Kinloch Nelson: An Overnight Sensation That Took 50 Years

Kinloch Nelson came to his instrument of choice—the guitar—and his chosen genre—the rambling fingerpicked folk style known as American primitive—in as close to a vacuum as one could get in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Around age six, he found a parlor size guitar in the coat closet of his family’s home in Massachusetts and was instantly hooked. Especially when he could lean his little head down, place his ear right next to it and feel like he was inside of the instrument. Much like sitting underneath his family’s piano while his mother practiced. He grew with the instrument, teaching himself and finding resonance with the growing folk scene that was frightening Middle America at the time. Even as he developed his own sound, Kinloch found the next catalyst in his musical evolution with an assist from his high school buddy, Carter Redd.

“I’d figured out a lot of the patterns I could do with a flat pick,” Nelson says. “But it just didn’t sound right because it was clumsy. Carter said, ‘Here, you should try fingerpicks.’ I watched him play and that’s when everything changed.”

From that pivotal moment to today, Nelson has built and sustained a remarkable career as an instrumentalist. He has expanded his repertoire considerably, studying and performing classical guitar and jazz, and holding workshops and private lessons in and around his hometown of Rochester, New York. He’s also co-founded two different guitar societies, which holds clinics and workshops for young players and presents concerts for touring musicians.

Somehow, Nelson has been able to accomplish all of this almost entirely below the radar of the music industry. And to hear him tell it, that’s been entirely by design.

“I totally avoided trying to find a record deal and becoming a personality, a national touring act kind of thing,” he says. “I saw so many gifted artists get bad record deals, especially back in the ‘60s and ‘70s when I was coming up. And I saw more than one guy go down in flames. Even a guy that I knew ultimately committed suicide because he got a bad record deal and the pressure of the big music life was too much. I just didn’t want to go down that road.”

Nelson is dipping his toes into those waters ever so gently this year thanks to a small nudge from the folks at Tompkins Square Records. The Bay Area label is getting the guitarist some long overdue attention with the release of “Partly On Time: Recordings 1968 – 1970”, a collection of tunes recorded in the studios of Dartmouth College’s radio station.

It’s a marvelous little treasure that shows Nelson (recording both solo and with Redd) expanding on the template provided by fellow pickers like John Fahey and Donovan that belies his tender age (the earliest tracks were captured when he was all of 18) and exhibits a sylvan influence born of his upbringing in the lush environs of New England and upstate New York. He shows off his speedy picking abilities, but the deepest cuts are administered when he slows the tempo down on songs like “Solitudes” and “Company Leaves.” The floating, rolling melodies are given ample room to drift and soothe.

“Partly On Time” even showcases Nelson’s experimental side through the album’s closing track “Tone Poem.” The shimmering, humming sound that he came up with was apparently produced by running a Dampit, a small rubber humidifier used to protect wooden instruments, over the strings of his guitar. After recording his experiments with this, he turned them into tape loops, building from scratch an electroacoustic piece that shares some sonic DNA with Alvin Lucier’s sound art.

“Oh no, I invented that. Everybody took it from me,” Nelson jokes when asked whether he was familiar with the processes that produced “Tone Poem.” “No, I didn’t know about tape looping! I just thought, ‘Oh, there’s a bunch of tape recorders around. I’ll just hook them all up and see what happens.’”

What these 50-year-old recordings also represent is a reigniting of the “What if?” questions that have smoldered in the background of Nelson’s career. While he says he eschews the notion of seeking out the support of a major label, that wasn’t always the case. Around the time of the first recording dates captured on “Partly On Time,” the engineer for the sessions, Dave Graves, sent a pair of the tracks off to John Phillips, the co-founder of The Mamas & The Papas, who was looking for new talent to produce. Months later, word came down that Phillips liked them and wanted Nelson and Redd to hit a recording studio in Connecticut to record a Mason Williams tune. The problem was that Redd was off on a cross-country trek and couldn’t be reached. The session never happened and Phillips moved on.

“It was pretty exciting and then very disappointing,” Nelson says, matter-of-factly. “It ended up not producing a recording for us at the time. But for a little while, we were on cloud nine.”

Then there was the 1970 car accident that nearly destroyed several of the tapes that wound up on “Partly On Time” and, more importantly, almost took the guitarist’s life. Nelson was sharing some of his work with a buddy on his home stereo, but both men wanted to hear what they sounded like on his friend’s dad’s expensive hi-fi. On their way there, a drunk driver ran a red light and t-boned Nelson’s car, sending the tapes and tape recorder out onto the highway and destroying his guitar in the backseat. Miraculously, Nelson and his pal only wound up with whiplash and the tapes weren’t run over.

Having survived all of that and now in his late sixties, Nelson has settled himself into a comfortable life in Rochester. He performs when and where he can, still seeking out opportunities to learn new tricks of his trade and try out new guitars. There are still moments that take him by surprise, such as when Tompkins Square came calling looking to release some of his work, but even that he is taking very much in stride.

“It’s a little weird,” Nelson says. “I might be an overnight sensation after being at it for 50 years. I think I’m only now beginning to understand what Tompkins Square is and appreciate more than I initially did. And judging by the promised action that they’ve delivered on, I’m more and more appreciative of what’s going on. It’s delightful. We’ll see what happens.”