark and they smell like diesel oil and Evil looked like he'd been born there. He was a grim sight. He drank torpedo fuel. It wasn't an uncommon practice. There's a lot of things that have more alcohol content than booze. Torpedo fuel didn't have more content, but it wasn't illegal to have on the submarine. So, Evil would smuggle a few loaves of French bread to use as filters and have a cocktail now and then. For those people who did drink it—I was not one of them—they called it a 'Pink Lady.' It was horrible. No-one ever accused the Navy of having a gift for metaphor. I loved working on the submarine, but I hated the Navy. I just didn't function too well in that environment. I don't miss it."

The Navy likely doesn't miss Kottke either.

"I put our sub out of control once on a dive. I nearly killed us all," he reveals. "I was on the stern planes and I didn't know what I was doing and I put the boat into a 20 degree angle on the dive—10 degrees is out of control. We were plummeting below crush depth. They did something called 'blowing the saddletank' which is a last-minute, desperate measure, because lots of times when you blow the saddletank the boat flips upside down and you sink like a stone anyhow. But we lucked out."

Kottke left the service shortly after that experience. He believes the Navy could have saved itself a lot of grief had its recruiters been more creative.

"The Navy didn't have a question on the mental stability questionnaire that asked if you ever wanted to hang yourself in your closet with your necktie," he says, snickering. "If they did, maybe they wouldn't have let me in."

Like many Kottke compositions, "World Made To Order" is difficult to categorize. Is it folk, pop, new age or country? Marketing wizards and record store managers alike seem perpetually confused about where to rack his releases. But Michael Hedges argues that this is a positive thing.

"The place an album is filed in the record store is not going to change the music. That's what speaks," he says. "I'll go wherever I need to go in the store to find Leo's records. I don't give a damn where I find them. To me it's a real compliment that people don't know where to put him."

Although Kottke is consistently complimented for his guitarwork, he hasn't been so lucky with his throaty vocals. They're an acquired taste—even for his daughter.

"Her first word was 'daddy,' which pissed off mommy, but the first sentence that any of us ever heard was 'Daddy don't sing!'" he recalls with glee. "Little kids frequently have trouble with a deep voice. Babies can be scared to death by them. Took me a while to figure that out."

Renowned singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones produced Peculiaroso. She figured out that Kottke's eccentric vocals just needed a bit of tweaking to enhance his delivery. "The best way to learn what your voice can do is to sing with other people," he says. "If you sing with Rickie, you can get a clearer picture than if you sang with Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. It automatically teaches you stuff about yourself and she's someone who can really make it mean something."

Meaning is something listeners occasionally have trouble gleaning from Kottke's lyrics. They're sometimes peppered with enigmatic references and metaphors. Take this snippet of "Nothing Works" from Great Big Boy for example:

Dimwit scrawls along the walls
By barking kids on gasoline
Windows scratched on granite lawns
And numbers on the clocks again
Nothing works
That's not the way things work

"It's a bunch of images and unrelated little snippets of thought that he puts down on paper and puts music to," says Don Ross, who covered Kottke's 1978 tune "Everybody Lies" on his 1992 album Three Hands. "It's a perfectly legitimate way to write a song, which seems to be almost the only way Leo writes. It's a very stream-of-consciousness style. Nobody else writes like him."

But Kottke maintains his songwriting process is more deliberate than that.

"My brain is off, but I'm still paying attention," he says. "I don't direct it, so in that sense it is stream of consciousness, but I'm not just transcribing the noise in my head. Every now and then, something kind of comes up the back of your neck and you've noticed that something has started. If you're quick enough, you can keep it going by just paying attention. After you've got as much of that as it's going to give you, you look at it and see what you were up to and maybe refine it or give it a different front or back end. In other words, there's a structure to it for me. It's not just a string of images or words."

Images and words aren't what The Shamen were after though. In an incredibly unlikely move, the British techno act thrust Kottke into British dance clubs by sampling a few seconds of "Morning Is The Long Way Home" from 1974's Ice Water. The sample ended up on the track "Comin' On" from their 1992 release Boss Drum.

"They used two different things and very little of it. They take approximately from the middle of one bar to the middle of the next. They didn't lift out an intact block," says Kottke. "Just by selection, they kind of built their own Leo, and it's nice. I like it. You can be sampled all wrong and you can be ripped off or someone can actually make something with what you did where you become part of their process. They didn't just glue something together. They did it right."

Techno rhythms are probably the last thing Kottke has in his head when he performs Ice Fields, a suite for guitar and orchestra. It's an ongoing project he's performed twice since 1990.

"In both cases it was the most terrifying experience I have had yet and that includes putting the submarine out of control on a dive," he says dead-seriously. "I retained my motor control when that happened at least. But with the orchestras, I got the shakes. I suddenly had to remember every single note exactly as it was on paper and I found out how rarely I do that. But I love it. There's no thrill quite like that—having an entire orchestra join you."

Kottke hopes to record Ice Fields at some point, but says it's just too expensive to make an album with an orchestra in the United States. He may end up committing it to tape in Australia where costs are lower.

People aren't likely to throw chicken feet at Kottke during his orchestral shows, but it has been known to happen at his solo gigs. "Usually, they're stuffed feet made out of corduroy. Sometimes they come with a note attached," he says.

Select fans began the bizarre ritual after Kottke told a story onstage about his unsuccessful effort to kill a chicken when he was a kid.

"That'll put a dent in your self-esteem when you go to strangle a chicken and find out you can't do it," he says. "It wasn't for lack of trying. You twirl the chicken over your head and then you give it a kind of grace note and then its neck snaps. This was on a farm where they do that every day and I couldn't do it. We eventually backed a tractor over its head. And even then it didn't die. It kept kicking. So we left it there for about a half hour and it finally expired. It wasn't a great day for the chicken. As they say, it was a tough bird."