Post by mummifiedstalin on Oct 13, 2011 19:03:06 GMT -5
Most people don’t know about John Fahey, and that’s a shame. He’s a guitar player who’s something of a legend for other guitar players (he was also #35 on Rolling Stone’s “Most Influential Guitarists” list). But his public appeal, such as it ever was, seems always diminishing, probably helped by his own self-sabotage.
So why should you care? If you listen to the songs or records he’s most known for, what you’re going to hear is a type of guitar playing that sounds like it belongs either on incredibly old phonographs of lost southern blues players (think the kind of thing that most people didn’t really hear until they saw O Brother, Where Art Thou?) or like simple old-timey country songs that lost their singer somewhere along the way.
It also seems incredibly simple, and you’re going to wonder why so many other guitarists have loved this guy. He has the careless style of many old blues players who are self-taught, who play on worn out strings on busted guitars. It’s like someone was trying to just recreate the vibe of an old Mississippi John Hurt record, and doing a reasonably good job…but why is this innovative, especially for a white guy from the suburbs in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s?
Listen and see for yourself. And enjoy the wild-growth comb-over:
That’s the first impression. And it’s wrong.
If you listen a bit longer, you’ll start to notice that what he’s playing aren’t really songs. They seem like songs – there’s something like a chorus/verse structure, a three chord blues thing happening (especially in his earliest records), and a simple alternating bass pattern that gives it an almost “down-homey” feel. But it may slowly dawn on you that something else is going on. Maybe it’s when a bridge lasts way too long and seems to take over the song. Or maybe it’s when he decides he’s just going to keep picking the same pattern and start a drone going in the middle of an otherwise standard little blues tune. Or maybe it’s when it seems like he actually tries to play really poorly and starts making his little guitar suffer by playing clicks and twangs behind and above the notes – using bad technique as an instrument. Or maybe it’s when the simple blues chord structures start to give way to something that sounds like it belongs to Arnold Schoenberg.
And that last comparison isn’t casual. Fahey says that one of the things he wanted to do once he really started “composing” was to try to reproduce the kind of sonic dissonance on guitar that contemporary classical music was doing at the time…but to do it on the back of standard blues and country styles. He claims that even some of his simplest pieces were attempts to recreate some of the chord and modal changes that occur in some of the more complex pieces of achromatic and experimental classical music of the time….even if it just sounds like a kinda messed up three chord song.
Fahey certainly had the brains to do that. He started his “career” as a musicologist, getting an MA from UCLA in the field and doing a lot of work to make black blues guitarists respectable to the academic music establishment. He even personally revived some “lost” musicians like Charlie Patton and Bukka White (who he physically removed from a farm where he was working to start recording again).
It’s certainly possible that Fahey’s genius, as it were, could be an ability to translate complex musical ideas into the simplicity of 6 strings, basic picking patterns, and blues.
…But.
And here’s where it gets interesting: what if it was all a joke? What if Fahey was really just a run-of-the-mill guitarist who had a flair for playing old bluesy tunes with a nice spark? And what if all that avant-garde stuff was just a joke, a way to increase his mystique? In his later albums, he gives up on the acoustic altogether and creates “atmospheric” pieces that are often just “noise art.” He records trains and screeches, etc., and the stuff can almost be unlistenable. It’s hard to tell whether all of this is really innovative or just slap-dash, both in terms of the actual guitar playing and the composition.
Especially when he started to do things like this:
People started to question what it was they were hearing, not that it’s bad (I actually love that piece), but is this a musical genius, or is this just slightly twangy New Age noodling?
That’s blasphemy to some people, who think that Fahey was single-handedly responsible for making the guitar an actual instrument rather than just a thing for accompaniment and solos. These are the same people who will wax philosophical about the emotion he can express in a simple D chord. And, in part, I think it’s true. No matter how simple some of his early songs are, and I’ve learned a lot of them, they only sound like Fahey on his records. There really is something lonely and tragic about the way he plays, and he can make even the simplest tune interesting just in terms of expression.
It’s the grander claims that make people skeptical. That and the guy’s other antics. His entire career also seems fraught with a sense of carelessness. He wrote extensive, fantastical liner-notes for all of his records (which you can find online), and he developed a massive mythology (and even something of an apparently private religion) surrounding the childhood suburban gangs with which he grew up.
He was also never afraid to tell tall tales about his own actions, often telling straight-faced lies about whatever he felt like. His first album, even, was promoted as if he had “discovered” an old blues player named Blind Joe Death, and the first printing suggested that the A side were Death’s songs and the B side were Fahey’s. He kept this up for quite some time until he just got bored with it, and then he acted like everyone should have known from the beginning that it was all just a laugh.
All of this is to say is that’s he’s a fascinating, enigmatic, frustrating, and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful artist. And this is my excuse to spend some time reflecting on him.
I’m not going to do this in an album-by-album manner. He simply produced too much. But each post will have some kind of unifying theme, whether a certain style, a period, or some aspect of his writing.
But we should start with that first album: The Legend of Blind Joe Death.