RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: THE JOHN FAHEY ANTHOLOGY

Bill Monroe is the father of bluegrass. Muddy Waters sired Chicago electric blues. The kind of music John Fahey started doesn't have a catchy name yet ("American Primitive Guitar" has been suggested) but as surely as Monroe or Muddy, John Fahey has created a highly original style of American music that has become enormously influential. He was the first to demonstrate that the fingerpicking techniques of traditional country and blues steel-string guitar could be used to express a world-full of non-traditional musical ideas -- harmonies and melodies you'd associate with Bartok, Charles Ives or maybe the music of India. The whole phenomenon called New Age music might never have happened without him (though Fahey resolutely refuses to take the credit or the blame for that!)

I met a lot of great musicians in 1964, the year I did sound and lights for the Ash Grove (Los Angeles' top nightclub for traditional music) and all kinds of things for the UCLA Folk Festival (I was a grad student there, in Folk Music Studies). My first meeting with John is as lively in my mind today as anything from '64. As this (then) skinny six-footer in blue jeans ambled toward me across the UCLA campus, the first thing I spotted was the stack of LPs he was carrying. DEATH CHANTS, BREAKDOWNS AND MILITARY WALTZES, read the crudely silk-screened covers. JOHN FAHEY - GUITAR.

"Is that a new John Fahey album?" I asked before I realized I was speaking to the man himself. Not that many people knew about his earlier album...but a couple of years earlier up at Reed College I had borrowed and taped one of the 95 existing copies of the 1959 LP cryptically labelled JOHN FAHEY on one side of the cover and BLIND JOE DEATH on the other, without a word of further information. I'd played the tape a few times on the campus radio station, and a great many times at home.

Fahey, in town for the folk festival, was pleasantly surprised to encounter a stranger who knew his work...and we quickly discovered mutual passions for blues and country music on pre-WWII 78s, 20th-century classical music, and railroad lore.

John joined the UCLA Folk Music Studies program that autumn. He decided to write his master's thesis about one of his idols, the pre-WWII Mississippi blues giant Charley Patton. One slight problem: the faculty insisted that John's thesis had to include illustrations of Patton's music in standard notation. John has never learned to read or write music; he carries his hundreds of compositions around in his head, along with all the other music he knows.

The serendipitous solution to that problem became an item of music history: While performing on tour at Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass. John met a young local musician named Alan Wilson, who 1) was highly familiar with Charley Patton's blues, 2) could read and write music, and 3) wanted to see the West Coast. And so Alan Wilson spent the fall of '65 in L.A. helping John write his thesis (which was eventually published in England by Blues Paperbacks). Meanwhile John introduced Alan to the blues aficionados of L.A., including a large young man named Bob Hite who owned L. A.'s biggest blues 78 collection at the time, and yearned to sing in front of a live blues band. One day Alan brought his guitar and harmonica to Bob's place. The duo quickly became a jug band and then an electric blues band, named after a Tommy Johnson 78 in Bob's collection: Canned Heat. (It was Fahey who gave Alan his famous nickname. It started as "Blind Al," after the nearsighted Wilson lost his eyeglasses early in their trip West; by the time the pair reached L.A. it had mutated to "Blind Owl.")

Fahey didn't play Monterey Pop or Woodstock like Canned Heat did. Incredibly enough, he never performed in public for pay anywhere until after his third LP was released in 1964. John was born (Feb. 28, 1939) and raised in Takoma Park, Md., a leafy suburb of Washington. In his early teens he became a country music fan, acquired a $17 Sears Roebuck guitar, and began teaching himself how to play it.

One day he found some old country 78s in a thrift store. He liked what he heard and eagerly searched for more. He soon discovered that two of the USA's premier record collectors lived nearby. Dick Spottswood introduced John to pre-war blues, after piquing his interest with a record by Blind Willie Johnson (which John says he hated at first, but couldn't get out of his mind). Spottswood also showed John how to "canvass," going door-to-door through the area's poorer neighborhoods offering to buy up old records; John would do that regularly for many years. Joe Bussard owned not only thousands of rare 78s but also a tiny record company called Fonotone, whose "releases" were newly recorded 78 rpm discs made one-at-a-time on an old disc cutter, and sold by mail-order to hardcore 78 collectors. John made his very first recordings for Fonotone at age 19, two dozen sides of traditional blues guitar (some of which were named after German philosophers, another longtime passion of John's). Bussard paid him in old blues, country and jazz 78s.

Though there's not much evidence of it on the Fonotone records, Fahey at 19 had already begun composing, forging his unique synthesis of traditional picking techniques and modern music. The following year an Episcopal priest, who had heard John play at a church youth group function, showed John how he could put out his own LP for a few hundred dollars, using the custom pressing facilities of a major record company. John saved up some of the money from his gas station job, borrowed the rest, and did just that, ordering 100 copies (five of which were broken in shipment) and calling his "label" Takoma, after his hometown. This was the album that said "John Fahey" on one side and "Blind Joe Death" on the other. "One of the ideas was to try and convince people that white people could play blues too," John told me.

It took a couple of years to sell those 95 copies at parties and at the gas station. Meanwhile John studied philosophy at American University in Washington. He spent some time in Hawaii (soaking up a lot more music than sunshine) and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley before winding up at UCLA in '64.

By happenstance John and I rented beach cottages nextdoor to each other in Venice, Calif. that year, and I came to know his taste in cigarets (Gauloises, the strongest he could find), music (he still loved blues and early country as much as ever, but Charles Ives was more likely to be on his tape player) and women. John had a succession of affairs which he told the world about in his compositions often using the women's real names in the titles -- "A Raga Called Pat," for instance, and "Knott's Berry Farm Molly." Speaking of Molly, I went to a party once with Molly and John. My musical judgment having been altered by gin and juice, I commandeered the living room piano for an unsteady rendition of "My Blue Heaven." I thought nothing more of it until some time later when I got a call from John. "Barry," he said, "I'm recording a new album and I want you to come to the studio, drink exactly the same amount of booze as you did at that party, and play "My Blue Heaven." There's a mercifully brief snippet of "Heaven" on John's twenty-minute "Requiem for Molly" (not included here. Molly hadn't died, by the way, except maybe in John's mind).

There were other small collaborations. When John finally started performing regularly in the mid-1960s, I helped him drive to some out-of-town gigs. He got impatient if the speedometer dipped below 80...but though he had nerves of steel on the road, it took him a long time to get over his youthful stage fright. He'd make himself more comfortable with an ever-present half-gallon bottle of Coke, often spiked with bourbon. Concerts could be adventures: John, who had been known to heckle campus speakers in his days at UC Berkeley, often heckled the audience while changing guitars or re-tuning. In the days when political correctness didn't have a name yet, John could be counted on to be as politically incorrect as possible. One never quite knew whether he was speaking his mind or simply playing devil's advocate for the fun of it, to get a rise out of people. (He did get picketed a time or two). John could go on like that for 10 or 20 minutes before getting around to the next piece of music.

Speaking of words, John's liner notes are a literary genre of their own, as original in their way as his music. Starting with his fourth album, The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions (1966), his Takoma albums came with inserts filled with long, involved stories about John and his friends, male and female, in which real events blended seamlessly with allegory, fable and myth. Often the participants' real names were used; at other times names were changed to protect the innocent. (I'm somewhat proud to say that "Tree Sloth Man" is me). Most massive of these missives is the one for The Voice of the Turtle, whose bound-in insert also contains numerous rare snapshots. (The LP itself is more of an audio scrapbook than a serious musical contender, but it remains a great Fahey collectible. Later pressings may lack the insert pages. I might also mention the America album, where fifty-odd spare but scary drawings by Patrick Finnerty take the place of Fahey's words but communicate similar thoughts).

In December 1966 John and I drove his '56 Chevy to Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas to record several old-time musicians as a project for UCLA (including fiddler Hubert Thomas, heard on this anthology). Evenings in motel rooms gave me a chance to listen in on John's compositional process. Lying on a bed in his underwear after dinner, guitar in lap, he'd start out by going over a traditional tune, and then let his fingers "free-associate" (his own word for it) until they formed new licks and phrases to his liking. Having got the basis of something, he'd add more and more to it until he had a composition with a beginning, middle and end. (Once he'd composed a piece, he might play it again and again in concert with little variation, or he might change it over a period of time).

On that trip we also canvassed African-American neighborhoods in towns along the way for old 78s. (John once got arrested for that, but was let go when he convinced the cops that he was leaving money in their town, not taking it out). Fahey supported himself through the 1960s auctioning those 78s by mail to collectors around the world, but a couple of his other trips down South yielded still more precious results. In 1963, with ED Denson (his partner in Takoma Records at the time), he rediscovered Booker (Bukka) White, the great Mississippi slide guitarist who had been living in obscure poverty for years, unaware that anyone still cared about his music. A couple of years later, with fellow guitarists Henry Vestine and Bill Barth, John found Skip James in a Mississippi hospital. At the time, only a few record fanatics remembered Skip's amazing 1932 recordings, but the tours and albums he made after his rediscovery cemented his place in the blues pantheon.

Now as for John's place in the pantheon...By the early 1970s Fahey had toured widely and recorded a dozen LPs, including two albums each for Vanguard and Reprise, and a Christmas LP for Takoma that has sold well into six figures (it's called The New Possibility, and it's now available on a Rhino CD). Ever since then, most record stores big and decent enough to have a Folk Music section have generally stocked at least a couple of Fahey's works therein, though one might well argue that he belongs instead in the Classical section. (I won't mention "New Age" anymore, except to point out the clear echoes of Fahey's work you can hear in Will Ackerman's playing, along with Leo Kottke's, and that they used to call George Winston "the John Fahey of the piano" around the time Winston made his first LP -- which was on Takoma Records).

John sold Takoma to Chrysalis in the mid-1970s, but continued recording for the label until 1983. As acoustic music regained its popularity in the late 1970s, John was internationally recognized as one of the genre's major attractions. He travelled extensively, recording music in Rome for the film Zabriskie Point and an entire album in Tasmania, and taking an extended break from touring to experience life at a Hindu monastery in India.

In 1981 John and his wife Melody moved from Los Angeles to Salem, Oregon. In an eloquent farewell piece in the Los Angeles Reader, writer Mark Humphrey paid tribute to Fahey the "self-proclaimed 'existential guitarist,' part time protector of turtles, and full-time misanthrope, dabbler in philosophy, thaumaturgy and Catholic existentialism, fancier of dark beers and darker music, and venturer into what he calls (tongue only slightly in cheek) 'The VOID.'"

Resettled in the quieter environs of Salem, John enjoyed the green countryside and the passing freight trains. He underwent psychonalysis, and relieved himself of some painful childhood memories with a series of autobiographical vignettes in the literary magazine Grinning Idiot (where he shared cover billing with such luminaries as the late Charles Bukowski).

Fahey continued touring regularly until 1986 when he contracted Epstein-Barr syndrome, a long-lasting viral infection that sapped his energy. Diabetes followed with other ailments, and a very painful divorce. It's not been an easy road back. The dark beers are history now, along with the Gauloises, and so is a lot of the darker music. John is still fiercely proud of much of what he played and composed in earlier times, but his greatest creative pleasure in the 1990s has come from making sunnier music inspired by pop songs of the late 1950s -- "Twilight Time" and "Sea of Love" for instance. He's gotten into record collecting again -- this time he's after classical LP's from the early years of stereo. He's writing a book of reminiscences about musicians he's known and studied. He still plays splendidly, and with good fortune the new millenium will be blessed with wondrous new Fahey soundtracks for its meditations, just as the past few decades have been.

Barry Hansen

(from the notes to Return of the Repressed, The John Fahey Anthology, Rhino R2 71737)

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