The news got to me a couple of days ago: John Fahey had been taken off of life support and was expected to die. I didn't even know he was ill. Just days before, Henry Kaiser and I had been talking about him - Henry telling me about John's recent all-electric, reverb-laden musical direction. Neither of us had any idea that his life hung in the balance at that very moment. It was just another in the never-ending parade of John Fahey stories. John was just that way: truly eccentric, a bit crazy, unpredictable, and, above all, a true American original. I guess he was truly mythic. A maverick of the highest order, and a man whose storied personality could never overwhelm the magnificence of his musical pioneering. How I mourn his passing today...

I first heard John Fahey's music in 1969 or '70. My best friend Alan's big brother Bob - a poet hippie much revered by us 13-year-old fledglings - had John's album Days Have Gone By (still a personal favorite). The music was so mysterious, so enigmatic (that train song!), and stories of the man's drinking and high-mindedness abounded, making him seem daunting and -yes- fabulous. And to think he was local, living in Venice, we heard. I started trying to pick up more of this music - on his OWN LABEL no less. It was soon after that his amazing (and my personal favorite) album America came out. With an incredible package of bizarre autobiographical/mythical artworks by Patrick Finnerty ("Fahey Finnerty Desert Monuments 1-10", etc.), it was so mysterious and marvelous that I became somewhat of a Fahey acolyte. The extended piece, "Mark 1:15" (tragically edited on the CD version to make room for tons of incredible unreleased stuff), with its idiomatic dissonaces, hypnotic repititions, and brooding yet sublime mood, is still an epiphany for me every time I hear it. Anyway, albums like Guitar, Fare Forward Voyagers(Fahey in his brief stint of Swami Satchidananda and sobriety), Blind Joe Death, The Dance Of Death (And Other Plantation Favorites), to name but a few of my faves, enjoy the admiration and respect of not just me but people I've known and/or admired such as: G.E. Stinson, Rod Poole, Elliott Sharp, George Winston, William Ackerman, Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, the aforementioned Mr. Kaiser, sensitive fruitarian hippie wanderers, and, of course the vast generations of solo steel-string fingerstylists who would not exist without him.

I finally met John through my friend George Winston - yes, that George Winston. George was then a perfect example of the kind of Fahey followers I often met: He was an acoustic guitar player (he and I played duets together back then - he on open-tuned slide), lived in a house with no heat, and was a driver for Larry Flynt who would hang out with me at the record sore where I worked and look for odd recordings of solo instruments. He had a solo piano record out on Takoma called Piano Solos which had been cut-out, I later learned, so obviously he knew John. He and I went to see John at McCabe's Guitar Shop, and he was really sick with flu but was drinking a pitcher of beer. He was feverish in the extreme, apologizing often for lapses in concentration. As it turned out, John felt unable to drive, so George drove John's car to his little pad in Palms and I followed in George's car. We
crept in the dark into his bedroom (George obviously knew the way), trying not to wake up John's wife, and literally put him to bed. Quite an introduction! But after this John always treated me as a friend. To me he remained an enigma of the highest order.

When John moved to Oregon and got sober, we became better acquainted. We even did some gigs on a mini-tour with my Trio and a band I really liked called Her Number Thirteen who were very neo-Sonic Youth. Sounds odd, but John had become quite taken with the independent rock and avant-garde jazz and new music scenes. It was at this time that I saw what would become a familiar sight: John beligerently repeating this one waltz theme over and over until most of the audience had left. He seemed totally oblivious to this fact, and seemed to not care one bit. My good friend Mike Hogan (of little brother records fame, who had "organized" the "tour") would just smile and shake his head. (He would smile and shake his head many times later as he tried to pin John down and release what became a now scarce double 7".) It was at a gig on this "tour" at Sam Bond's Garage in Eugene that John asked me in that innimitable voice of his, "So, Nels. Why is it that you do these engagements which pay you virtually no money?!" What could I say?? He wanted to hook me up with his lawyer/manager, but I'm lame and never followed up... Then John gave me his new triple 78rpm 10" !! And I've still never been able to play it! What a guy!

The last time I heard John was when I opened for him solo at the reconsitituted Ash Grove on the Santa Monica pier. I was playing solo electric guitar (which apparently had caused a hysterical bunch of old ladies to flee in horror into the lobby where they demanded, "When is he going to STOP?!?!?!"). John was in the dressing room munching tortilla chips and salsa and reclining on the couch with his massive belly jutting upwards, and displayed discernable pleasure at my performance despite the omnipresent shades. "Well, Nels, what am I supposed to play now?! You just played everything I was going to play!", he joked, in THAT VOICE. "I guess I'm going to really have to play some MUSIC tonight!" Then he played (on a shitty Washburn borrowed from ex-McCabe's booker John Chelew - John no longer traveled with a guitar) the set with THAT WALTZ, and most of the audience was gone... I remember seeing old friends of Eric von Essen's there that I hadn't seen in years (was Eric still alive then?...), Brett Werb and Bearded Fellow (who never did have a beard). They were part of those who hung in till the bitter end. I never did tell John that I was never paid for that gig - he would have been pissed! But even at that point I think that I was a little afraid of the mad genius who had been so kind to me, and I didn't want to bother him.

John Fahey's later music was echo-laden, electric. He played slide. His Revenant label, given over to reissues of esoteric masterpieces, was purportedly started with inheritance money. When I heard of his windfall I asked him if this meant he would move out of the residence hotel he lived in. "Are you kidding?! They clean my room every week, pick up my mail when I'm out of town. It's great!" I guess that room later caught fire and he moved to another one not all that long ago. Was he the drunk that people saw piss against a mountain in front of an entire audience of folk festival goers? He was once. Was he the man who wrote an impenetrably abstruse column in Guitar Player that was half in German? Yes, he was. Was he a legend, an enigma, a man whose contribution will grow and be felt as long as we have ears to hear? Emphatically, yes. His solo music, his D.I.Y. independence, his musical scholarship, were all, dare I say it, ahead of their time. I will, as I have since I was 15 years old, take pleasure in playing my paltry rendition of "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean". Perhaps that's where he lives now. I miss him already.

Guitarist John Fahey, whose eccentric acoustic stylings influenced a generation of musicians, has died at Salem Hospital in Salem, OR after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation 48 hours previously.

John Fahey was born on February 28, 1939 in Takoma Park, MD. His father played popular songs on the piano and Irish harp, and his mother was also a pianist. John spent his youth raising wood turtles and fishing in the Susquehawa River and upper Chesapeake Bay. On Sundays the family went to the New River Ranch in nearby Rising Sun, MD where they heard the top country and hillbilly groups of the day, like Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers.

On a fishing trip in 1952 John met a black singer and guitarist named Frank Hovington, whose fingerpicking style so intrigued John that he bought his first guitar soon thereafter, a Sears Roebuck model that cost him $17.00, and startedteaching himself to play.

After getting a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from American University, Fahey moved to Berkeley, CA in 1963, where he established his own label, Takoma Records, and began his long recording career. The following year he moved to Los Angeles, got an M.A. in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA, and was instrumental in the rediscovery of blues artists Skip James and Bukka White. He expanded the Takoma label to includefellow guitarists Leo Kottke and Peter Lang, among many others, and New Age pioneer George Winston was another whose early career was nourished by the quirky innovator. In recent years the Takoma catalog has been purchased by Fantasy Records of Berkeley, CA, and Fahey's Takoma LPs are now being systematicallyreissued on CD. Fantasy Records executive Bill Belmont called Fahey
"a true American musical genius."

Although Fahey preferred to be known as an American primitivist, he was widely acknowledged as the "godfather of the New Age guitar movement," and his recordings (over thirty albums for a wide variety of labels) showcased his ongoing musical explorations. Several were sonic explorations in the alternative music vein, and all had exotic titles (a 19-minute excursion was called On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age,while another was called Old Girlfriends and Other Disasters. At the same time, he never lost his early love for traditional and roots music forms, and during the early 1990s he formed another record label, Revenant, to reissue classic recordings of early blues and old time music. At the time of his death he was working on a new album, Summertime and Other Sultry Songs.

For further information contact: Mary Katherine Aldin or Mitch Greenhill via email at info@folkloreproductions.com or by phone at (310) 451-0767.

Click image for info. on the John Fahey book
How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
(Drag City)