Thanks, Mr. Wheeler, for the tribute.
What I especially like about it is that you're grappling with one of the most difficult things to articulate about Fahey's music (he would insist we MUST not confuse the music with the man, something which I, like many others, have been guilty of): why does this music, which is comprised of some things I do understand, evoke in me a response I can't quite name; why does it make me feel the way I do, and so keenly?Fahey's music, much of it which he came to reject as flawed or dishonest, still seems to me some of the purest ever made and yet, for all the hundreds of times I’ve played his albums, I still don’t understand why they make me feel the way I do, why they speak to me so profoundly. Your tribute captures some of that feeling.
I spent three days with John last summer, ostensibly to conduct interviews with him for a new Revenant project. I wasn't especially surprised that Fahey was critical of *The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party*, the first Fahey album I owned and one of my favorites (at the time about to be reissued on CD by Fantasy / Takoma). After all, he'd been routinely knocking his early works in the press. But I was surprised that he was dismissive of such relatively recent fare as *City of Refuge* ("It went too far,") and *Atlanta Struts* ("I shouldn't have let that come out,").
Even though his comments felt like a vindication of my own feelings for those records, Fahey had been as unperturbed by my dislike of those albums as he was unimpressed by my complete love for the early ones. (The only ones of John's albums I have little feeling for one way or another are the Xmas albums and *Yes Jesus Loves Me*, and the ones he did for Varrick when he was suffering most acutely the effects of Epstein-Barr -- though there are moments on all of these albums.)
In response to my "But I love that album John; it changed my life!," I can hear his oft-repeated response: "Fine, but that has nothing to do with me."
Fahey was, for all his failings and his more than occasionally infuriating behavior, absolutely ethical when it came to music, and especially his own. There was no room for a shred of nostalgia or rationalization in his assessment of his own accomplishments. He seemed always in a state of dispassionately reevaluating early works based on where he was at currently. While it amused me to hear him vilifying records that still mesmerize me -- and I argued frequently with him over the merits of his own work -- I understood that, for him, the most interesting record was the one he was working on NOW. (He loved *Hitomi* and was at work on second and third volumes in a series of *Hitomi*s when I was out there.)
And though I had no use for *City of Refuge*, I was glad to see John so excited and involved with making music again. He was totally into it at the time of its release; he considered it THE VERY BEST THING he'd ever done!
And that's the way it should be, I think, a complete engagement in the present.
To those folks who are asking for recommendations, I say be open to it all. The *Return of the Repressed* collection is OK as a primer (a catalogue as huge as John's seems to cry out for some sort of overview or introduction), but I disagree with its premise. John's albums ought to, I think, each be taken on their own terms and it’s expecting too much for an easily-digestible little package to encompass 40+ years of a man’s music.
The anthology also omits tracks altogether from some periods and, since it was released before that huge burst of creative energy in the last decade or so of John's life, an important period is not represented at all.
So if you make *ROTR* your first Fahey purchase, by all means don't let it be your last.
Glenn Jones
― Glenn Jones, Sunday, February 25, 2001 7:00 PM (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink
beautiful stuff from a legend in his own right. used to be a yahoo answers group with years worth of these kind of gems from the old guard, all gone now
― global tetrahedron, Sunday, 6 June 2021 00:10 (two years ago) link