"When I come home exhausted and I want to lay down and forget about my obligations to other people, I'll turn on noise and enjoy it. Noise has nothing to do with people, and I don't want to think about people while I'm resting. Then I'll fall asleep, and when I wake up, I'll be ready to go and deal with people again." - John Fahey
"How the fuck has it taken me all these years to never have heard of John Fahey!" - me, as a younger, stupider man.
"How the fuck has it taken me all these years to never have heard of John Fahey!" - me, as a younger, stupider man.
I've been wanting to write up John Fahey's music for the better part of 2012 but I wasn't sure how to do it justice. I've been slowly trying to make my way through his back catalog. I've found his music to be consistently engaging and emotionally charged.
John Fahey is a blues musician for people that hate Eric Clapton and a folk artist for people who think Pete Seeger is an asshole. He founded Takoma Records way back in 1959 (way before independent labels were even a thing) as a vehicle to put out his own music. The first album was a "split" with Blind Joe Death (also Fahey) and he mostly gave the records away, snuck them into record stores or sent them to musicologists with the hope that they would confuse him for some unsung hero of the 1920s. He traveled around the South and recorded various old blues musicians for Takoma while scrounging for Charley Patton records and developing his musical sensibilities. He put out more music, got a little bit bigger, released some weird sound collage type things and experimented with acoustic guitar over the next 30 years, turned into an alcoholic, almost died and then was rediscovered by The Underground. He had a short resurgence making raga guitar noise. Then he died, leaving behind a career of music either out of print or out of mind.
Over the last year I've found myself calming down a lot. The pure technical wizardry and multi-layered doodling that used to get me off just doesn't do it for me anymore (what has happened?). It's sort of embarrassing for me to admit now but actual songwriting is not something I began to take very seriously with my music listening until recently. Sometimes I think I struggle with my music vocabulary and this essay proves especially hard. Here's my first try: John Fahey studied music his entire life. Where he excels is how he stitches those influences together into challenging compositions that build on so-called American "primitive" guitar and turn it into something bigger. To put that another way: you can tell that he's trying really hard and that he's got the good taste to make that effort something transcendent.
I've heard various writers describe Fahey as trying to "transform the acoustic guitar into a classical concert instrument" or some similar bullshit that I don't buy. That sounds very pompous to me. In interviews and writings Fahey strikes me as a pretty modest guy who didn't even particularly like his own music. I think a closer truth is that Fahey was one of those iconoclasts who wanted to make music but couldn't get behind the pretentious self-congratulations of the hippies or the affected crotch waving of rock 'n roll. I doubt he would have known how. I think he was a lonely, damaged man who felt a connection with music more than he felt with people or society.
It's very appropriate that he titled his autobiography How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. Why do we choose to do things that we know will hurt us? What is the difference between sadness and heartbreak? I posit that while sadness may be regrettable it is also unexpected and mostly unforeseen. True heartbreak involves pursuing something that you know is doomed, something that you had no control over that you would still repeat knowing the outcome. I'm convinced that John Fahey was never a happy guy. Everyone is always so obsessed with tragic artists and their demise yet nobody ever asks why they continued (or started in the first place). There's a fine line between being a romantic and being pathetic. Between integrity and naivety. How do you decide? Ask the starving artists, or the single mothers, or the politicians. Ask the religious martyrs and the punx. The fuck if I know.
Assuming anybody is still with me after that masturbatory paragraph, here's some music!
Sunflower River Blues: Quintessential Fahey. From 1964's The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.
When the Catfish is in Bloom: Off of Requia in 1968. Pretty straight forward and stays interesting for the whole 7+ minutes. Fun fact: the second side Requia is mostly a "musique concrète" (whatever that means) experiment in noise and spoken word. It's terrible and should be avoided at all costs.
Steamboat Gwine 'Round de Bend: Live footage! Not sure when this song was released. Slide guitar owns.
Dalhart, Texas, 1967: Released on America in 1971, this song shows Fahey's great use of restraint and setup for the jam at about 4 minutes in. Possibly my favorite song right now. Sorry about the Myspace link (I didn't realize Myspace still existed) but this was the only version of this song I could find.
The Voice of the Turtle: A lot of people consider this to be his best song. Also off America.
Dry Bones in the Valley: This is a Fahey song but played by Jim O'Rourke (who has been involved with every cool band you've ever heard).
The Dance of the Cat People: The only late-period Fahey song I feel like linking. From Hitomi in 2000. This is really only good academically, as opposed to actually.
Over the last year I've found myself calming down a lot. The pure technical wizardry and multi-layered doodling that used to get me off just doesn't do it for me anymore (what has happened?). It's sort of embarrassing for me to admit now but actual songwriting is not something I began to take very seriously with my music listening until recently. Sometimes I think I struggle with my music vocabulary and this essay proves especially hard. Here's my first try: John Fahey studied music his entire life. Where he excels is how he stitches those influences together into challenging compositions that build on so-called American "primitive" guitar and turn it into something bigger. To put that another way: you can tell that he's trying really hard and that he's got the good taste to make that effort something transcendent.
I've heard various writers describe Fahey as trying to "transform the acoustic guitar into a classical concert instrument" or some similar bullshit that I don't buy. That sounds very pompous to me. In interviews and writings Fahey strikes me as a pretty modest guy who didn't even particularly like his own music. I think a closer truth is that Fahey was one of those iconoclasts who wanted to make music but couldn't get behind the pretentious self-congratulations of the hippies or the affected crotch waving of rock 'n roll. I doubt he would have known how. I think he was a lonely, damaged man who felt a connection with music more than he felt with people or society.
It's very appropriate that he titled his autobiography How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. Why do we choose to do things that we know will hurt us? What is the difference between sadness and heartbreak? I posit that while sadness may be regrettable it is also unexpected and mostly unforeseen. True heartbreak involves pursuing something that you know is doomed, something that you had no control over that you would still repeat knowing the outcome. I'm convinced that John Fahey was never a happy guy. Everyone is always so obsessed with tragic artists and their demise yet nobody ever asks why they continued (or started in the first place). There's a fine line between being a romantic and being pathetic. Between integrity and naivety. How do you decide? Ask the starving artists, or the single mothers, or the politicians. Ask the religious martyrs and the punx. The fuck if I know.
Assuming anybody is still with me after that masturbatory paragraph, here's some music!
Sunflower River Blues: Quintessential Fahey. From 1964's The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.
When the Catfish is in Bloom: Off of Requia in 1968. Pretty straight forward and stays interesting for the whole 7+ minutes. Fun fact: the second side Requia is mostly a "musique concrète" (whatever that means) experiment in noise and spoken word. It's terrible and should be avoided at all costs.
Steamboat Gwine 'Round de Bend: Live footage! Not sure when this song was released. Slide guitar owns.
Dalhart, Texas, 1967: Released on America in 1971, this song shows Fahey's great use of restraint and setup for the jam at about 4 minutes in. Possibly my favorite song right now. Sorry about the Myspace link (I didn't realize Myspace still existed) but this was the only version of this song I could find.
The Voice of the Turtle: A lot of people consider this to be his best song. Also off America.
Dry Bones in the Valley: This is a Fahey song but played by Jim O'Rourke (who has been involved with every cool band you've ever heard).
The Dance of the Cat People: The only late-period Fahey song I feel like linking. From Hitomi in 2000. This is really only good academically, as opposed to actually.
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