Search and Destroy: John Fahey

I think 'Tuff' was one of the Charlie Schmidt songs that snuck on to the that Fahey comp. Not really funny.

That quote is real murky, like Harry Smith:'old-time'::John Fahey:¿John Fahey?

There are shitloads of little winks in the form of deliberate anomalies in Fahey's discography, but I don't think Fahey was just being a dick w/ Voice Of The Turtle or whatever.

It's not an incomprehensible quote, but it's to very eloquent either.

it's a lot of little thoughts I agree with that don't have much to do w/ each other. editor done the man no favours.

I think 'Tuff' was one of the Charlie Schmidt songs that snuck on to the that Fahey comp. Not really funny.

whoa! never knew that. another dadaist provocation from john-beyond-the-grave? anyway, i suppose this justifies my description of it as "not quite like anything else he's done.

iirc he had tapes of charlie he intended to fob off to shanachie in the late 80s - same time he gave them decade-old recordings to release as new (god time&causality) - and clearly they remained kicking around deceptively labelled and slipped by whoever put the comp together.

whoooaaaa http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/sfc/index.php/2010/02/24/dr-demento-and-john-fahey-interview-son-house/

that's so great! awesome to hear the moment something lodges into fahey's mind that would come out on his last album over 35 years later.

some more fahey goodies to tide us over til the box set: http://delta-slider.blogspot.com/

Any good Fahey albums with lots of backing instruments - aka Bryter Layter - Nick Drake?

there's some stuff where he's backed by a dixieland kinda band, but that might not be what you're looking for.

probably not :/

you probably know it, But Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing would scratch that itch ...

good call. there are always the christmas LPs with the 2nd guitar, but those aren't really that good...

i was listening to 20 different fahey records the other day. not at the same time. some i like more than others. i like him, but....sadly, his records = currency to me. i never feel like hanging on to any cuz they are always good $$ or have good trade-in value. this is also why i don't own any sun ra records despite the fact that i have bought dozens of sun ra records over the years. i was digging the turtle record the other day. and his notes in the gatefold booklet are funny too. also digging the record that fahey recorded with jeff fuccillo. disturbed strings. fahey said hey i want to record you and jeff went in to the studio and started playing and fahey started laying down all this noise and fx onto the recording and freaked this young dude out. he didn't know what to make of it. sounds pretty cool!

not at the same time.

Oh scott, how u do amuse me!

that jeff fuccillo album IS fun. loved his story about asking fahey about the recordings later and fahey expressing "strong dislike" as they sounded "too nice".

to lorax, fahey did plenty of stuff w/ bands, just not normally the uh, nice finger-picking stuff, but they're all great. there's the dixieland orchestra albums (all dope), cul de sac record, john fahey trio records, dance of the inhabitants w/ spirit on yellow princess and shitloads of duets.

bad timing hasn't got that much instrumentation for a lot of it, but he does use Fahey's Old Fashioned Love trick to good effect, I think he did it on a gastr del sol album too.

Anybody else notice "Desperate Man Blues" in the newest Corvette commercial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJW9Up0nJT4

ian wrote:

my favorite john fahey moments are prob--
"knott's berry farm molly"

is there a more "spacier" version of KBFM made available on mp3 somehow? I have a version in my itunes that sounds like super reverby and the backwards masking sounds really crazy compared to the LP version.

the lp version i have has the reverse/reverb/tape-manipulated part at the end of the piece; don't know what the issue is? iirc vol. 4 only had a few pressings (black label & then blue/gold?) but the tracklisting remained consistent.

weird (the corvette commercial). too bad john didn't live to collect the bucks!

I wonder who administers his estate/approved that license.

No idea who would get the cash from it -- Fahey didn't have any kids, did he?

presumably it goes to whoever owns the copyright in the recording. this should be a matter of public record.

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9konefHxs1qa7wy0o1_500.jpg
Five CDs + book coming in 2011.

stoked.

who is doing this? Dust-to-Digital or Revenant?

looks like dust to digital is taking the reins, but i think revenant's involved.

:)

wow awesome!

good news!

Surprised not to see a mention of Georgia Stops, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites, which is probably my personal favourite Fahey album (even over the Takoma material). Is it generally not rated?

Re the box set: this is his earliest recorded material, right? Is it an obsessives-only kind of deal or something a dilettante fuxxor could love?

"Georgia Stomps..." of course

I don't think Georgia Stomps is particularly well thought of - a few ppl love Juana & I remember Fahey regretted releasing it at some later point - but who cares. Prefer the tone on hitomi & other similar live sets that are floating about, some amazing stuff, a little Heavy though.

Hmm ok...for me Hitomi was a less interesting album from that era.

was listening to The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick just the other day, wld make a really gd intro disc for Fahey newcomers, imho - really strong playing, great sound and some v. funny patter between songs. had avoided it before cuz fahey was always meant to be an inconsistent, even willful live performer, but he was totally ON that evening.

love the live in tasmania set and after the ball too (listened to after the ball a hell of a lot more though). never noticed that the "live" set borrowed a track from the latter. lol.

listening to both to check, and yeah. they sound quite a bit different for me, cuz i've only got after the ball on CD and live in tasmania only on LP, but it seems to be exactly the same performance. so, is the rest of tasmania, uh, "externally sourced" or what?

...for me Hitomi was a less interesting album from that era.

certainly not one of my favorites. much prefer red cross and that "hard time empty bottle" thing.

at the moment after the ball might be not just my favorite john fahey record, but one of my very favorite records period. i notice that whenever a track from it comes up on shuffle, i immediately want to hear the rest of it, the whole thing, from beginning to end, and usually more than once. so good.

^ not highly regarded by fahey fans, i know. too close to arlo guthrie territory, maybe. but i love it to death.

I think Tasmania is just two reels, the 14 minutes of Introduction by Stefan Markvitch/On the Sunny Side of the Ocean/Tasmanian Two-Step and then on side B, the 9 or so minutes of Fahey Establishes Rapport with the Tasmanians/A dissertation on "Obscurity" (spoken)/The Return of the Tasmanian Tiger/Funeral Song for Mississippi John Hurt. I have it on CD but I haven't listened in ages; "Beverly" is definitely the same recording, I suspect the rest of the stuff is studio catchall as well, filler to pad running time.

That said the performances on this slay me, the aggression and tension in volume, plucking, the tempo fluctuations, it's stunning expression. "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean"...[∞ hyperbole].

after the ball is awesome -- I think it's handicapped because it has some of the lamest album artwork of Fahey's oeuvre
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GPVJVM1BL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
"Beverly" is top five Fahey for me ... and I dig the dixieland stuff on there, too.

Yeah "Beverly" is way up there, his last-best in my view. "Sligo", "Sunny Side", "Princess" and "Catfish" would round me out on a Top 5 I think.

last two tracks on Live In Tasmania sposed to be studio efforts w/ dubbed applause. love the Approaching Of The Disco Void & jim o'rourke's description of it as 'ice cubes in a blender', and waltzing matilda is fantastic too.

the first two dixieland albums have really grown on me I love the enormous disco ball moon on after the ball&the gloss of hawaiian two step & om shanti norris, but of rivers & religion is my favourite, first true emergence of big drunk fahey playing big reverberating medleys w/ glacial syncopation & supreme relish, love Visits Washington DC, God,Time & Causality and Railroad for when the same thing shows up. maybe this was what old fahey was talking about more when he felt his earlier music was dishonest, idk, but it has Heft.

http://delta-slider.blogspot.com/2011/03/glenn-jones-on-john-fahey-fonotone.html
wow, lots of info about the upcoming box set from glenn jones here. can't wait. crazy stuff about losing everything via hard drive failures. also, anyone know about the legal trouble that the ayler box set caused revenant, which jones refers to? terrible that it caused the label to cease functioning!

just sent these guys an outlook calendar notice reminding them to back up their files

lol, yeah. can you imagine?

have never heard the ayler story either. amazing box and it really comes off like a labor of love from those involved. to have it kill your label as a result... well, that just sucks!

it is rare to find meaty pieces of writing on Fahey that look at the composition of his pieces, writers often seem to be dazzled by his status & mythology, but I love good appreciations and analysis about the music itself. this guy seems to be offering a sort of General Theory of Fahey in that paragraph you quoted from, which is an endeavour that's familiar to me and pleasingly ambitious. It was a little unclear and I was starting to write about where I disagreed with it when I started to think about what he was getting at.

"The long standing difficulty in understanding Fahey’s musical proximity draws from the way he ordered meaning."

Fahey's musical proximity = who to think of him in the company of & how that might affect our understanding. This guy wants to compare Fahey to composers, suggesting that Fahey succeeds where many before have failed in trying to disrupt (even inverse) or change the 'primary musical context' or 'dominant form' through undermining "the way the components of a piece interact through degrees of importance" "in a way that unraveled the structural integrity of each element".

'Meaning' isn't fleshed out, but surely the meaning is or is in the ordering. What makes a given passage of notes more or less significant is how it is presented. I would say one thing that marks Fahey out from the composers listed is that he is very much a performer (crucially there is no clear distinction between performer/composer for fahey), and as a performer is able to have a much stronger effect on how things are presented. this seems analagous to how much Fahey loved intros, how he would play old songs with longer and longer intros over time, until the original song was just like a coda. like a drawn out alap in a raga, a lot of fahey's pieces are in no hurry to get where they're going, and he luxuriates in approaching from various oblique angles.

I would say one of the things Fahey had the most fun playing with was this sense of musical proximity (with... varying degrees of subtlety). Fahey appreciated some of the peculiar possibilities afforded by the sound world of the guitar. he understood the raw power of fingerstyle steel string playing from an acoustic perspective (& owned that to the extent that his name is the first ppl reach for to describe it), but he also had a beautiful understanding of the ways in which a lot of music was idiomatic to the guitar, and the flattening effect solo instrumental music has on different stylistic idioms. fahey can quote anyone and sound like himself. as a side note it occurs to me that this is close to the definition of freedom according to Hegel - being oneself in an other - & there is something supremely liberating and free about the way Fahey roamed stylistically, to an extent that no one else I've heard has really matched, and in strange/intuitive ways that could involve sudden sharp turns through time and space and genre. that is to say, he was a master of hodology. the clue is in the titles "stomping tonight on the pennsylvania/alabama border"; the inhabitants of the palace of king philip xiv of spain are rehoused in the invisible city of bladensburg. it's one thing to deploy a bit of skip james immediately after vaughan williams, another to play it so smoothly that it sounds fluid, and another again so that no one even notices that's what you're doing, it just sounds like you. the sound world of the guitar is the key: it elides geography and history, it can disguise, it's a third point through which emotional heft/meaning can be triangulated, it gives the distance necessary for irony, & Fahey appreciated the huge opportunities it opens up for a performer.

anyway I agree with him that death chants is one of the best records. I was listening to it while walking through spain earlier this month, and there is something about its slightly sun-faded classicism which suits the country (Fahey took such obvious care over his titles it seems odd ppl don't pay more attention to them). the original recordings have a comfortably-worn understated quality to the playing, and I think the album flows and hangs together the best of any of his early takoma efforts. I was listening to some summer day, just thinking about how amazing it would be to hear one of the current crop of guitarists release anything like that, but no one's even trying. 'post-fahey' is a misnomer, most of the stuff in that thread would be better thought of as post-rose who himself had a more complicated relationship to fahey than can be defined simply as 'post'. no one ever calls fahey 'post-james' or whatever, but he did at least understand how the music worked and was constructed and used that knowledge to do something else. I wld say Fahey has been most grievously misunderstood by guitarists, who have echoed him in strange superficial ways and kicked up a lot of dust that has clouded a sense of what he was up to.

I disagree about fare forward voyagers, and I think it's interesting to think why its so focused on with its grandiose eliot titles, dark, slightly foreboding cover signalling an indian influence, and Fahey doing his best to lend the pieces gravitas however he can. it's so hefty and serious compared to old fashioned love, which is the following album, and lacks all those signifiers and yet seems more convincing/honest to me in the cheerful way it moves through its hodge-podge of lighter styles (which is no less or more absurd than what he's up to on FFV) and then moves up into that suddenly painful, elevated mode with dry bones which seems like the most breathtaking ending to any fahey album to me (better than but somewhat similar to the way america ends with "the waltz that carried us away..."). mb FFV is the sort of trojan horse that guy is talking about; all this alluring exoticism, poetry and mysticism which fahey has used to get generations of black metal and experimental fans to listen to him doing a 23 minute cover of goodbye old paint.

there are some live versions of FFV in which Fahey's playing is more ferocious and immediate but in terms of his long extended medleys I definitely prefer god time & causality. fahey could be funereal in some ways but I think that's an example of how it's sometimes championed to the neglect of some of his best material.

ya i think that's why i like god, time, causality so much, it captures the 'imperial' era of fahey so well (playing carnegie hall, doing these huge epics, probably peak of his technical playing- recorded in 77 but not released until later) but also some of the juxtaposition and humor that's key to his art... also his medleys/etc are a big part of understanding him but no other studio efforts sans this one capture the breadth of his material. (also 'sandy on earth' has some parts that are unmatched elsewhere in his discography). ooooh and there's even some of his prankster side coming out a la 'Voice of the Turtle' in how he passed off these old recordings as new ones

have you ever listened to 'America' with the original tracklisting ogmor? it's basically the two epics bookended with the waltz and old country rock... i love the dvorak and bluesey stuff that's on the rerelease but when it's more contained like on the original it makes a lot more sense, probably bumps it up to my top 5, almost elevated by striking some of the blues elements. i'd also agree that death chants is one of his best. 'on the sunny side of the ocean' aside transmogrification always seemed a bit overrated, honestly. not sure why it's always exalted or the conventional 'go-to', i'd say it missed elements of what made him special

also otm on dry bones in the valley, amazing song and performance aside that one is interesting because there's actually quite a bit of processing on the guitar, lots of compression and effects, etc

sorry, 'knoxville blues' on america:

"Voice of the Turtle" – 15:42
"The Waltz That Carried Us Away and Then a Mosquito Came and Ate Up My Sweetheart" – 5:49
"Mark 1:15" – 16:18
"Knoxville Blues" (Sam McGee) – 3:07

it is rare to find meaty pieces of writing on Fahey that look at the composition of his pieces, writers often seem to be dazzled by his status & mythology, but I love good appreciations and analysis about the music itself. this guy seems to be offering a sort of General Theory of Fahey in that paragraph you quoted from, which is an endeavour that's familiar to me and pleasingly ambitious. It was a little unclear and I was starting to write about where I disagreed with it when I started to think about what he was getting at.

"The long standing difficulty in understanding Fahey’s musical proximity draws from the way he ordered meaning."

Fahey's musical proximity = who to think of him in the company of & how that might affect our understanding. This guy wants to compare Fahey to composers, suggesting that Fahey succeeds where many before have failed in trying to disrupt (even inverse) or change the 'primary musical context' or 'dominant form' through undermining "the way the components of a piece interact through degrees of importance" "in a way that unraveled the structural integrity of each element".

'Meaning' isn't fleshed out, but surely the meaning /is/ or /is in/ the ordering. What makes a given passage of notes more or less significant is how it is presented. I would say one thing that marks Fahey out from the composers listed is that he is very much a performer (crucially there is no clear distinction between performer/composer for fahey), and as a performer is able to have a much stronger effect on how things are presented. this seems analagous to how much Fahey loved intros, how he would play old songs with longer and longer intros over time, until the original song was just like a coda. like a drawn out alap in a raga, a lot of fahey's pieces are in no hurry to get where they're going, and he luxuriates in approaching from various oblique angles.

I would say one of the things Fahey had the most fun playing with was this sense of musical proximity (with... varying degrees of subtlety). Fahey appreciated some of the peculiar possibilities afforded by the sound world of the guitar. he understood the raw power of fingerstyle steel string playing from an acoustic perspective (& owned that to the extent that his name is the first ppl reach for to describe it), but he also had a beautiful understanding of the ways in which a lot of music was idiomatic to the guitar, and the flattening effect solo instrumental music has on different stylistic idioms. fahey can quote anyone and sound like himself. as a side note it occurs to me that this is close to the definition of freedom according to Hegel - being oneself in an other - & there is something supremely liberating and free about the way Fahey roamed stylistically, to an extent that no one else I've heard has really matched, and in strange/intuitive ways that could involve sudden sharp turns through time and space and genre. that is to say, he was a master of hodology. the clue is in the titles "stomping tonight on the pennsylvania/alabama border"; the inhabitants of the palace of king philip xiv of spain are rehoused in the invisible city of bladensburg. it's one thing to deploy a bit of skip james immediately after vaughan williams, another to play it so smoothly that it sounds fluid, and another again so that no one even notices that's what you're doing, it just sounds like you. the sound world of the guitar is the key: it elides geography and history, it can disguise, it's a third point through which emotional heft/meaning can be triangulated, it gives the distance necessary for irony, & Fahey appreciated the huge opportunities it opens up for a performer.

anyway I agree with him that death chants is one of the best records. I was listening to it while walking through spain earlier this month, and there is something about its slightly sun-faded classicism which suits the country (Fahey took such obvious care over his titles it seems odd ppl don't pay more attention to them). the original recordings have a comfortably-worn understated quality to the playing, and I think the album flows and hangs together the best of any of his early takoma efforts. I was listening to some summer day, just thinking about how amazing it would be to hear one of the current crop of guitarists release anything like that, but no one's even trying. 'post-fahey' is a misnomer, most of the stuff in that thread would be better thought of as post-rose who himself had a more complicated relationship to fahey than can be defined simply as 'post'. no one ever calls fahey 'post-james' or whatever, but he did at least understand how the music worked and was constructed and used that knowledge to do something else. I wld say Fahey has been most grievously misunderstood by guitarists, who have echoed him in strange superficial ways and kicked up a lot of dust that has clouded a sense of what he was up to.

I disagree about fare forward voyagers, and I think it's interesting to think why its so focused on with its grandiose eliot titles, dark, slightly foreboding cover signalling an indian influence, and Fahey doing his best to lend the pieces gravitas however he can. it's so hefty and serious compared to old fashioned love, which is the following album, and lacks all those signifiers and yet seems more convincing/honest to me in the cheerful way it moves through its hodge-podge of lighter styles (which is no less or more absurd than what he's up to on FFV) and then moves up into that suddenly painful, elevated mode with dry bones which seems like the most breathtaking ending to any fahey album to me (better than but somewhat similar to the way america ends with "the waltz that carried us away..."). mb FFV is the sort of trojan horse that guy is talking about; all this alluring exoticism, poetry and mysticism which fahey has used to get generations of black metal and experimental fans to listen to him doing a 23 minute cover of goodbye old paint.

there are some live versions of FFV in which Fahey's playing is more ferocious and immediate but in terms of his long extended medleys I definitely prefer god time & causality. fahey could be funereal in some ways but I think that's an example of how it's sometimes championed to the neglect of some of his best material.

New footage of him, instant classic- that pic of him and his girlfriend holding the umbrella came from this. Hope the full thing comes out at some point

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/1281-memphis-blues-again

Wow, nice!

so good

Looks like a new 4xLP box, comprising his now famous mixtapes along with unreleased recordings, is coming next year via Mississippi:

John Fahey - Bestiary 4 LP box set (Unbelievable 4 LP set of unreleased Fahey recordings collaged with mixes made by Fahey of his favorite songs from all genres - Brazilian, pop, classical, blues, country, Indonesian and on and on. Also comes with a 185 page cloth bound book filled with unpublished writing, collages and paintings by Fahey. Very limited one time edition. We will also have an expensive special edition available to CSR members that comes with an original Fahey painting and an original mix tape made by Fahey. Really. This thing is nuts.)

They've been pretty quiet about it thus far (no release date, and this is the lone Google hit for "Fahey," "Bestiary") but you can see the cover art here (just below Dead Moon): https://sites.google.com/site/mississippicsr/

Hope this thing is >$150

Think you mean <$150

fahey is my musical hero but can't say i have much interest in unreleased late period stuff... and i feel like i saw those mixes on someone's blog or soundcloud at one point?

yeah I've listened to some mixtapes he made on SoundCloud before

xmas was a great reminder of how amazing The New Possibility is

it really is, we listened to it a few times. the later period 1991 Xmas CD on Burnside has some great stuff too, like a sprightly version of 'Jingle Bells'. I still need the Xmas Vol. II LP as well.

jamming new possibility in the gift shop today as we speak

John Fahey, live in early 1968: "Bursting with a manic vitality and a missionary belief in the healing properties of the alternating bass." https://t.co/lI2Ga7OVx3 pic.twitter.com/i0pciRhHbE

— Tyler Wilcox (@tywilc) July 26, 2022