Takoma's one-offs and obscurities

I have not heard the CD.. there was an LP bootleg from maybe 10 years ago or so. Paste-on cover, no label info, mediocre sound.

GUYS!

GUESS WHO'S WIFE GOT HIM 6 GUITAR LESSONS WITH PETER LANG FOR FATHER'S DAY???
XD

wife otm

result!

pretty excited, i just need to call the west bank school of music to schedule

that is cool, i wanted to take lessons with a takoma-style dude who lived around here, but he moved away. keep us posted on how it goes! when is Transfiguration of the Upper Mississippi Shakedown scheduled to be released, anyway?

!!! awesome matt.

haha yeah i don't know when i'm going to schedule them, i almost feel like i'm too shitty to take lessons from him now

but at the end of the day just even being able to geek out and be in the same room, watch him play stuff etc

my friend that took lessons from him had a bunch of handouts from him like tabbed out sheet music for "in christ there is no east or west" by fahey and stuff like that :)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_I2cHuaRju4M/S4S576UqMBI/AAAAAAAAAEs/Q0IOHNNs0JA/s400/p000.jpg
full scans of this book over here: http://delta-slider.blogspot.com/2010/02/best-of-john-fahey-guitar-tab.html

that is really exciting, matt!

not takoma, but this is great. only heard one other track by this dude previously.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jYLDKDXUoNo/T-qbT9WISHI/AAAAAAAAEcM/xD7rSjqwaRo/s1600/conflower+front.jpg
http://ghostcapital.blogspot.com/2012/06/suni-mcgrath-cornflower-suite-1969.html

dl link seems to be down for the moment tho :/

That Mark Fosson record is sounding great today, thanks for posting that. Stream posted upthread still works btw. Pretty amazing sound for a home recorded set of tunes.

yeah i've been listening to that a ton.

It's sequenced/recorded as almost one continuous performance, or at least the mix and consistency of the performance makes it seem so. Can picture the guy (who looks super-young in the picture) sitting down and banging them out in one take, which would be pretty astounding. Considering he was renting the mic he recorded with, that just may be the case.

That Fosson record is incredible! Cosmic Hiccup is transcendent. And to whomever is getting the lessons from Peter Lang: how I envy and am saving up for what you're doing... as a wannabe fingerpicker, you'll have to let me/us know how it goes. I feel like it's something I should jump on once I get the cash, as it doesn't seem like an opportunity to be missed and one that won't be around forever...

Will keep you guys posted on how it goes....btw I don't think it's super expensive for the lessons, but I guess if you were traveling that could get expensive

I live in MPLS, but I live below a poverty wage at the moment so we'll see on that. I never even considered looking him up for lessons until you mentioned it, though, so thanks! Holy shit man.

He teaches through the west bank school of music if you want to inquire, but yeah a friend did it and had a lot of fun and said it really helped

hey i just downloaded that Fahey tab book.

ayo...um...did any of you guys, like, read some of the essay stuff he wrote at the beginning of the book o_O

like especially the "Homosexual Guitar" section is over the line in parts.

i guess i don't know that much about fahey as a dude, was he like super crazy?

he was kinda nuts, had some lame opinions/ideas. he probably just enjoyed pushing people's buttons too.

i haven't read that essay, though. was he saying that some male guitars like to have sex with other male guitars?

um...i wish...

can't C&P but here's a sampling:

"Those who fear their guitars are essentially cowardly faggots who have allowed themselves to be conquered by perverse tendencies. They are unable to sit anywhere for six hours under any circumstances. Their span of attention is short, but what is much worse is that they don't care....They have constituted themselves essentially as hatred, opposition - pure negativity. Homosexual guitar playing is an imitative gesture of the non-essential (i.e. temporary) characteristics of women - bitchiness, frivolity, flightiness, and super-sensitivity."

that's just a sampling

eek! would be interesting to ask Lang about that particular theory. provided he doesn't start your first lesson by calling you a "cowardly faggot."

i get the sense lang is a little more "normal" than fahey was

I'd heard quotes about how weird Fahey was in person and read him described as 'practiced at being obnoxious'. I'd say that type of writing up there is kind of a logical extension of his insane ramblings that made up his liner notes and his counter-counter-culture tendencies. Ever wonder where the title "Revolt of the Dyke Brigade" came from? In the Return of the Repressed liner notes he said that it was written 'around the time of women's lib, i was scared and insecure' or something similar. I feel like he reigned it in near the end, In 'How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life' he writes a quite sympathetic chapter about his gay friend that died and who couldn't be visited by his SO. I dunno.

Doesn't hurt/help that you can tell how hammered he was in a lot of his live cuts (and on record! the slurring voice on the song 'Days Have Gone By' is Fahey)

78 Collectors: Why are they so weird?

whoa holy shit @ that fahey excerpt

Not only is that passage willfully offensive, it doesn't really make any sense at all.

Hmm, not to defend J. Fahey too much, as certainly I haven't read this passage, but I imagine that the "(not) really making any sense at all" part of the equation should be weighed heavily. Guy struggled with a lot, but I don't think he was really a bigot in any way.

i shouldn't characterize the whole this like that, like from what i've read some of it is really good....it's just, i dunno, lots of stuff in that era (like lester and nick tosches as skot mentioned in another thread) were a little too free with the f- and n-words in their kinda jive writing

but that particularly line of though is pretty stupid macho bullshit, continued:

"Mastering a guitar is very similar to conquering a woman, and when you fail to master it, like when you fail to master a woman, you have the same feelings of humiliation and violence."

but honestly for there's tons of great stuff too!

"And you can win -- with any guitar. Sit there with it for six hours. No guitar can withstand the creative spirit that is in every human being. Anyone who calls his guitar a "box" does not understand. Anyone who calls his guitar an "axe" cannot play it very well."

<3

like you should just download the thing and read it, i feel a bit bad for calling that part out but goddamn some of it IS just offensive no other way around it.

uhm, that suni mcgrath record is great. all his records are great but that's my fave.
fahey is a very complicated individual. i would suggest reading his books before judging him as a bigot

i wasn't saying he was a bigot! that part just kinda jumped out at me and i didn't really know much about the dude tbh!

i mean large font headers called "Homosexual Guitar Playing" and "Guitar Angst" are sort of eye-grabbing

oh oh oh i know you weren't!! just advising anyone against making knee jerk assumptions abt the guy. there is a lot of sexual abuse/trauma in his past that he spent large chunks of his life dealing with.

plus his house was his car and it smelled like hamburgers

there's a bootleg from the mid 70s where Fahey suggests that everyone (including himself) commit mass suicide.
"We could all go to sleep. Why don't we all go home and - why don't we go out back and have a joint suicide? Let's all go out back and commit suicide. Every one of us. The neat thing would be when the newspapers come they won't know what happened. Nobody will be able to figure it out."

huh!

Lang's musical career was postponed in the 1980s, to allow him to pursue a career in animation and special effects production.

there's a bootleg from the mid 70s where Fahey suggests that everyone (including himself) commit mass suicide.
"We could all go to sleep. Why don't we all go home and - why don't we go out back and have a joint suicide? Let's all go out back and commit suicide. Every one of us. The neat thing would be when the newspapers come they won't know what happened. Nobody will be able to figure it out."

― tylerw, Friday, June 29, 2012 3:30 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa, which one was this? i've been just getting into some of the bootlegs on delta slider. some heavy stuff in there, musically, that is. most of his banter thus far has been lightly amusing. nothing like this.

delta-slider.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-fahey-as-jim-jones.html

Wow, that's pretty disturbing stuff, dude must've been more wrecked than I ever thought.

hey we all have our nights, don't we? ok, maybe not.

This older lady, a folksinger, was telling me about being backstage at a festival in the late 60s or early 70s, when a limo came cruising through the mud, and people were saying, "Yeah, Fahey's here!" A guy who looked like a Texas Ranger got out, so impressive--followed by "a little ol' snakehead in a t-shirt." The Texas Ranger type was Fahey's bodyguard, the folksinger was told. "Like a cult leader, bad vibes, and lame. He played well, of course." But also, he was known early on for a warped sense of humor, and wouldn't be surprised if this scene fit that description. Later, in his more typical econo-mode, a Creem writer saw him onstage with a 12-pack and a rented guitar (both required in the contract), watching a little portable TV while he played (again, no complaints about the playing). But he also spent a lot of time talking about his favorite shows (re-runs of Green Acres, Adam-12, etc) and the Creem writer liked some of those shows too, but wanted a little more music. Still, it was okay. Glenn Jones had some good recollections in liner notes for Red Cross, which I think was the last album Fahey finished before he died, it was pretty good. But the up close and personal memoir that really gets me is Andy Beta's (Andy used to post around here)
http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-01-24/music/looking-for-blind-joe-death/

thanks for the link, good article

yeah that's great
Other times, he would play his mixes: collages of Nazi rallies, Balinese gamelan, and recent Chicago blues licks with their verses and choruses mischievously lopped off, rearranging their 12- bar logic.
wonder if any of these still exist?

The Mark Fosson is great.

another good one is the john jeremiah sullivan essay, which features fahey a bit: http://essayist.tumblr.com/post/8424884997/unknown-bards-the-blues-becomes-transparent-about

just got a promo of a new (!) harry taussig album!
http://www.musicdirect.com/images/product/medium/94959.jpg