Why is John Fahey So Boring?

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.

Ooh. Look forward to This!

I always LOL at the claim in the opening post of this thread, that Fahey is a cl9ne of Elizabeth Cotten.

*clone

the lowenthal book was a passable bio but this is the kind of writing about fahey i wanna see

Will get the book, thanks for news! As for reading about him in his den (the world etc), incl. personal recollections, I think I got enough from Glenn Jones's comments,especially those incl. w Red Cross, and especially especially from ilx alum Andy Beta---I know I've linked this on at least one Fahey thread, but just in case yall haven't seen it and even so: https://www.villagevoice.com/2006/01/24/looking-for-blind-joe-death/ Fahey's own mix tapes, mentioned in here, have since surfaced, I think.

book sounds great

Lowenthal's book was a valuable service, he got the basics of his life down and recorded, did the work and research. but he didn't have a lot of insight.

i just looked him up and yes he is boring but does not look bad in 1969 but let himself go after and since but he plays good!

hot take

new-to-me show, from the sterling FFV era. great setlist and performance

Thus Krishna on the Battlefield / When the Fire and the Rose Are One / Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain / On the Sunny Side of the Ocean / Spanish Two-Step

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KntfF4uBeE

nice!

thanks, probably my favorite era

new to me, never heard of this lady before and wasn't aware he was doing collaborations like this into the 70s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjNchlnxOOI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruc99Z8Vy8I

Complete broadcast

nice

a number of comments are like 'why is this the fahey thread that keeps getting bumped' and tbf i think it's perfect

this actually sounds pretty sweet: https://josemedeles.bandcamp.com/album/railroad-cadences-melancholic-anthems-a-drummers-tribute-to-john-fahey

Hadn't seen this book by Fahey before:
he Father of the Delta Blues, Charley Patton (1891–1934) was born and raised around Mississippi's cotton plantations. During the 1920s, he was the first of the region's great stars, performing for packed houses throughout the South and making popular recordings in New York City. His music — ranging from blues and ballads to ragtime and gospel — is distinctive for his gravelly, high-energy singing and the propulsive beat of his guitar. Patton had a lively stage presence, originating many of the guitar-playing antics now associated with Jimi Hendrix and other latter-day musicians. His influence, among both his contemporaries and subsequent blues artists, is incalculable.
Noted guitarist John Fahey presents a textual and musicological examination of Patton's music. This new edition of the original 1970 publication is enhanced by Fahey's notes from the Grammy-winning, out-of-print box set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton. Available for the first time outside the set, Fahey's reconsideration of Patton's music offers fresh perspectives and key corrections of the historical record.
https://smile.amazon.com/Charley-Patton-Expanded-John-Fahey-ebook/dp/B08FMBCXKH/ref=pd_sim_2/133-9215491-0402603?pd_rd_w=iBdPp&pf_rd_p=6caf1c3a-a843-4189-8efc-81b67e85dc96&pf_rd_r=D44BVE6CT3E08Y8GWEFW&pd_rd_r=beb58f08-f249-45cc-af8d-8c0f03f5e676&pd_rd_wg=hkdhQ&pd_rd_i=B08FMBCXKH&psc=1

Also on Amazon:
American Primitive Guitar Paperback – March 22, 2002
In this series for the intermediate guitarist, John Fahey teaches a wide variety of instrumental solos. Critics have called John's style American Primitive Guitar. The book includes tablature and notation with three compact discs featuring note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase instruction. LESSON ONE: A general discussion of pattern picking and the use of the alternate bass. In Christ There Is No East Or West, Take A Look At That Baby and Some Summer Day. LESSON TWO: One of John's most requested multi-sectioned composition is Indian Pacific Railroad Blues, also known as Beverley. This tune demonstrates how John composes in the fingerpicking idiom. Also taught is another very requested and imitated instrumental, John's The Last Steam Engine Train. LESSON THREE: When The Springtime Comes Again and The Approaching Of The Disco Void. A discussion of improvisational ideas in relationship to fingerstyle compositions concludes this lesson.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0786662085/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3