Why is John Fahey So Boring?

Agreed -- I've been doing some modular synthesizer interpretations of Fahey tunes and am working off of the Requia version for this one, which has a completely different structure and starts with the B section. He doesn't get into the long, pedal-pointy A-section that leads the Of Rivers and Religion version until over two minutes in. It's a great piece all the same, but the tension and release I described upthread is totally different.

they're both great and the contrast between them makes me appreciate both more. requia one has a more classical/flowing feel, the beginning is so light and gorgeous

he had such a light touch in the 60s. it's so amazing to watch his picking hand on those 'guitar guitar' appearances

yeah he quite suddenly got a lot heavier sometime around 1969

that can happen when all you do is sit around all day playing guitar

I wouldn't rule out the influence of alcohol either

And trauma/mental illness

it's a rich tapestry!

Happy birthday JF.

I was recently discussing what made him so great with some friends and one friend dissented that all of the talent was in his right hand. All of us were pretty dismissive at first but after thinking it over for a couple weeks, I realized that my friend had some merit in his critique. My arguement is that you need to fold in the chord-structure/choices/voicings of these tunings into his left hand "technique", which then elevates his talent.

What is the best example of his left hand technique. Any serious heads want to tackle this?

brenda's blues

but i don't think that's a valid 'dissent' in any case

obviously he didn't go in for fast runs or hammer-ons or loads of wild awkward chords but a lot of what makes for a good guitarist cannot be assigned to either hand, and ofc fahey was a composer and synthesizer and so on too. his picking patterns aren't wildly complicated but the key business of timing is mostly a right hand thing so I think you can make a case on that basis. brenda's blues is a good call, yellow princess is probably his fanciest left hand era, stuff like lion, but really his slide stuff is what I would point to, esp the live performances

Thank you both. Will see these numbskulls tomorrow night at the Fennesz show and will bring up your examples.

People should stop worshipping Fahey and give credit to the blues musicians he ripped off. There, I said it!

— Sarah Louise (@SarahLouisemusi) June 12, 2020

"ripped off, streamlined and codified the techniques, thus sucking the life out of the music"

more proof these kids never got it for those who couldn't tell from the music

what a confusing revival.

guess I just find it funny that ppl are acting like john fahey, who dedicated so much of his life to championing and popularising country blues, writing about it extensively (he won a grammy for mythologising other ppl!), tracking down skip james and bukka white, finding rare records, and just getting it in a way that ppl hadn't really before and even with his example many still can't, somehow operated at the expense of blues artists

Black-and-white thinking iirc.

ogmor i thought more or less the same thing. it's like, how can you engage with john fahey to an extent that can be meaningfully called "worship" and not be aware of the extent of his commitment to the tradition he was so clearly and self-consciously participating in ?

anyway, if you want to hear what lifeless white folk guitar sounds like, head straight to her bandcamp page !

I've overcome enough of my antipathy to new age to say that as sun-swallowing dazzling reverie goes I quite like sarah louise & I think she stands out, but that tweet is steaming ignorance. mb there are a significant number of oddly annoying john fahey fans in the US, but the resentment ppl feel towards him is clearly not for the nonsense (and indeed rockist) reasons put forward in that thread. by far the most perceptive and most ruthless takedowns of john fahey i've heard all came from john fahey, who was mb more self-aware and self-ironizing than any musician i can think of, but just as the subtleties of his playing have gone unappreciated as his music has been interpreted as "aimlessly jamming and playing around w/ blues cliches in open tunings", all the care he put into negotiating the position of his own music amongst his peers and influences has been reduced to "self-mythologising"

you could say this reductive process is a necessary part of how influence functions, the way in which culture travels on the "vibrational level", to borrow a concept from noted blues scholar john fahey

might be a few good reasons we could cancel john fahey, but ripping off the blues is pretty low on the list.

wait, that tweet wasn't satirical?

I think it all stems from her performing and being on the I'll fated panel at the 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival

jf really deserves a better thread title.

also ogmor otm

wait, yeah i think Austin is right, it's a bad joke ? there's no way she's that stupid.

the I'll fated panel at the 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival

?

and this revive continues its outright confusing tendencies.

john would have dug this revive quite a bit, i reckon.

Budo on my phone right now will recount when I'm on my laptop

ah yeah if she was front and centre to witness the old cranks desperate to get their piece of the Fahey legacy pie and she wasn't even especially fussed about him in the first place that makes sense

if you really see fahey as just another 'great fingerpicker'* then ofc the fact that he birthed a whole mini-industry (& one with sufficient gravity to suck in&bemuse ppl who have little in common with fahey beyond being fingerpickers) and elizabeth cotten didn't is a weird mystery that can either prompt closer examination, or the decision that it must just be privilege & structural racism doing their thing w/ a big-helping of 'self-mythologising'

*this is mb the reduction I find most salient in identifying what irks abt the trends in last decade or so of these post-rose guitarists: just talking about players and this jam-band-adjacent focus on craft and raw sound and immediacy (even VIBES) to the exclusion of all the other things that were in the mix. you cld def trace a lot of this to jack rose, and then it felt fresh to me, but with each iteration it just seems to get emptier and blander and less aware; the problem with the vibrational level of influence is you end up with mindless entropic heat death (rather than being consciously embraced as a method of transcendent self-abnegation a la alvin lucier).

xps to map we do have the other regular thread but it's S/D

Search and Destroy: John Fahey

this thread ofc was started by some random lurker/sock/troll, but it seems appropriate to use for discussing people's take on his legacy idk

I'm not on Twitter. Has there been much pushback on this tweet? I'm guessing no

I love the music of John Fahey and I love the music of Alvin Lucier. And rumpy riser's post is the first time I've ever seen heard them both mentioned in the same discussion. Artistic and idiosyncratic geniuses?

more like two over-hyped exemplars of privilege. ppl should stop worshipping lucier and give credit to the first early humans who felt a transcendental tranquility as they contemplated their mortality and the limits of their self as they listened to the echoes of their voice bouncing off the rocks of the great rift valley

there's some but also a lot of Wikipedia experts who want a pat on the head for knowing who Bukka White is


fwiw I very much like Sarah Louise's music

(xpost to Paul)

ums what's the festival story ?

sooo....this was the panel discussion:

12:30 PM Panel Discussion

Panel features Byron Coley, Glenn Jones, Peter Lang, Sarah Louise, Claudio Guerrieri (The John Fahey Handbook), Allison Hussey (Indy Week, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily), Steve Lowenthal (Dance of Death, VDSQ), Bill Meyer (Magnet, Wire, Dusted), Leah Toth (Footfalls Records, Tinymixtapes)

here's what I wrote at the time:

We are here tomorrow

Gene Rosenthal of Adelphi Records got kicked out of the panel discussion, Glenn Jones told him to shut the fuck up

― The Desus & Mero Chain (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, April 14, 2018 12:27 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

ooh tell us more -- internet drama is boring, gimme people getting kicked out of places & told to stfu irl

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Saturday, April 14, 2018 12:51 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

So Rosenthal had placards written that said "Contemporary Guitar" which he held up when any one said American Primitive, then "Bullshit" and "Opinion" when ppl said something he didn't agree with

Was warned several times from stage, Glenn said Gene you're a pain in the ass and I wish you weren't here. Peter Lang stepped in to explain that Gene was a friend but was asking him to stop, then he wouldn't and got escorted out and held up a sign that said MORONIC on his way out

― The Desus & Mero Chain (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, April 14, 2018 1:18 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

....it was pretty embarrassing, and you could tell Glenn felt terrible about it, Jesse Shephard from Elkhorn had to escort him out

was definitely a bad vibe because it was an old man once again trying to center the conversation around who "owns" Fahey's legacy, one of his big things is it should be "contemporary guitar" not "American Primitive" like who actually gives a fuck about that.

Coley did a good job as moderator trying to keep things on track but it was hard. Especially embarrassing because Louise and Allison Hussey had been trying to bring up the lack of diversity and other voices at the festival and in the genre in general to get talked over by some dickhead grinding axes from 50 years ago

so, I guess I could see her leaving that festival turned off by the whole Fahey thing? Or it would not surprise me if that was a factor

thing is that rosenthal would probably *agree* with sarah about fahey, haha

Don't know if this was brought up before, but I thought this episode of Lost Notes was pretty good:
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/lost-notes/living-with-john-fahey-aka-a-room-full-of-flowers

I’ll check that out.

Am I to understand that Rosenthal’s perspective here was some version of “I’ve spent my life rediscovering black blues artists and I find the whole American primitive thing to be pretentious”? Was he arguing that Fahey was just doing something modern and/or derivative?

I hadn’t realized that Adelphi’s first release was Dance of Death and that Fahey actually brought Skip James to Adelphi to record immediately after he and Barth found him:

https://adelphirecords.com/zero-to-180/ahead-of-the-curve.html

The Jessica Hopper podcast was insightful, depressing and not entirely surprising. That Fahey would be emotionally manipulative is completely consistent with what I know about mental illness and substance abuse. His treatment of the last major relationship profiled was particularly hard to listen to -- a successful businesswoman in Silicon Valley who moved to Salem to be with him--who created and curates the great johnfahey.com website--only to be cheated on repeatedly summarily and trashed by Fahey to anyone who would listen. Really rough -- thanks for sharing, ET.

I'll have to listen to that. Fahey was a grim scene esp at the end.

Melody Fahey is the admin of the John Fahey Facebook group and posts semi-frequently.

Am I to understand that Rosenthal’s perspective here was some version of “I’ve spent my life rediscovering black blues artists and I find the whole American primitive thing to be pretentious”? Was he arguing that Fahey was just doing something modern and/or derivative?

I hadn’t realized that Adelphi’s first release was Dance of Death and that Fahey actually brought Skip James to Adelphi to record immediately after he and Barth found him:

https://adelphirecords.com/zero-to-180/ahead-of-the-curve.html

― Naive Teen Idol, Monday, June 15, 2020 7:27 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it was more he sees himself as the true keeper of Fahey's legacy? And that he feels people like Glenn Jones have bastardized Fahey's true....uh...whatever...into "American Primitive" He has a big axe to grind about the name...was hard to tell.

I wonder if he thought it should have been on the panel?

I ended up talking to Coley out smoking and he said they originally wanted to have a mic for audience questions, but then when Coley saw that Gene was going to be there he said no fucking way, he'll grab the mic and just take over so they didn't have Q&A.

Um, overall kind of seems like a really weird old crank! so like a classic old school collector type guy

hadn't heard that podcast before, was a bit apprehensive about it but it was less gloomy that I feared and just seemed to cement my impression of his life. I thought I'd heard rumours of violence but mb it was speculation. thought it was great that melody fahey & melissa stephenson are friends

https://johnfahey.blogspot.com/2008/01/jon-monday-travels-with-john-fahey.html?fbclid=IwAR2CnF-vAWPzfXlx3Xye6saDWESc5ZfMZzHHbc0OIT0CUx1Y2AXnRsODv8g&m=1

That was good. Enjoyed the little details like him eating salad with no dressing and swallowing pills without water.

And of course Fahey snores. You could look at him and tell that!

That was a stressful read tbh and I'm not happy with the gropeyness. Also that guy should've taped his snoring so that jf could've used it on an album

John Fahey, the best and the worst.

https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Joe-Deaths-America-Discontent-ebook/dp/B08HH1FCN4/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=blind+joe+death%27s+america&qid=1607183411&sr=8-2

absolutely stoked to read this. tempted to say it was specifically written for me

For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. Mythologizing himself as Blind Joe Death, Fahey crudely parodied white middle-class fascination with African American blues, including his own. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time. These vocations, inspired originally by Cold War educators' injunction to creatively express rather than suppress feelings, took utterly idiosyncratic and prescient turns.

Fahey voraciously consumed ideas: in the classroom, the counterculture, the civil rights struggle, the new left; through his study of philosophy, folklore, African American blues; and through his experience with psychoanalysis and southern paternalism. From these, he produced a profoundly and unexpectedly refracted vision of America. To read Fahey is to vicariously experience devastating critical energies and self-soothing uncertainty, passions emerging from a singular location—the place where lone, white rebel sentiment must regard the rebellion of others. Henderson shows the nuance, contradictions, and sometimes brilliance of Fahey's words that, though they were never sung to a tune, accompanied his music.