Search and Destroy: John Fahey

I enjoyed the documentary. But I don't know enough about his life to take issue with what they may have left out.

And honestly they didn't spend very much time with the Decemberists guy. I really didn't find his presence that annoying, and I'm not going to otherwise complain about him just cause I also don't like the Decemberists.

he is probably a cool guy.
the zabriskie point tapes are interesting! very meandering, but in a good way for the most part. all solo, wonder if there are any tapes floating around w/ various collaborators (fahey mentions bringing in other musicians).

i didn't mind the decemberist guy or even townsend but it was a little weird to reach out to them and not, say, Peter Lang or Leo Kottke who were close associates to Fahey and might have a had a little more to add other than "I like John Fahey a lot"

yeah opening on townsend was really weird, i was struggling to draw a line between their respective playing

True! Was hoping Glenn Jones would show up too.

Either way, if you can get Townsend to say meaningful things in your documentary, it's probably worth including, if for no other reason but to get Fahey material more attention through association.

To that point, maybe they had him appear immediately to hook any casual viewers mostly unfamiliar with Fahey.

I wonder if there is pressure for documentary makers to pepper in star-power for that reason, like from a marketing stand point you need some percentage of star names to call out in promotional materials.

yeah actually townsend is townsend so i'm cool w.him overall & he was a big fan I know Fahey kinda patted him on the head when Pete wrote him and had him listen to Tommy haha

i mean i get it definitely, both are in there for interest, i just thought it was kind of lazy not to have leo or peter in, as i think both are pretty accessible and i dunno, it's like they were so close to him

Hey, maybe they tried who knows.

kinda want a 9-part ken burns doc on the american primitive scene through the ages. what are the odds!?

maybe dave grohl could narrate

I think the topic would make a better 1 of a 9 part series about traditional blues

or rhythm and blues, pace pete townsend

At a friend's urging, I've finally checked out some Faheytronica: part 1 of my first-listening notes:

after googling started with Requia, "Requiem For Molly," in four parts.
Part 1 turns out to be very handsome, perhaps courtly but not genteel solo guitar,
the other three parts include "sonic collages." as online sources put it ( with which he is assisted by music writer Barry Hansen, AKA Dr. Demento, maestro of the syndicated novelty radio show). "Collage" is especially appropriate because the news reel etc. bits sound like animated newspaper clippings, maybe wiggling envelopes sometimes, and mainly I like the way their contours and the pacing of placement---also the cadences and intonation of spoken word and other sounds, Hitler and bombers and so on, go with the guitar sound. Fahey said later he didn't like the results, though did consider this experiment a valuable "learning experience." It's not that different from other "underground" tracks you find on LPs of that era, '67 or so, in terms of choosing what we'd call samples, but I haven't heard any other American artist from that neck of the woods--the rock folk weirdo neck---who made it all work as this kind of ambient experience, social commentary and hipster humor aside, although I guess those might be in there too (first listening)

Probably better though--not as dependent on my own quirks/glosses of hearing----is "The Singing Bridge of Memphis Tennessee," from The Yellow Princess: much more sophisticated, in terms of no newsreel, newspaper clippings glued on, just what does indeed sound like a singing bridge---of steel guitar strings, various other metals used in constructing a bridge over a body of water, maybe some water effects pulled in, vibrations and whistles and other nice things (incl vocal?), all layered and merged, just attached and distinct enough. It's based in part on "Quill Blues" by Big Boy Cleveland, and may incl. some of that original recording (think I saw that statement or speculation somewhere)

The Epiphany of Glenn Jones is all over the place,
Conceptually I totally dig the opener, "Tuff, " right away, although the glacial zen groove trek had me nodding a bit, so it turns out even good drones can do that, h'mm.
"Gamelan Collage" different enough to keep me awake, but lost me sometimes,
"Maggie Campbell Blues" quite splendid courtship again,
"New Red Pony" is heavy smokey red rock, awright,
"Out Puppet Selves" is UFO Bebe Barron dub plate equiv of op art, which I like: if you're gonna go this way, bear down on the basic texture FX, awright again.
"Gamelan Guitar" like a real good dream I forget right after it's over (but I can go back again to this dream, yay).
This version of "Come On In My Kitchen" is discreetly tweaked, also tweeked, just enough to enhance it in ways prob unnec but v enjoyable.
"Magic Mountain" is back to the science fiction soundtrack, but much more varied than "Out Puppet Selves," and a little too soft-focus for me, so far.
The spoken word-based closers go on very long, though I like that, even though Fahey keeps ending up with nothing, even when the pretty lady persuades him to board the bus to scenic Exstinkyville, he eventually (very eventuallly) remembers "the basic dialectic of life," or some kind of dialectin and sings a hearty "No-o-o," then an equally hearty "Ye-e--e-s," continuing while the band makes noise around him.
Next will be City of Refuge, Womblive, The Mill Pond EP, located here and there, mostly posted track by track on YouTube. The albums I'm talking about above are all on Spotify, at least the version we get over here. (Meaning America; guy I was responding to is in Europe.)

Pt. 2, dammit! (Maybe some of this will sound better as I listen more; despite what I said toward the end, I did keep all of City and Womblife)(Snapped up The Mill Pond EP from WFMU)

Starting again with City of Refuge, which chronologically I should have listened to before Epiphany, which Glenn J. meant as a corrective to the former, to save his hero and help him find a way to say the new thing he was trying to say. Later, he also writes, he decided both albums what Fahey meant them to be: photographs of him at the time they were made. However, after hearing City, I gotta say, "Thanks GJ and Cul De Sac (and God I wish you could have pulled him back from Womblife, although The Mill Pond works fine")!---but I'm getting ahead of myself).
CoR: "Fanfare" is well-named: flourishes, with buzzy picking and strumming and chopping.
The second track seems more like tuning up and/or down, who cares, ditto for the title.
"City of Refuge I"' is 20-odd minutes long, first half feat. ominous peg-twisting and whatnot. The second turns up a skeletal pattern, then a sunny stroll-along, and then somewhat merges the two motifs, in a natural way: you go for a stroll, you and your shadow (not the song of that title, just the thing that happens). Wanders off somewhere, but with a good edit, hey.
"Chelsey Silver, Please Call Home" starts promisingly, the silvery Classic John, but gets a little too reliant on basic devices and reminds me that one reason he was trying new directions was diabetic nerve damage in fingers (ouch, ouch ouch just thinking about it)
Nevertheless, "City of Refuge III," with evocation of silver bells and chimes calling insistently over an earthly shuffle, is very fine, and the only one of these YouTubes I bothered to download.
Womblife has some kinda nice drone lullabys and doppler-shift x sealife imitations at times, but most of it's rubbish; I'd call it heavy new age, but not that heavy. "Juana" reverts to the more popular JF: crisp Spanishy morning sounds, cogent back and forth of a and b melodies, even underselling lyricism or at least fluidity, but another one that could use an edit: 12 minutes, jeez
The Mill Pond EP! Wasn't expecting much, but true avant garage, as Crocus Behemoth would put it, with vocal and other sweaty bristley Radio Shack Popular Mechanics bits and kits from Dad's abandoned workshop, returning via cyberTibet understages, more like whole underlives--- attention-grabbing/holding, viable moments and passages flashing by. Another scribble mentions " a good motif for soundtrack of Japanese folk-horror art film, or Roger Corman's remake, " and "Garbage" suggests more of the 50s UFO-huffing found on The Epiphany's "Out Puppet Selves," but also with traces of Hendrix emulating that kind of soundtrack,and suspense as the saucer reverb inches toward liftoff/spinoff. Some tracks may use elements of each other, and for the climax, Fahey seems to be chanting while eating his way through his guitar----which reminds me of Andy Beta's testimony, one of the very best of its kind and flavor:
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/looking-for-blind-joe-death-6400465

(Later I remembered to tell him about delta-slider.)

great posts & 'Faheytronica' is a fine coinage

The Singing Bridge of Memphis Tennessee definitely has a straight sample from Quill Blues - https://youtu.be/kTdIMR9bGpM - & I think it's my favourite of these efforts, alongside A Raga Called Pat, though the guitar is still obviously the star of the latter

The Epiphany of Glenn Jones is probably the strangest Fahey album, it really is all over the place & I don't love most of it but Fahey's voice/monologue/dialectic on the last two tracks is just incredible to me, love the live recordings when his introductions become circuitous and oblique for the same reason & the trio recording where he reads from the liner notes to the first album, his voice has got that same heft

Great stuff, dow. Very insightful. "Faheytronica" (great description, by the way) has always kind of been a challenge to me. Hard to really grasp onto the stuff and, truthfully, it often just strikes me as an interruption — get back to the actual music, John! I've really struggled with Requia —an album I really want to love— for this reason. I don't even care for it when William Tyler does his homages to the style. The only "recent" (read: post-70's) Fahey I've ventured into is Red Cross, so I don't have much of an idea of what he was up to in later years.

starting to think "God, Time, and Causality" is his best work- some truly ripping takes of older classic material fused with newer medleys and epics

wrote and deleted a load of gushing bc I've written enough rubbish about fahey on ilx but yes, it's definitely up there

awww i love your gushing, some of my favorite Posts on here

did you ever read this, ogmor? some of the best writing on him i've seen.

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

https://blogthehum.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/the-unaccompanied-guitar-soli-raga-and-beyond-part-one-john-fahey/

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