Guitar virtuosos join forces in reviving almost-forgotten art
—by Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic

Sean Smith sits on his windowsill smoking a hand-rolled tobacco cigarette. The ashtray rests on the fire escape outside his bedroom window. The walls of his proletariat Berkeley apartment are largely bare, although a green Army blanket hangs like a tapestry on one wall and a poster of young Black Sabbath is pasted above the corner where his sophisticated, highly select record collection is stacked in peach crates.

The friendly, furry 25-year-old muses on the guitar resting on his lap, strums an open-tuned chord and runs a single finger up and down the fretboard, changing the chord like a kaleidoscope, chatting amiably while he picks absentmindedly at the guitar. He is the young virtuoso behind “Berkeley Guitar,” a new album of solo steel-string finger-picking guitar he produced with a couple of friends, his roommate Adam Snider and the man who introduced them, his childhood friend from Pacific Grove, Matt Baldwin.

On this album, the three young guitarists evoke three Berkeley guitarists from an earlier generation — Leo Kottke, Peter Lang and the late John Fahey — whose 1974 joint album was the last great release from Berkeley’s historic Takoma Records, epicenter of the solo steel-stringed finger-picking revolution of the ’60s. “The Takoma guitarists were recycling the Piedmont blues pickers in the first place,” says Baldwin, 24, whose dirty blond hair hangs over his shoulders. “But we ruled out early on doing some imitation of the Fahey-Kottke-Lang album. We wanted to step out on our own. We wanted to be referential to the whole Takoma thing and still have the music stand on its own.”

The three pursue a soloist’s art form and do not play together. Smith hands Baldwin the new Martin guitar with the banjo tunings that his father bought him, and Baldwin plays one of his tunes. Snider, who has his own guitar, carefully picks his way through a new composition that he has only previously played for Smith, correcting a couple of mistakes as he goes.

Smith, who put the deal together and produced the album, has only been playing this solo finger-picking style for a few years. But guitarist Jack Rose of neo-psychedelicists Pelt recommended him to Josh Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records, who has made a quest of unearthing guitarists who played on the old Takoma albums. He has recorded and released a pair of CDs called “Imaginational Anthem” reprising this lost side of the ’60s folk scene. Smith contributed a track to “Imaginational Anthem, Vol 2.”

In the chasm between the guitar-strumming protest-singing folksingers that followed Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and the acid-drenched psychedelic rock bands of the Fillmore and Avalon fell the pioneers of steel-string finger-picking like Fahey, Kottke and Robbie Basho, who all recorded for Ed Denson’s seminal Berkeley record label. These musicians bridged those musical worlds with long, tangled improvisations on themes drawn from delta blues, old American folk music or Indian ragas.

Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area provided a safe haven for these guitar players in the ’60s. Basho lived in the apartment above Telegraph Avenue club the Jabberwock, where he frequently shared bills at the club with rock groups such as Country Joe and the Fish. Fahey, co-founder of Takoma, settled in Berkeley. Sandy Bull played beatnik dives in Sausalito and San Francisco and appeared on early Fillmore bills. “Rainy Day Raga” by Peter Walker was frequently heard on local underground radio, alongside records by rock groups of the day.

An undercurrent in the culture appears to be carrying this music back. Fahey, who died at age 61 in 2001, has been the subject of two tribute albums this year, including “The Revenge of Blind Joe Death,” just released last week by Fantasy Records that features a cut by Smith. “Fahey is very trendy, very popular, especially with people our age,” says Baldwin, a student at UC Berkeley.
“There’s hardly any young guys doing this,” says Smith. “We’re serious about it.”
“He’s the real deal,” says guitarist Henry Kaiser, who produced Smith on the Fahey tribute album. “He was just so good. He must have the same seeds inside him as Fahey, Kottke, Basho and Lang.”

Smith, who was a “High Fidelity”-type record store geek who brought his own albums to play at the Monterey used record store where he worked for nine years, keeps a pristine collection of several hundred obscure phonograph record albums, hop-scotching genres from bebop to bluegrass, psychedelic rock to spoken word, in the corner of his spartan quarters. The bulk of his collection remains stored with his mother. He has made sure “Berkeley Guitar” has also been manufactured in a gorgeous gatefold-cover vinyl edition and recorded the album at nearby Fantasy Studios on old-fashioned, almost obsolete tape. For a day job he works — where else? — at Amoeba Records in Berkeley.

Baldwin and Smith first met in the seventh grade and played in rock bands together growing up in the seaside community they called PG, going from sounding like Nirvana to sounding like Pavement or Archers of Loaf to, finally, Neil Young and Elvis Costello. Baldwin was the first one to take up finger-picking, which he says he picked up quickly once he started decoding Fahey records.

“With only a few patterns, using left-hand movement, John Fahey was able to write a universe of songs,” Baldwin says. “I showed Sean a few things.” Smith took it from there. His solo debut recording was released last year by the small Berkeley independent, Iosta Records, and a second solo album is due imminently. “Playing solo opens up composition,” Smith says. “I don’t have to explain myself. I can play any kind of tempo. I can do any kind of key change. The better I get at it, the closer I get to the singularity of” — he paused, choosing his words — “artistic introspection and intellectual control.”

All three were leery of claiming the mantle of the ’60s Berkeley guitarists. Smith didn’t think of the concept. He cut a handful of demos with his pals, Baldwin and Snider, and sent the results to Rosenthal at Tompkins Square. “He had another idea,” says Smith. “He wanted to know if I could produce a compilation of Berkeley-based guitar players. It kind of ended up distilled down to Matt, Ad and I.”

The three discuss the role Berkeley played in their music and their claim to the album title. Snider, 22, who grew up in Visalia in the Central Valley, didn’t even play guitar before he came to UC Berkeley (he graduated last summer and this fall started teaching at a preschool for severely disabled children). Smith, who moved to Berkeley only three years ago after his pal Baldwin moved up to attend college, says he has written almost all his music in Berkeley. Baldwin points out that the earlier guys — Fahey, Basho, etc. — also came from out of town.

“We never really saw it,” says Smith. “Having a label based in New York probably makes it easier for them to see it as a legendary Berkeley guitar thing.”
Smith wanted to call the record “What Once Was Will Be,” a title of one of his songs, with “Berkeley Guitar” as a subtitle, but was overruled by the record label. “We didn’t really want to draw too much attention to Berkeley,” Baldwin says. “It’s just a bunch of songs.”

BERKELY GUITAR “a collection of new recordings by three of the Bay Area’s finest young acoustic guitarists: Sean Smith, Adam Snider, and Matt Baldwin”