The John Fahey Trio

In 1999 JF hooked up with two local Salem musicians, Tim Knight (who played keyboards, bass and guitar) and Rob Scrivner (who played guitar). They formed a trio – called The John Fahey Trio! – and made some recordings. In 2001, after JF’s death, Tim Knight issued the recordings as follows.

Good Luck

One Hit Records 0002

Things Fall Apart

The Center Will Not Hold

Like Being Born Again

Slouching Toward Jerusalem

A Drunken Tale to Hide

Scherzo

Tina in the Rain (AKA My Mentor Blind Joe Death)

Recorded live at Guitar castle in the rain

JF plays organ on track 2. Apart from Tina in the Rain, the music was recorded at Jazzoo Studio and mastered at Lastra Studio & Sound in Motion.

The KBOO Live Recording

One untitled 60 minute track

Date of recording/broadcast not given

John Fahey Trio, Vol. 1

Intro/She/Things Fall Apart

Hitomi Cries

The Center Will No Hold

Scherzo/Oregon Capitol Inn

A Drunken Tale to Hide

Like Being Reborn Again

Final Song Live

Tina in the Rain

Notes

The Trio work is Fahey at his most noisy, tuneless and experimental. Some of it just sounds like roadworks outside your house. Guitar, keyboard and a ton of effects, plus at times JF intoning very funny parts of liner notes to previous albums. It’s fairly excruciating to my shell-like ears, but I’m aware that some folks LIKE this kind of thing – there are dozens of noise bands out there. Fahey’s favourites were Einsturzende Neubauten – so if you like those bad boys, this is for you. But if you love Sunflower River Blues or The Death of the Clayton Peacock then invest in a pack of Anadin Extra before pressing Play. You have been warned.

Literary allusions:

The Second Coming by W B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Intro/She/ Things Fall Apart. In the intro the m/c says Fahey is just back from Japan, which would probably mean spring/summer 99.

This third album, which was more officially released than the first two, features two new tracks, one alternate version and the rest from Good Luck.