A lavish autobiographical fantasy, an absurd
exercise in self-gratification, or self-deprecation,
hard to tell; a labour of love for sure, a financial
disaster, definitely, a grand folly, a lovely
indulgence, a holiday from seriousness, a mosaic of
diverse musical traditions and a discographical
nightmare; “The Voice of the Turtle” is all these
things. The most rococo expression of Fahey’s sense of
the absurd, with its lying notes, self-mythologising
and lunatic picture book, this is a serious joke.
VOT AS MOSAIC
Blues, of course, old time fiddling (should that be
fiddlin’?), musique concrete, objet trouvees (we’ll
come to them), Gamelan, cajun, hymns, Tin Pan Alley,
the streams feed the river, and you heard all this
before, in so many reviews of so many Faheys. However,
as the notes say, “we do not mean to imply that Mr
Fahey is merely eclectic.
VOT AS LABOUR OF LOVE
With those notes, and that picture album so lovingly
subtitled, the sleeve in all its gatefolded glory –
“the author age 17” , the quote from the Bible which
everyone including Fahey knows means turtledoves, not
turtles, this record comes at you like a conceptual
piece, a bold encryption of a dream of a possibility.
Fahey, I award you the Turner Prize for 1968.
VOT AS GRAND FOLLY
Glenn Jones told me once: “Takoma was selling the
record for over a year before some genius (definitely
not John in this case) decided to cost out the various
prices of assembling the whole package… and discovered
that the record was costing Takoma 15c more per album
to manufacture than they were selling it for to their
distributors! This is why all the later versions of
the record are single pocket sleeves with no notes.
VOT AS DISCOGRAPHICAL NIGHTMARE
The problem is easily summarised - one sleeve, one
label, but two records!
It took me about 12 years to realise this, and
perhaps many owners of the record never did find out,
and still don’t know. I was at the house of Mr David
Popple, and we were trying to crack the mystery of
“Bottleneck Blues”. We were coming round to the theory
that it really wasn’t Fahey playing the song. As we
argued the pros and cons of this then-outrageous
theory, minutes passed and I remember asking what was
playing now – I hadn’t noticed anyone changing the
record. Still “Voice of the Turtle” I was told. That
can’t be right, I said – I never heard this before.
And there it was, spinning on the turntable, playing
songs I never heard. “Your copy of this record has
songs on it which my copy doesn’t,” I said very
slowly, “but the sleeve is the same, and the track
list is the same.” There was one significant
difference – his record had a black label. Mine had an
orange.
So it turned out that when we thought of “Train” we
were thinking of entirely different songs. Not to
mention “Bean Vine Blues” which was three different
songs! It was confusing.
Since the Orange Label version is the first, the
bizarre accident happened when VOT was reissued minus
the gatefold sleeve and notes. Clearly it was an
accident, as the tracklisting remained the same
(except for one detail we’ll come to later). Or,
perhaps, it was a joke within a joke perpetrated by
some nameless Takoma employee. Even in this, the Age
of Available Information, I doubt that we will ever
know.
The same tracklisting on both versions makes it
impossible in four cases to tell which title refers to
which song. When this true confusion is added to the
spoofing half-truths and downright wool-pulling
deliberately confusing fictions of the liner notes,
then the air grows thick and the hearts of lowly
discographers quail. Labouring on individually, Fahey
fans had nearly given up all hope of solving the
enigma within a riddle inside a conundrum whose name
is VOT. It’s the kind of thing that makes strong men
weep.
It came to pass, however, that certain persons fell
asleep one night in 1998 and dreamed the same dream
simultaneously; and in such a manner was formed the
International Fahey Committee, the only human agency
remotely capable of tackling this problem in a worthy
manner. Spanning several continents, and with
limitless financial resources, the IFC has left no
stone unturned, has burnt whole lakes of midnight oil
and has been through therapy eight times apiece, often
involving deep hypnosis (“How old were you when you
saw an Orange Label edition for the first time?”) and
is now in a position to give tentatively definitive
answers to most of the questions.
Before we proceed any further, readers must be
aware that the CD reissue of VOT is essentially the
Black Label Version. CD-only owners of VOT will not
have heard some of the stuff which follows. A formal
complaint about the CD issue will be registered
elsewhere in this essay.
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