More than 30 years of mind-blowing guitar playing and composing have earned John Fahey a hip handful of devoted fans and a squalid room in a welfare motel. Byron Coley explores the uncommon life of one of America's neglected musical treasures.
Salem, Oregon, is not a large city, but it has its amusements and we are in search of on e.
"Turn in here," says John Fahey, waving his arm in the direction of a gas station mini-mart "Their sausages are great." Fahey orders the last two sausages-on-a-stick available from the establishment’s hot table, as well as a quart of sweet iced tea, a package of three pink-frosted goodies whose origins are not clearly terrestrial, and a small warm bucket of deepfried mushrooms. "And we can write this all off?" he asks. I assure him that we can, and we return to my small rented car. We squeeze our fat asses into the sedan, and Fahey proceeds to direct me toward our next destination: a local Salvation Army thrift store at which he regularly buys classical records to resell to a dealer in Portland. The scent of the mushrooms — not so much earthy as somehow fishy —fills the vehicle, eradicating its pernicious new-car smell once and for all. I mention that the counter help at the mini-mart had a "born again" look in their eyes, and Fahey launches into a discourse about the inability of most evangelical Christians to grasp the transitional nature of Paulist theology, gobbling oily mushrooms all the while. During a moment of quiet mastication, I say that a friend of mine studied guitar with the Reverend Gary Davis when Davis was teaching in New York in the 1960s. "Oh, Rabbi Davis," Rabbi Davis," Fahey says with a smirk. “He sure made some insanely good guitar-playing records in the ’30s. By the time he was rediscovered he really couldn’t play that well anymore. He was a pedophile. Did you ever go to his shows?
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Somebody always gave gave him a girl to lead him around. He was always doing a lot of groping, with his wife right there. I there. I always thought the guy was an old jerk. The Salvation Army is right over there." there." Such is a typical car ride with John Fahey, a guy who has made his own slew of insanely good guitar playing records and seems ripe for a “redis covery" of the sort that was visited upon those few pre-war blues artists who had the good fortune to survive into the ’60s. Certainly, the 55-year-old Fahey is as monumental and singular a musical talent as any this country has produced. His guitar playing and compositional skills are both stagger ing and unique. Many of the finest moments of my life (either engaged in sexual congress or navigating the waters of higher consciousness) have been heightened by the presence of his music as life soundtrack. At its best, his work offers all the beautiful intricacy of a DNA double helix cast in pure gold and bathed in the blue glow of pre-dawn light. And although Fahey has languished far apart from the cultural mainstream for most of his life, there have been periods where his performances and recordings were very popu lar with a certain set of hipsters. Thurston Moore is one musician who has admitted as much. “Fahey’s weirder tunings,” he says, “were a real secret influence on early Sonic Youth." That his popularity is currently nowhere near its zenith was obvious from the moment I laid eyes upon the Salem welfare motel in which Fahey was living when we met. In a single room strewn with a curious assortment of food containers, classical LPs, esoteric nonfiction books, and an inchesthick layer of general detritus, Fahey was sprawled, vast, white, and shirt less, across a queen-size bed. The room was dark. Fahey was listening to a record of General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech, and his grizzled countenance seemed to be relaxed by the familiar blabber of MacArthur's “old soldiers never die” kiss-off. The discomfort of Fahey's situation (since our meeting, he has relocated to a local Salvation Army) says as much about the paucity of the public's imagi nation as it does about any of his personal failings. In the 35 years since his first recordings were released, Fahey has created a universe of complexity, emotion, and exquisite otherness for otherness for acoustic steel-string guitar. His musical inventions match those of John Coltrane and Harry Partch for sheer transcen dental American power. As Fahey’s acolyte Leo Kottke once said in an inter view, “John is one of the heroes of whatever this country has for a culture." Still, as I sit in Fahey’s cluttered quarters, I'm trying to figure out if there's a guitar around somewhere or whether he has had to hock it again. “I’m so poor I keep pawning my guitar," Fahey says. "A friend got it out of pawn for me, but I'll have to put it back in next week to pay the rent. Life has been pret ty grim. I’m not used to being poor. I’ve never been poor in my life. Although certain aspects of it are interesting interesting and good for one’s humility, of which I
structed (and ultimately aborted) tour. His Boston show occurred in the revolving bar atop the local Guest Quarters Suites Hotel. This place does sometimes present jazz, but Fahey did not appear to be part of their regular ly scheduled fare and the tables were full of blabbing junior exec types inter ested in nothing other than a slowly spun drink. These nimrods made such a racket that the dozen or so faithful in attendance had to strain to hear even the ghosts of Fahey's laconically plucked notes. It was one of those events that make even the most gentle aesthetes wish for a gun. After the show, Fahey said it was fairly typical of the ways things were going: unadvertised gigs played to uninterested suit-and-tie jerk-offs pounding down cocktails named after cartoon animals. It’s no wonder he’s a little stage shy. Fahey is now past the five-year bout of Epstein-Barr virus that made his life hell in the mid-to-late '80s. “I could feel it when it entered me, and I could feel it when it left,” he says. ‘That’s when I was at my apex of drinking. I had to drink a lot of beer for the energy. I didn’t play nearly as much. I talked most of the time. It was horrible." Still, he is plagued with something called restless leg disorder, which causes long periods of involuntary muscle con tractions, as well as the persistent chronic insomnia that made him one of the first people to receive a prescription for quaaludes when they were introduced in the '60s. “A lot of people are eulogizing the ’60s," Fahey says. “Praising the '60s— for me it was a time of misery. In the '70s, I had a lot of fun. In the '50s, too. But in the ’60s everything went crazy." Fahey had just gotten his prescription for quaaludes when the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni flew him over to Rome in 1969 to record music for the soundtrack oiZabriskie Point. Antonioni's conceptual sequel to Blow-Up is Blow-Up is an Italian leftist’s goofball cine matic view of late-'60s American counterculture. To assemble the sound track, Antonioni reportedly asked various American hippies what music they liked. Their answers included Pink Floyd, Kaleidoscope, the Grateful Dead, and John Fahey. Zabriskie Point Point features one particularly long sequence with nude couples making love in the desert, and this is the one Antonioni wanted Fahey to score. When Fahey arrived in Rome, Antonioni showed him the segment in a screening room. “Antonioni says, *What I want you to do is to compose some music that will go along with the porno scene.’ I kept saying, ‘Yes, sir.’ Then he starts this, ‘Now, John. This is young love. Young love.' love.' I mean, that’s young love? All these bodies? bodies ? ‘Young love. But John, it’s in the desert, where’s there’s death. But it ’s young love.’ He kept going, *young love/death' faster and faster. I was sure I was talking to a madman. “So I experimented. I had instrumentalists come in and told them just to play whatever they felt like. They had to pretend to understand what I was talking about especially if Antonioni came in the room. I came up with some sections of music that sounded more like death than young love. I played it
" A lot lo t of people are are eulogizing the '60s," '60s," Fahey Fahey says. " For me it was a time of misery. mis ery. In In the th e '70s, '70s, I had had a lot of fun fun.. In the '50s, '50s, too. But in i n the th e '60s '60s everyth everything ing went craz cr azy." y." London calling: Fahey and first wife Jan Lebow during his 1969 British tour.
don’t have any—it may help me be more humble—but so far I just get mad. I have no experience with this. I’ve always had plenty of money.” It is true that Fahey has been flush in the past The record label he found ed in 1959,Takoma, had several hugely successful albums including his own The New Possibility (an Possibility (an album of beautifully arranged Christmas songs that sold over 100,000 copies) and Kottke’s 6 and 12 String Guitar. But Guitar. But lack of interest in the details of running a label resulted in the sale of Takoma. “I couldn’t stand being in an office. ‘That’s an office decision,’ I’d always just tell them. ‘You do what you want’ ” From the end of the ’60s through the mid dle of the ’80s, Fahey also maintained an extensive and well-paid touring schedule, playing concert halls and colleges from here to Tasmania (where he recorded a live LP in ’80). He has, however, been dogged by persistent medical problems since his youth. Now that he is 55, some of those troubles have intensified, and wideranging tours are almost too grueling to consider. “What wears me out is the anticipation, the traveling, and the nervousness," he says. “You’ve got excess adrenaline that’s making you nervous. You’ve got to burn it up, so the first pieces you play have to be hard and fast. That’s the only way to do it. Stage fright is a purely physical thing. Although I suppose some people are more afraid of people than others. And I’m pretty scared of people." The last time Fahey played the East Coast was as part of a poorly con64 SPIN
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for Michelangelo, and he thought it was great. So he took me out to dinner at this really fancy restaurant and started telling me how horrible the United States was. We were drinking a lot of wine and I don’t remember which one of us started cussing. It started real fast and ended in a fistfight. What a jerk. I did like 20 to 25 minutes, but they only used about two min utes. Somebody’s driving along in the car, and the announcer says, ‘And now some John Fahey.' And that’s it—young love and death.” Fahey brims with stories of this ilk, intercut with profoundly observed religious and philo sophical expositions, expositions, as well as weighty treatis es on the aesthetic milieu of pre-WWII American music. More than almost anyone whose thoughts are collected in the musical press, Fahey is a knotty individual with extraordinary intellectual, mystical, and creative depths. He has lived a life that buggers easy description. For instance, there was the time he was playing at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Festival and decided to tweak the crowd. “I was trying to convince the audience, who was mostly Negroes, that these jerks like Phil Ochs and the impartial moderator Pete Seeger were writing music about Negroes to make money and not to help Negroes. I kept saying, ’I think that Negroes have enough intelligence to write their own songs. I’m really convinced of it.’ ‘Boo!’ I was set up, I just didn’t know it. I was perceived by the left as being dangerous. Because I was playing at the Jabberwock every weekend and packing it. And I was play ing an Al Capp role, calling them communists and using the word ‘nigger’ and things, just to
walked over, and asked me if I knew who it was on the stereo. Since he’d just finished lecturing me on the lyrical topics Robert Johnson had heisted from Lonnie Johnson (in order to make the point that Robert Johnson’s supposed pact with the devil was a latter-day fiction created by white fanboys), I felt a bit sheepish admitting that I did, indeed, know who it was. Fahey pointed his finger at the speakers, through which the song’s final croak was blasting, and said, “Man, that guy can write some great lyrics." My jaw slackened in dumb agreement. Raised Raised in Takoma Park, Park, Maryland, Fahey Fahey bought his first guitar at the age of
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13 with money earned on a paper route that included Goldie Hawn’s house. He’d been a devotee of classical music when he noticed some guys hanging out in a local park playing guitars and picking up girls. It looked like a good gig. Fahey’s early influences were country and bluegrass players. Indeed, when he first hooked up with blues collectors to go looking though the rural south for rare 78s, Fahey was uninterested in any black music. It was only after an epiphanic hearing of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Praise God I’m Satisfied” that he became a blues hound. “I had just found the Blind Willie record, and I’d traded it to Dick Spottswood for some hillbilly stuff. Then he played it, and I got physically sick. I broke down and started crying for about 15 minutes. I can’t explain it, that's just what happened.’’ happened.’’ In 1956, Fahey enrolled at the University of Maryland, but became embroiled in an argument with his ROTC captain. He transferred to American University in D.C. and continued to live at home During the day, Fahey was the star of the philosophy department at AU. In the evenings, he worked as night manager at Martin’s Esso Station, once the third-biggest gas station on the East Coast. “We pumped 100,000 gallons a month,” Fahey says. He thrived on the night shift. "Martin’s was the only thing open in the county. I always invited the cops to stay as long as they wanted. ‘You want some free batteries for your flashlight? Take them.’ I got to know all the cops and they let me speed. I never got caught. It was just, ‘Hi, Fahey.’ I became a very important person for the only time in my life. I still dream about it. I have very nice dreams of going back and working all night at this gas station.” With not much else to do except grease cars and cops, Fahey would spend long hours playing and composing, attempting to fuse some of the
American beauties: The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Deaf/>(1966); /?e<7u/a(1967); The Voice of the Turf/e(1968).
rememberr when you'd you 'd go "\ remembe
info a folk store, stor e, there'd always always be a big sign si gn up, up , 'SHOULD PETE SEEGER GO TO JAIL?' I'd always say, 'Absolutely. 'Absolu tely. Beca Because use he sings such lousy l ousy music.'" mu sic.'" see if they really had any backbone. I remember when you’d go into a folk store, there’d always be a big sign up, ‘s h o ul u l d p et et e s e e g e r g o t o j ail ?’ I’d always say, ‘Absolutely. Because he sings such lousy music.’ ” Or there was his relationship with the Integral Yoga Institute in the early ’70s. “Probably the primary reason I got involved with them was that I fell in love with Swami Satchidananda’s secretary, Shanti Norris. So, I was doing benefits for them, hoping to score points with her, and along the way I learned a lot of hatha yoga. I could go over there and get food any time I liked. And I learned the secret passwords, so I could get through the young devotees who all wanted to convert me.” The brief interest Fahey evinced in Mormonism after moving to Salem had a similar flavor. “I decided I needed a new wife. I thought I’d try the Mormons. So I called them up and said I was interested. They came right over. They’re real sociable. The Mormon missionary I first met was this beautiful woman, and what was amazing was that she said she’d read the Book of Mormon 40 times. I couldn’t believe it. She had a really high IQ. How could she read this crap and believe it? That’s just incomprehensible to me.” Fahey’s own philosophical stance has been fire-tempered over many years. Still, his mind seems to be incredibly open. The third day we spent together, we decided to drive down to Eugene to survey the used record stores. Fahey was looking mostly for old Takomas, which he can sell to European collectors, or underpriced classical LPs. At the last store we hit, the guy at the counter was a dedicated new waver, and a few minutes after our arrival, he slapped on Big Black’s Atomizer at at a pulverizing volume. I was scrunching up my eyes, the thing was so loud, and I felt kinda bad for Fahey, hunkered down among the 99$ Vaughan Williams albums while Roland’s beats scrubbed the air and Steve Albini railed: “Nothin’ much to do in this town / Been here my whole life.” As ‘‘Kerosene’’ was ending Fahey got up, 66 SPIN
dissonant things he liked about modern classical composers, like Bartdk, with blues' syncopated rhythms. One night a friend who stopped by said that she thought he ought to make a record. So he did. An LP’s worth of material was recorded and issued under both his own name and a wiseass blues sobriquet.- Blind Joe Death. Fahey called his label Takoma and tried to sell the records at work. Nobody bought them. He also stuck a few of them in the bins of a local Goodwill. “It was my secret way of breaking records,” he says. “That first record took years to sell.” It was also among the first albums recorded and produced by an independent artist, without the succor of a record company. As Barry “Dr. Demento” Hansen wrote in ’72, “John Fahey is the original underground musician. Dylan was still at Hibbing High School when John Fahey made his first record.” After getting his BA, Fahey and many of his crew headed for UC Berkeley. He packed the remaining copies of his LP into the trunk of his Chevy and enrolled in the school’s Philosophy Ph.D program. He soon found he didn't appreciate the department's empirical bias, nor did he care for Berkeley’s social scene. The East Coast transplants were avid record collectors, well versed in the real shit, Berkeley was full of earnest pasty young people plunk ing Martin copies and singing ‘This Land Is Your Land.” Fahey and his friend Ed Denson spent many hours heckling these clueless would-be hepsters. ‘Their big thing, which I also ridiculed," Fahey recalls, “was to get everybody together to sing the same songs, ‘so we’d learn this feeling of unity.’ Whereas my agenda was to get everybody apart and to listen to me\ Fuck unity.” It was during this time that Fahey and Denson "rediscovered" the blues singer Booker White, and Fahey recorded his second album, Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes. This album included pieces recorded back in Maryland and also introduced Fahey’s practice of writing extensive, hilarious, (continued on page 107)
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phy to do that. I don’t know what ‘will’ is. I recognize trying, but trying, but not will. And will. And with ’trying-power’ I could never do anything. But all I had to do in AA was dream things up and say prayers every once in a while. That worked." That worked." Recently, Fahey has turned his attention toward writing, composing some new pieces for guitar, including a long kaleidoscopic opus on the order of “Fare Forward Voyagers." He has spent more time, however, working in prose. At the behest of a local college professor, he began to collect his memories of meetings with famous musicians, and the stack of this and other music-related writing is approaching book-length thickness. Plus, there’s his continu ing work on Admiral Kelvinator: Clockworks Factory, Factory, an autobio graphically based phantasm dealing with the early years of Fahey’s life, and the general heft of American life during the years leading out of World War II. “Sometimes I almost feel I like writing better than playing," he says. “Maybe you shouldn’t print that."
and sarcastic liner notes, which poked fun at the archly serious notes on most blues collections. Fed up with Berkeley’s touchy-feely folk habituds, Fahey relocated to Venice,California, in 1965, enrolling in the master’s program in the folklore department at UCLA. Fahey made many important contacts in L.A. He met fellow blues scholars, young musicians, and collectors, introduced Ry Cooder to the pleasures of slide guitar, and generally lived the life of the debauched scholar-artist, split ting his time between working on his thesis about Charlie Patton and play ing long impressionistic guitar suites in folk clubs —a whiskey bottle his omnipresent companion. Zap Comix publisher and longtime Berkeley resi dent Don Donahue says, “Fahey was the first guy that any of us had seen drinking onstage. It just wasn’t done in those days. But he made drinking look very hip and sexy." As the decade ended, Fahey got What the future holds for Fahey is married and decided he was inter ested in running the Takoma label unclear, but there are hints of bright possibility. He’s hunting for publish himself. He found, however, that he ers for his written work. Shanachie had no real faculty for it. His A&R ear was keenly tuned enough to hear the Records (which has already reissued genius that lurked in Leo Kottke’s a few choice Takoma titles) suppos homemade demo tape, but his atten edly has several more in the works. Rhino Records is releasing a won tion drifted too easily. His marriage derful two-CD compilation of his broke up, he investigated countless Eastern and Western philosophies, music this month. Assembled and spent time roaming through India, annotated by Barry "Dr. Demento" and devoted less and less energy Hansen, this comp will undoubtedly to the business side of the label. set some young minds ablaze, since Throughout the 70s, Fahey record it includes many seminal perfor ed and toured regularly, producing mances that have been unavailable brilliant albums such as Fare Forward for decades. Voyagers and Voyagers and Visits Washington D.C. ‘There’s no one even remotely like and garnering a reputation for eccen him," says singer-guitarist-fan Barbara tric live performances. He would Manning. “His records are so beautiful lumber onto the stage looking like a that it would be tragic if there weren’t cross between a liquor-fueled bear at least a few more of them. There are and a slighty seedy college profes certain moods I get in where I can’t sor, then fill the air with a mix of fan bear to hear anything else." tastic guitar-playing, loud burps, and "I’ve always really thought of caustic asides. “Being a genius is myself as a spiritual and psychologi tough, I guess," ventured a Village cal detective," Fahey says. "I’m Voice reviewer. Voice reviewer. So it went. always trying to get to a fuller under Fahey remarried in the late 70s standing of myself through my and relocated to Salem, Oregon, in music. I felt so alienated from the 1981. He recorded Railroad I, I, one culture around me, like I was from a last great LP for the floundering different planet, like I wasn’t really a Takoma label, and records for other member of the human race. I had two companies followed, as did a stream heads, one just wasn’t visible. So I of reissued material, but not much was looking for another path of cash accrued. Then came Epsteinmusic. I didn’t really know what it Barr virus, accelerated drinking pat was. I didn't care what it was, and I terns, and the dissolution of his still don't. Makes no difference to me second marriage. Fahey managed to and that’s perfectly okay. ’Cause I’m give up the bottle with some help just a little blip. The whole style is from AA. “I had tried to stop drinking just a little blip on all the mainstream in the past using ‘willpower,’ but I of music. I don’t fit anywhere. And I spent too long in scientific philoso never will." 9
