JOHN FAHEY, Sunday Times, September 19, 1999
From the late 1950s onwards, guitarist John Fahey has forged a unique fusion of traditional American musics and avant-garde conceits, bending blues and folk templates into new forms and dousing them with found sounds. Today, Fahey is flattered by the collaborative attentions of underground guru Jim O'Rourke, Sonic Youth's ever-adventurous Thurston Moore and experimental rockers Cul de Sac. While the early 1960s saw Fahey tracking down boyhood blues heroes such as Skip James and Bukka White for his own label, Takoma, three decades later, after re-emerging from a haze of drink and depression with 1997's City of Refuge, he himself is now Skip James to the current class of free-form, cut-and-paste guitar wranglers.
"Ironic? I suppose so," he concurs in a wheezy whisper, from the Oregon motel-room home he describes as "between nowhere and no place". Taking a moment to adjust his position on the bed, he continues: "It's kind of funny. I was looking for people from southern-Negro musical culture, and now these new people are looking for me. It's delightful to be touring with someone like Thurston. And...it's work."
It's work. Throughout his career Fahey has eschewed any marketplace that might offer him a platform. As early as 1958 he incurred purists' ire by recording scratchy, ancient-looking 78s under the name of Blind Thomas, and sharing his first release with a pseudonymous "Blind Joe Death", sending most of the album's 300 copies to blues scholars or sneakily leaving them in the racks of second-hand shops and thrift stores. Throughout the 1960s, Fahey composed and recorded the beautiful, delicate instrumentals that he now contemptuously describes as his "little jewel art pieces"; and the introduction of found sounds and tape effects to 1968's expansive and ambitious Yellow Princess might have seen a crossover to the experimental fringes of the rock scene, had Fahey been able to shrink his talent into a psychedelic shape.
"Most people assumed he was a 'head',"
recalled producer Samuel Charters of Fahey's 1960s concerts, in The
New York Times. "But what they didn't understand was that John
was a drunk. So there would always be this stunned moment when they
would look at him sitting up
on stage with a quart of Coca-Cola and a bottle of whisky." Fahey
dismisses Charters's re-collections as "bullshit", but can't
conceal his contempt for the counterculture's sacred cows. "When
Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died, we had a party in Salem. That
guy was a
silly prophet guru getting people to take drugs. How many deaths is
he responsible for? I considered him a kind of paedophile, going around
trying to influence youth through politics or drugs, the kind of parasitical
adult who says he's helping children but wants to destroy their creativity."
Clearly, Fahey has what Americans call
"unresolved issues", which might explain his gradual slide
into despair in the 1980s, watching from the sidelines as the "new-age"
music of the Windham Hill label and William Ackerman shifted thousands
of units with a marketable
distillation of his own innovations. "New-age music! Yeuuchhh!"
says Fahey, suddenly animated. "They were doing me without the
passion, education or taste. It's vapid crap. But I made some bad
records in the 1980s. I didn't even know there was an 'alternative'
movement,
and, when I experimented, reviewers gave me hell, so I gave up and
churned out the same stuff."
Pretty soon Fahey had given up churning
out anything at all, stuck in Salem in hostels and cheap motels, scrounging
a living seeking out valuable second-hand records in thrift stores
and selling them on to dealers, drinking himself to death, until he
was diagnosed with the chronic fatigue syndrome Epstein Barr virus
and had to make some choices. Fahey's new work has been characterised
by an absolute refusal to compromise. His most recent record, Womblife,
is a slow, face-down crawl through the American musical landscape,
inspecting the sun-bleached bones of traditional forms at such intimate
proximity they become unfamiliar and eerie. "What I did,"
explains Fahey, "was play four boom-boxes of gamelan CDs simultaneously,
and paid the kids in the motel to keep changing the CDs over. We had
a
lot of fun, me and the kids. Then I laid down some cheap acoustic
steel guitars and put a screwdriver in the neck to tune them real
high, layer by layer. It's the best record I ever made."
Fahey's return to recording and touring
might, at last, make his body of work more important than the legends
attached to him. Before he goes back to sleep, he is coerced into
finally confirming the exact circumstances of his 1969 confrontation
with Blow Up director
Michaelangelo Antonioni, who'd hoped Fahey might score his new film,
Zabriskie Point.
"Well," begins Fahey, unburdening,
"the antipathy began when Antonioni got me over to Rome without
telling me what he wanted me to do. Then he shows me film of this
big sex scene in a desert, and I said, 'Hey man, I don't do no skin
flicks.' I should have flown back straightaway. I'm too Victorian.
It scared me, made me sick. Antonioni starts describing the scene.
'John,' he says, 'this is young love. But it's in the desert. And
what's in the desert, John? Death, John, death! So it's death and
love and death and love and death and love and death and love and
death and love and death and love...' And I said, 'Yeah, sure I can
do that!' not realising I was
working for a madman. So I composed his sex-desert-death music and
he said it was great, and then he took me out to dinner and started
telling me how much he hated the USA and Americans, and kept talking
about sex and death. To me it seemed impolite. Well, we were both
drinking, and I don't exactly remember who threw the first punch,
probably him. We got in a fist fight and fell on the ground, but we
were too drunk to really hit each other, just rolling on the floor
in this expensive Italian restaurant. Anyhow, Antonioni got up and
ran away, and then I flew back to the USA. He took my music out of
the movie and hired in Jerry Garcia instead. Which is another reason
why I hate him and why, I think, Zabriskie Point ended up as one of
the 100 worst movies ever made."
Playing his first concerts in the UK for more than a decade, Fahey seems to harbour a hesitant anger even towards his audience. "What I don't want is people coming along and asking me to play things they know. They should just open their minds to what I want to do." At 59, John Fahey is still clearly a dangerous man to cross.
