Search and Destroy: John Fahey

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!

btw, backing up my files tonight. have been ignoring my google calendar reminders for about a month. :-o

The soundtrack to the game Diablo is pretty good (not really) and sounds kind of like Fahey. What I've heard of his stuff is dull, especially the record with Cul De Sac.

― adam, Saturday, July 20, 2002 12:00 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have no idea what john fahey i had heard 8 1/2 years ago (besides the boring cul de sac one) that would have led me to write this. diablo sndtrk is totally faheyed out tho.

can't wait for the next deepening in yr fahey/diablo thought in 2019

what is the diablo sdtk?

a little more info
DTD-21 : Late September / Early October 2011
Edited by Glenn Jones
88 page book with 5 CDs
115 tracks, most available on CD for the first time
A co-production between Dust-to-Digital and Revenant
http://www.dust-digital.com/fahey

Apologies if this is mentioned elsewhere, but don't recall seeing it here, & they've got a lot of money still to raise in the next few days:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/963556219/in-search-of-blind-joe-death-the-saga-of-john-fahe

(I'm nothing to do with the movie, just interested in seeing it get made)

Hmmmm, just over 9 grand needed with 28 hours to go.

I have probably heard it a hundred times but "Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues" is probably my favorite thing by Fahey ever -- the perfect balance of blues, dissonance and rhythmic hypnosis.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m1kvbphaBmw/TngYVLEY71I/AAAAAAAABiM/7gJlrIEzK2w/s1600/tumblr_lqr1p665z41qg4e4uo5_1280.jpg

As I've always found Fahey to be particularly enjoyable when listened to on a record-by-record basis (as opposed to comps), I've now spent the last month buying every record of his used on Amazon that I didn't own already.
I think the most exciting thing about it is listening to all the different renditions of songs at different points. Like, "Wine and Roses" on Dance of Death is revisited, raga-style as "The Approaching of the Disco Void" (from Live at Tasmania) and again, post rocked out as "The New Red Pony" (from The Epiphany of Glen Jones.

Or "When the Springtime Comes Again," which returns as part of the epic "Mark: IV" on America.
And those are just his own pieces. Part of what's so interesting is that you really hear Fahey the Musicologist come out in Fahey the Composer -- see www.faheyfiles.com for a complete listing, but reading thru his career and seeing the connections and how all the strands, riffs, melodies and patterns become mutated and regurgitated is pretty remarkable. Given how zonked out Fahey was for so much of the 70s and 80s, I actually wonder how much of it was subconscious.

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