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If a tree falls
in the woods but no
one hears it, does it really fall? Who cares, trees come a dime a dozen
in the woods. But if that tree is stripped, chopped, processed, fashioned
into a guitar and placed into John Fahey’s plump and knobby fingers, will
anyone hear the sounds he conjures from it? Does it even exist? Yes and
no, in no particular order.
For the better part of four decades, John Fahey has existed in a vacuum,
cultivating contradiction, spinning innovation. His contributions to American
music are no less singular than those of some of the century’s true giants
— Bill Monroe and Louis Armstrong come to mind — and his influence is
only slightly less pervasive. Monroe and Armstrong are dead, and Fahey
has had a right mind (and body) to join them on a few occasions, but he
lives, modestly, in a motel room in Salem, Oregon, has for 15-odd years.
John Fahey knows his place is in this world, because there’s no suffering
in heaven. And without suffering, where would that leave him?
I HAD HEARD SUCH SOUNDS BEFORE...
To borrow again from Stanley
Booth (maybe he should be writing this piece), like every true original,
John Fahey has a strong sense of tradition. The components of his muse
— his steel string guitar, his country blues, his love of classical melodicism
and dissonance, his fascination with railroads and other manifestations
of the industrial age — all have their origins in the early 20th century.
Fahey is a formidable expert on the age. Growing up in Takoma Park, Maryland,
he fell in with some of the most rabid record collectors in the region.
Compelled by a love of early country and blues 78s, this charter group
of vinyl junkies embarked on frequent trips to the South, canvassing black
neighborhoods in search of records and the artists who recorded them.
Though cryptically recorded and packaged, Fahey’s own first album, Blind
Joe Death (ca. 1959, pressed in a quantity of 100 and sold, primarily,
out of the gas station where he worked at the time), reveals his love
of these musics and demonstrates his already keen grasp of their lexicon.
Not bad for a man barely 20.
By the early ’60s, Fahey had switched coasts and was enrolled in a newly
inaugurated graduate program in folklore studies at UCLA. The program
led to him visiting the South again with some frequency. On two such expeditions,
Fahey “rediscovered” blues greats Bukka White and Skip James, both of
whom would enjoy fruitful second careers (and in the case of James, an
arguable artistic peak; reference Skip James Today ca. 1966 and Devil
Got My Woman ca. 1968) during the blues revival of the day.
...A SIMPLE HUMAN EXHALATION...
Back in Los Angeles, Fahey
continued to cultivate his own playing. With the help of ED Denson, another
transplanted beltway native who oversaw the business end of Fahey’s Takoma
record label, he issued a series of recordings that defined his art and
earned his audience. Exhaustively titled albums such as Death Chants,
Breakdowns and Military Waltzes, Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites,
and The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions bore
the heavy yoke of history, the isolation of timelessness, the exquisite
pain of a simple human exhalation. For some reason, the hippies loved
it.
Still, Fahey emerged from these lonely spiritual excursions with his humanity
and good humor intact. Like, say the Let it Bleed-era Rolling Stones (a
comparison he would probably loathe), Fahey suffused tradition with his
own talents so seamlessly that his innovations were often indistinguishable
from homage, or even hoax.
Reference Fahey’s 1968 album,
The Voice of the Turtle, an album of ragas, “field recordings” and sundry
guitar wizardry all bound by some impossibly dense and completely fabricated
liner notes (the first sentence alone is 561 words long), penned by Fahey.
Aping the academic, Folkways-style liner notes of the day, Fahey purports
that sections of Turtle date back as far as the ’20s. And if you weren’t
aware of his gift for gag, you probably would have believed him.
...LOSING IT, WAITING FOR
IT AGAIN...
By the ’70s, Fahey’s work
and interests began to splinter. Takoma recruited a many-striped stable
of Fahey protégés, from strict disciples like Robbie Basho
and Peter Lang, to new acoustic/age-stars-in-waiting Leo Kottke and George
Winston, to authentic weirdo Joe Byrd. Byrd’s psychedelic masterpiece
with his band the United States of America prepared no one for his subsequent
Takoma release A Christmas Yet to Come, an album of traditional holiday
carols as rendered by primitive synthesizers. The Takoma roster of the
’70s reflected Fahey’s belief that popular music reached its eclectic
peak, “its zeitgeist,” during that decade. Fahey himself supplemented
his Takoma output with inspired, if not definitive, recordings on the
larger Vanguard and Reprise labels.
As the ’70s stretched into the ’80s, the story became cloudier. Fahey
generated less music, likely because of a succession of personal and health
problems. A couple soured marriages, alcoholism, and bouts with Epstein-Barr
syndrome all sapped Fahey of some of his creative impulses. By the late
’80s, he had vanished from the musical vanguard as quietly as he had entered
it 30 years prior.
Hindsight reveals that Fahey spent his lost weekend in and out of charity
missions and dive motels, earning a piecemeal income as a different kind
of picker, finding collectible records in thrift stores and reselling
them for meager profits. In some ways, his life had come to resemble those
of his blues heroes he happened upon back in his UCLA days. It’s only
fitting, then, that he too would be rediscovered — by noted critic, collector
and Fahey fanatic Byron Coley — and with no small amount of encouragement,
would embark on the most prodigious phase of his career. With legend intact,
Blind Joe Death lived again!
...THE SOUNDS I COULD NOT
IDENTIFY, THE REALLY FRIGHTENING ONES...
1997. John Fahey, the notorious
cynic, the hardened bastard, talks with the wide-eyed mettle of a man
recently emerged from an extended tenure in a musical deprivation tank.
“I think this is a really exciting time for music,” he insists, “experimental
music particularly. People are a lot more open and curious than they ever
have been before.” And the new-fangled John Fahey is here to give the
people what they want. By the end of this year, Fahey will have added
five more albums to his already sizable canon, as well as a loosely autobiographical
book to be published by Drag City Press. He’s also re-entered the biz
by way of Revenant, his new record label, aimed at releasing “raw music”
from the likes of Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey, Jim O’Rourke, Hasil Adkins
and the Stanley Brothers, to name just this year’s crop. The onslaught
begins with City of Refuge on Tim/Kerr Records, Fahey’s first release
in over five years, an album so good that in one fell swoop it erases
many of the transgressions of former colleague Winston and the host of
other players who claim Fahey as a formative influence. “I don’t understand
that connection [between my music and new age music] when people make
it, and I claim no responsibility for it.” Fahey says flatly, impatiently.
Sure enough, Refuge carries none of the traces of lobotomized minimalism
inherent to new age music. It’s Fahey’s most challenging — and, by his
own claim, his best — work to date. The album is more akin to the works
of a newer crop of Fahey descendants, groups like Gastr Del Sol and Cul
De Sac (both of whom Fahey has collaborated with in recent months).
Refuge opens with “Fanfare”, a nihilistic sound collage drawing on a series
of disparate sources from a train to a Stereolab song (the track “Pause”,
from Stereolab’s 1993 album Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements,
is “the only one of their songs I like,” Fahey says). On the album’s subsequent
five tracks, Fahey blends primitive acoustics with the occasional found
sound in thoroughly updated fashion. It’s as though he never left.
He saves his starkest work for the final track, “On the Death and Disembowelment
of the New Age”. Asked whether the song addresses the new age musical
genre or the new age of cyber culture, Fahey replies, “Both.” Of course.
Either way, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of the song’s dark
manifesto, its unidentifiable, frightening sounds.
THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF JOHN
FAHEY
In his book of the same name,
James Rooney explains the concept of Bossmen:
“Every field has its ’bossman’ — the one who sets the style, makes the
rules, and defines the field in his own terms. Each man is aware of who
he is and exactly what he has done. Each man has thought deeply about
music and respects his music. Music has been for each a way of getting
at what is true and real in life.”
Fahey is a bossman unto himself. He invented a genre that only he seems
to understand, but he’s eager to share his talents nonetheless. His first-generation
students proved to be a mutinous bunch of turncoats, perpetrating lies
atop the truths and realities he showed them. But maybe Fahey is right.
Maybe now is the time when he will finally be understood, even cherished.
God knows it’s been a long haul to get here.
THE END
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Matt
Hanks writes and talks about music in
Memphis, TN, where his employer swears he is
the very best babysitter.
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Copyright 1997 by No Depression/Matt
Hanks. Reprinted here with permission. This article first appeared in
the May-June 1997 issue of No Depression
magazine. We thank them for allowing us to use the photo kindly provided
by the art staff at Fantasy Records in Berkeley, CA.
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