| johnfahey.com reprints | The Foyston Article_|

       


    People clapped vigorously as Fahey walked offstage without further comment.  Though the lights stayed down, the shouts of "more" quickly died with the  applause — clearly, he's not an encore kind of guy.
     
     
     
    Reprinted here with the permission of
    THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OR                                                             SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1997
    Fahey bedevils his listeners again
    By JOHN FOYSTON
    of The Oregonian staff

    A recent article in The New York Times about guitarist John Fahey cautioned that influential American artists are often cranks — recalcitrant and inscrutable.

    Fahey is all of that and a wizard guitarist to boot —  but not every one of the 300 or so people at the Aladdin Theater Thursday night would agree with both halves of the Times assertion. Especially those who walked out early, mystified by Fahey's spiky explorations of dissonance and the internal harmonies of noise.
    They were a small percentage of the crowd; most sat quietly for an hour and several tunes until — at the end of "Fanfare" from his new CD "City of Refuge" — Fahey glanced out at the room and said "Well folks, that's about it for the show tonight." People clapped vigorously as Fahey walked off stage without further comment. Though the lights stayed down, the shouts of "more" quickly died with the applause  — clearly, he's not an encore kind of guy.

    Precisely what kind of guy he is has always bedeviled listeners. Brilliant and eclectic come easily, but the rest of the description is elusive.  In the early '60s, Fahey seemed to be an acoustic revivalist and maybe even part of the Great Folk Scare.
    Fahey quickly shrugged free of any labels.  "While other folkies earnestly sang the "Wabash Cannonball" Fahey released albums such as "Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes" and recorded songs that included taped segments of traffic over a bridge.

    Chronic fatigue syndrome and drinking found him living in a men's shelter in Salem in the 1980s. But Fahey's music never went away, and a surprising array of musicians claim him as an influence, such as Leo Kottke and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. Fahey regained his health and quit drinking and has begun work on a variety of new projects. "City of Refuge" (in stores on Tuesday) on Tim/Kerr Records is the first of these and shows Fahey's increasing fascination with industrial music and sampling.

    The tune that propelled the dozen or so early risers up the aisle was an example of Fahey's refusal to be pigeonholed.  Even when he played acoustic guitar, he played it through an amplifier and traded the dry, close-miked sound of his early records for a flat, electronic twang. He also played several tunes on what might be best termed a prepared lap-steel guitar, an old aluminum Rickenbacker "frying pan" that had the strings slacked off to promote Koto-like buzzing and resonances.
    The result — abetted by slide bassist Jeff Allman — was both dissonant and transfixing and a little like the futuristic electronic squawks and beeps of the score for "Forbidden Planet."

    But the acoustic guitar tunes showed Fahey at his idiosyncratic best. The notes spun out of his guitar as he music surged and eddied, unbounded by style —here were waves of .tidal fingerpicking backing up to swatches of Delta blues.  He moved a complex fistful of chords up and down the neck and tickled out weird little nursery rhymes and Transylvanian dance melodies.  He began one song with a gently mutated "Silent Night" and ended it with a crystalline "0 Holy Night."

    In one song, he played a beautiful fingerpicked melody briefly and re-turned to it later, playing it over and over, setting up a palpable tension and withholding resolution from the audience. As he repeated that phrase, he looked off to the side, inscrutable indeed behind white beard and shades, head nodding to an 'internal beat only he could hear.

    And isn't that the way of all true artists?

    johnfahey.com