Browse content similar to In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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He seemed to me the kind of folk-guitar-playing equivalent | 0:00:25 | 0:00:28 | |
of sort of William Burroughs or Bukowski, Charles Bukowski, | 0:00:28 | 0:00:32 | |
do you know what I mean? He had that really powerful thing | 0:00:32 | 0:00:36 | |
that we look for in American artists or writers | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
He created a new language, modally speaking, harmonically speaking, | 0:00:49 | 0:00:54 | |
and if that that's not an iconoclast, I don't know what is, really. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
Independent label owner, like, maybe the first, record collector, | 0:01:01 | 0:01:05 | |
musicologist, alcoholic, | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
hobo... | 0:01:09 | 0:01:11 | |
Thrift store master, | 0:01:11 | 0:01:13 | |
guitar, don't-give-a-shit- about-the-brand-name guitar owner. | 0:01:13 | 0:01:19 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
It's not about what you own, it's just about what you play, | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
you know, the voice of the turtle's like, in here, not in this thing, | 0:01:24 | 0:01:29 | |
so to speak. It's awesome. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:31 | |
It's been said of John Fahey that his style is American primitive, | 0:01:31 | 0:01:36 | |
whatever that means. What does that mean, John? | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
Well, somebody else said that. Oh, I know you didn't say it. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:41 | |
I didn't say it. This is like a Rousseau painting, or like Rousseau. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:45 | |
Primitive means untaught. I didn't have any teachers. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:49 | |
Oh. I taught myself. And American means American. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:53 | |
And what would you call your style, if you had to call it something? | 0:01:53 | 0:01:56 | |
That's the closest thing, if I had to call it anything, | 0:01:56 | 0:01:58 | |
I wouldn't worry about calling it anything. | 0:01:58 | 0:02:00 | |
OK, we won't call it anything. But it is unusual and it's your own. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:04 | |
There are a lot of people who haven't been actually literally taught | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
but who all sound alike, but I don't think that you sound like anybody. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:10 | |
Good. You sound like... "Good! Great." | 0:02:10 | 0:02:13 | |
So that everybody can join us in either agreeing or disagreeing, | 0:02:13 | 0:02:17 | |
why don't you start playing? | 0:02:17 | 0:02:19 | |
There is something about guitars, | 0:03:12 | 0:03:15 | |
maybe something magical when played right, | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
which evokes past, mysterious, barely conscious sentiments, | 0:03:18 | 0:03:22 | |
both individual and universal. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
The road to the unconscious past. | 0:03:26 | 0:03:28 | |
Guitar is a caller. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:32 | |
It brings forth emotions you didn't know you had. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:35 | |
It is a very personal instrument. | 0:03:37 | 0:03:39 | |
He seemed to be trying to create poetry, and divide... | 0:03:41 | 0:03:45 | |
if music is simply dividing time, dividing time in some new way. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
He took everything in the world and personalised it, | 0:03:55 | 0:03:58 | |
made it into part of him. He was a spiritual detective. | 0:03:58 | 0:04:02 | |
It's difficult to say what characterised him | 0:04:13 | 0:04:15 | |
because he went through so many phases. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:17 | |
I suppose what characterised him that was attractive to me | 0:04:17 | 0:04:20 | |
was simply the repetitive cycling rhythms. It was very pop, | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
it was very rock 'n' roll, it was very R It was cyclic. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:27 | |
I think it was his tunings. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
His sense of collage, his sense of soundscape, | 0:04:33 | 0:04:38 | |
his sense of dissonance | 0:04:38 | 0:04:40 | |
that influenced people like Pete Townshend, Thurston Moore and Beck. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:45 | |
He's using the guitar as almost like a antenna, | 0:04:45 | 0:04:50 | |
and he's not sure of what it's going to do or where it'll take him. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:53 | |
My family and I moved to the Washington, DC suburbs in 1945, | 0:05:00 | 0:05:05 | |
right after we dropped the big ones on Japan. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
I remember the night we moved into the new house in the suburbs. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:14 | |
I was sleepy, and didn't like what was going on. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:16 | |
I remember the following morning feeling afraid and shy, | 0:05:18 | 0:05:22 | |
but preparing myself to go across the street | 0:05:22 | 0:05:25 | |
where I saw the local kids hanging out. | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
My mother was encouraging me. She gave me a lot of support. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:33 | |
That day, for some reason, I thought I should dress up | 0:05:34 | 0:05:38 | |
in some kind of costume, so I wore a pith helmet. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:41 | |
Where John Fahey grew up was one of those neighbourhoods where | 0:05:45 | 0:05:48 | |
he would've had a lot of access to woods, basically. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
Places to wander, places to look under rocks and logs | 0:05:51 | 0:05:56 | |
and crawl over...you know, as a kid, | 0:05:56 | 0:05:58 | |
crawl over creeks and things like that. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
A kind of wonderful environment in a lot of ways. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
FINGER STYLE GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS | 0:06:04 | 0:06:06 | |
There's a certain a lot of the acoustic guitar work of water, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:10 | |
of that kind of movement, of that kind of rippling and...motion. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
The very soil was sacred. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
The water in the creeks and springs was holy water. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:31 | |
The oak trees were the highest in the world. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
And these oak trees weren't like regular oak trees, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:38 | |
they were sacred oak trees | 0:06:38 | 0:06:40 | |
planted by The Great Koonaklaster himself | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
while he was creating the world | 0:06:43 | 0:06:45 | |
Turtles were sacred to The Big K. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
The common box turtle was Big K's totem. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:55 | |
How did you start playing guitar? How come and how and... | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
Um, well, there were a lot of kids around where I lived | 0:06:58 | 0:07:00 | |
who played country west, so I got a Sears Roebuck guitar. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:04 | |
But I started to compose as soon as I got one. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:06 | |
As soon as I knew where the chords... | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
BEFORE I knew where the chords were, or anything. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
Had you taken any other music lessons of any kind? | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
Yeah, I played clarinet in junior high school band. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:16 | |
SHE LAUGHS I didn't like it much. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
I used to improvise. Were you good? No, I kept improvising. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:22 | |
Band teacher got pretty mad about it. | 0:07:22 | 0:07:24 | |
I met John, it must have been in 1957, or '58. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
We were both involved with some other usual suspects | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
at St Michael and All Angels. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
That community was more than a religious community, | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
it was a community of like-minded people who were welcoming to | 0:07:40 | 0:07:44 | |
a great diversity of people. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:46 | |
John was an outlaw, from start to finish. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:50 | |
A very gentlemanly outlaw but outside | 0:07:50 | 0:07:54 | |
the strictures of the...of his background. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
We had dated, we were sort of still dating | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
when I was finishing up high school. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:03 | |
Then there was a little event at church and he... | 0:08:03 | 0:08:08 | |
I guess he had been really drinking seriously that night | 0:08:08 | 0:08:10 | |
and he was just very rude to me | 0:08:10 | 0:08:12 | |
First time. So I got up and walked out in a huff. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:16 | |
Then he approached me, must have been a year later, | 0:08:16 | 0:08:19 | |
to do a session at Joe Bussard's in Frederick. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:22 | |
And it was not... We didn't really... | 0:08:22 | 0:08:24 | |
We may have played one song together but he was just asking me | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
to please, play these lines. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:29 | |
HE PLAYS SLIDE GUITAR | 0:08:29 | 0:08:31 | |
# Girl, you set your dogs on | 0:08:31 | 0:08:33 | |
# Set your dogs on him. # | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
HE FINISHES PLAYING | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:08:55 | 0:08:57 | |
I haven't played this thing in a long, long time. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
# Doo-doo-doo... # | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
Yep, the best music has already been recorded, my friend. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:15 | |
And as far as I'm concerned, | 0:09:17 | 0:09:18 | |
what they've got today is zero everything. | 0:09:18 | 0:09:21 | |
Look at this. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:23 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:09:23 | 0:09:24 | |
Look at the condition. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:27 | |
Fahey came by and listened to records | 0:09:27 | 0:09:29 | |
and one day he brought his guitar up and I liked the way he played, | 0:09:29 | 0:09:34 | |
he experimented around. This was in November of 1959. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:38 | |
I said, "Let's make a couple of records." | 0:09:38 | 0:09:40 | |
It was at four o'clock in the morning, | 0:09:40 | 0:09:42 | |
that's about the time he got loosened up. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:44 | |
He spent a lot of time up here A lot of time, a lot of time playing. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:51 | |
He'd sit over for hours and play. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:52 | |
This does not... MUSIC PLAYS | 0:09:52 | 0:09:55 | |
Oh, this is where he's playing a sitar. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:57 | |
We were playing... That's the only tricky thing we ever did. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
I wrote a record backwards. | 0:10:01 | 0:10:03 | |
Yeah, man. I like it. | 0:10:05 | 0:10:06 | |
MUSIC PLAYS BACKWARDS | 0:10:06 | 0:10:08 | |
We rolled the tape backwards. Hear? | 0:10:08 | 0:10:10 | |
What do you think of that? | 0:10:21 | 0:10:22 | |
You've never heard anything like that, ha-ha-ha-ha! | 0:10:22 | 0:10:27 | |
I used to go up to Frederick, Maryland | 0:10:27 | 0:10:31 | |
and there was crazy guy who lived there named Joe Bussard. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
He used to get me up there and get me just as smashed as he could | 0:10:35 | 0:10:40 | |
and get me screaming and yelling and playing the guitar | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
and trying to make out I was a drunk Negro blues singer from Mississippi. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:48 | |
He did the bulk? No, I did some, he did some. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:52 | |
No, and you hear a lot of... | 0:10:52 | 0:10:53 | |
HE GROWLS HOARSELY | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
You know, it's usually me. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
# Where you going? | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
# I'm going down to get us some wine | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
# You're going to eat crabs tonight | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
# What kind of crabs you going to eat, man? | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
# We're gonna eat them kind of crabs live in water, what kind IS that? | 0:11:10 | 0:11:14 | |
# That's crab crabs, man | 0:11:16 | 0:11:18 | |
# Yeah, them old crabs good, mmm! # | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
It reminded me of the old black blues guys. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:25 | |
Nice style, very interesting, and he'd get a big charge. | 0:11:25 | 0:11:31 | |
John started Takoma in 1959 on 8s, actually. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:44 | |
I think the reason was simply it was the only way you could | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
get your own music onto a record was to start your own label. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:51 | |
That's how he saw it. | 0:11:51 | 0:11:53 | |
It would've been hopeless for him to try | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
and approach a record company with his music. | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
It was just too strange to what was being issued by record | 0:11:59 | 0:12:03 | |
companies at the time. John Fahey and Ed Denson | 0:12:03 | 0:12:06 | |
managed Takoma Records and put out mostly John Fahey albums, | 0:12:06 | 0:12:11 | |
but also Robbie Basho and a few other blues artists. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:15 | |
Takoma became an icon of independent, artist-owned, | 0:12:17 | 0:12:22 | |
artist-started record labels within the independent label | 0:12:22 | 0:12:27 | |
world, but it was John's vision really, | 0:12:27 | 0:12:31 | |
that started that whole genre. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
Well, when I made my first...record, | 0:12:37 | 0:12:42 | |
um... | 0:12:42 | 0:12:45 | |
I thought it would be a good joke | 0:12:45 | 0:12:49 | |
to have me on one side, have the label say | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
John Fahey on one side and this guy Blind Joe Death on the other side. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:59 | |
The reason it says "blind" is because a lot of people I learned | 0:12:59 | 0:13:03 | |
from were on old 78rpm records and a lot of them were blind. | 0:13:03 | 0:13:08 | |
Their names were Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, | 0:13:10 | 0:13:14 | |
Blind Joe Taggart. A whole bunch of them were blind. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
I think he thought the sort of earnestness with which many | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
people of his background approached it needed a bit of sending up, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:26 | |
so I think some of that comes | 0:13:26 | 0:13:28 | |
from that wanting to kind of, you know, um, give something | 0:13:28 | 0:13:32 | |
a little bit of a poke. And...kind of mess with people's minds, too. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:39 | |
Also I was thinking, | 0:13:39 | 0:13:41 | |
whenever you print the word death, people look at it. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
I was thinking of record sales already. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
Even though I was only going to have 100 copies pressed. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:53 | |
John is a guitarist and composer, he's both. You can't separate them. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:05 | |
Very early in his career, before he ever recorded anything, | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
he started making up his own pieces. The first pieces were | 0:14:08 | 0:14:13 | |
pretty much just things that could have | 0:14:13 | 0:14:16 | |
been traditional, but as time went on, he began putting | 0:14:16 | 0:14:20 | |
the harmonies that he would come up with into these pieces. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:24 | |
He was inspired, certainly, to some extent by classical music. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:28 | |
Certain composers, especially. Bartok, Charles Ives. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
I met John Fahey in 1964 when we were both | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
part of the Folk Music Studies | 0:14:40 | 0:14:42 | |
masters degree programme that UCLA had. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:45 | |
He does his MA on Charley Patton. | 0:14:56 | 0:14:57 | |
It is still a definitive work on Charley Patton if you want to learn | 0:14:57 | 0:15:01 | |
about who the heck Patton was and learn about his life and so on | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
MUSIC: "Stone Pony Blues" by Charley Patton | 0:15:04 | 0:15:08 | |
# I got me a stone pony and I don't ride Shetlands no more... # | 0:15:08 | 0:15:15 | |
There was something about Charley Patton in particular that | 0:15:18 | 0:15:21 | |
really moved him deeply, but also the techniques. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
He would build his own music around the fingerpicking | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
and playing techniques, the slightest techniques, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
the slide techniques that were | 0:15:32 | 0:15:33 | |
originally developed by Charley Patton and other Delta blues people. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:38 | |
It was all grist for his mill. | 0:15:38 | 0:15:40 | |
# Vicksburg's my pony Greenville is my grey mare | 0:15:40 | 0:15:45 | |
# Vicksburg's my pony Greenville is my grey mare... # | 0:15:45 | 0:15:51 | |
Patton was an entertainer, not a social prophet in any sense. | 0:15:54 | 0:15:58 | |
He had no profound message. | 0:15:58 | 0:16:00 | |
He was probably not very observant of the troubles of his own people. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:04 | |
He was not a noble savage. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
The music, it is part of the pulse, the heartbeat of this place. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:17 | |
Maybe it is linked to the Mississippi River. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
If you think about it, there is a steady, giant, | 0:16:20 | 0:16:24 | |
volume of matter moving at 9mph | 0:16:24 | 0:16:28 | |
which almost has a, perhaps, magnetic pull. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:32 | |
It's hard to imagine what contemporary music would be like | 0:16:52 | 0:16:58 | |
if people like John Fahey had not been obsessively | 0:16:58 | 0:17:03 | |
fascinated with roots American music from the '20s and '30s. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:07 | |
# Praise God, I'm satisfied | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
# For me he bled and died | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
# Well, I'm glad to know that he loved me so | 0:17:14 | 0:17:18 | |
# For me he was crucified... # | 0:17:18 | 0:17:20 | |
The tune kept going through my head, something about it kept going through my head. | 0:17:20 | 0:17:24 | |
And within ten minutes, I had to hear it again. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
I would have killed to hear it again. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:29 | |
So they played it again and I thought it was the most | 0:17:29 | 0:17:32 | |
beautiful thing I ever heard in my life. I started crying. | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
It was like a conversion experience, you know. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:39 | |
There is the oft told story of him | 0:17:40 | 0:17:44 | |
weeping after hearing Blind Willie Johnson's Praise God, I'm Satisfied. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:49 | |
Although, initially, he was sort of sickened by it. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
He didn't know what to make of it. It was so alien to him. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
He grew up in the suburbs in Maryland. | 0:17:56 | 0:17:58 | |
He was he was a fan of bluegrass and country stars of the day. | 0:17:58 | 0:18:01 | |
He hadn't had exposure to black artists. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
He didn't have an instant affinity for this music. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:07 | |
This was, if you like, a transition from Mars to him. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:12 | |
John was always fascinated with other cultures, | 0:18:12 | 0:18:16 | |
so I am sure the southern black culture was fascinating to him | 0:18:16 | 0:18:21 | |
Any culture that isn't your own culture teaches you something | 0:18:21 | 0:18:25 | |
new and expands you, and I think John was always into expansion. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:30 | |
I spent every summer in the deep South, looking for old blues singers | 0:18:33 | 0:18:37 | |
and collecting records, old records and so on. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
We would go door-to-door in the black sections of these little towns | 0:18:42 | 0:18:47 | |
along the way. We'd knock on the door, | 0:18:47 | 0:18:49 | |
knock, knock, knock. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
People would answer and he'd say, "You have any old phonograph records? | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
"We're buying up old phonograph records. | 0:18:55 | 0:18:57 | |
"Give you a quarter a piece for the good ones." That was John's spiel. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
He kind of trained me how to do it. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:04 | |
So John had been making a living doing this, | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
or at least part of his living since the early '60s. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:09 | |
There were some other college kids coming into this | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
neck of the woods, but they weren't doing a voters | 0:19:13 | 0:19:16 | |
registration drive, and it cost them their lives. | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
And people were not really aware of the courage or foolhardiness it | 0:19:20 | 0:19:25 | |
took to go into that same neck of the woods. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:30 | |
Being young white guys talking to black people, | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
they could have very easily been misinterpreted or misidentified. | 0:19:32 | 0:19:37 | |
'How do you do that, by the way I'm just curious. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
'How do you find somebody? | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
'Or do you have them in mind and then go looking for them? | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
'Well, I might be looking for somebody | 0:19:47 | 0:19:49 | |
'specific like Bukka White or Skip James. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:52 | |
'Bukka White, you know, he made these old 78s. Right. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:57 | |
'And I thought he was very good | 0:19:57 | 0:20:00 | |
So I said, well, maybe Bukka White is still alive. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:05 | |
So he'd made a record called Aberdeen Mississippi Blues. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:09 | |
So I wrote him a little postcard. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
I knew his real Christian name or whatever you call it. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:17 | |
It was Booker T Washington White. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:21 | |
Then I wrote in caps... | 0:20:21 | 0:20:24 | |
I wrote... | 0:20:33 | 0:20:34 | |
On the back, I wrote... | 0:20:36 | 0:20:37 | |
So we did that. And about three months later, a letter came back, | 0:21:04 | 0:21:09 | |
and we left the next day. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:10 | |
Booker knew all about trains. Booker taught me how to ride freight cars. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
And we had a lot of adventures all over the South. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
Bill Barth, John Fahey and I believe Henry Vestine was with them | 0:21:49 | 0:21:53 | |
when they found Skip James, and that was in a hospital, I believe, | 0:21:53 | 0:21:59 | |
in Tunica, Mississippi, just down the road from Memphis. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:02 | |
MUSIC: "Devil Got My Woman" By Skip James | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
# I'd rather be the devil | 0:22:06 | 0:22:10 | |
# To be that woman man... # | 0:22:10 | 0:22:15 | |
But why was I so interested in Skip James? | 0:22:15 | 0:22:20 | |
What was so distinctive and wonderful about his records? | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
# ..To be that woman man. # | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
James' style was so aggressively melancholy, | 0:22:30 | 0:22:34 | |
so desperate and wretched, and full of gloom, | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
that we reasoned that James' life must have been unbearable. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
Just underneath the great sadness in James' music, we hear anger, | 0:22:45 | 0:22:50 | |
disguised and hardly noticeable | 0:22:50 | 0:22:52 | |
# Nothing but the devil... # | 0:22:54 | 0:22:57 | |
John hated phoney emotionalism. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:00 | |
But he did think his work channelled often the very darkest | 0:23:00 | 0:23:04 | |
emotions that he could dredge up, | 0:23:04 | 0:23:07 | |
and it happened that some of them may have sounded pretty... | 0:23:07 | 0:23:12 | |
or something akin to a Skip James tune or something like that, but... | 0:23:12 | 0:23:18 | |
For him it was catharsis, you know? | 0:23:18 | 0:23:21 | |
And he was, you know, venting his spleen there in the recording. | 0:23:21 | 0:23:28 | |
Would you play something on this for us? | 0:23:28 | 0:23:30 | |
Yeah, I'll try to play The Death Of The Clayton Peacock, | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
which is another song I wrote. | 0:23:33 | 0:23:35 | |
I used to live out on Mount Diablo, | 0:23:35 | 0:23:38 | |
and I'd ride into school every morning, | 0:23:38 | 0:23:41 | |
and there was a lady out there who raised peacocks, | 0:23:41 | 0:23:44 | |
and she had one peacock left, and it got run over one morning | 0:23:44 | 0:23:47 | |
And it laid in the street for two or three days | 0:23:49 | 0:23:51 | |
and then somebody cut his tail off. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:53 | |
Oh. But... I was very upset. And so you wrote a song about it? | 0:23:53 | 0:23:58 | |
Well, no, but it made a good title, you know? Want me to hold that for you? | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
I'll mind it till you're ready | 0:24:03 | 0:24:05 | |
HE STRUMS GUITAR | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
Open G tuning? Yeah. Famous open G... | 0:24:09 | 0:24:12 | |
Not regular Dobro tuning, because that's... | 0:24:12 | 0:24:14 | |
Then you have that... | 0:24:14 | 0:24:16 | |
But... | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
MUSIC: "Death of the Clayton Peacock" | 0:24:19 | 0:24:23 | |
One night, Fahey was playing at the Jabberwocky Coffee Club in Berkeley, | 0:24:34 | 0:24:39 | |
and he was on stage performing, and in his own wonderful style | 0:24:39 | 0:24:44 | |
he said, GRUFF VOICE: "I gotta pee." | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
And so he just walked off stage to pee. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
And I met him and said, "Hey, John, I'm Stefan." | 0:24:50 | 0:24:52 | |
And he took me, and just grabbed me, | 0:24:52 | 0:24:55 | |
and went into the bathroom, holding me. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:58 | |
Took down his underpants, and we were talking about | 0:24:58 | 0:25:02 | |
Willie Brown's guitar style while John was farting his brains out. | 0:25:02 | 0:25:07 | |
And then we finally, thank God, got out the bathroom, | 0:25:07 | 0:25:10 | |
and he went back up on stage. That was my first meeting with John. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:14 | |
I hear Stefan Grossman was here | 0:25:14 | 0:25:16 | |
Uh, I heard that Stefan Grossman played here, that true? | 0:25:18 | 0:25:22 | |
He said he didn't like it here | 0:25:22 | 0:25:24 | |
Did anybody here like him? AUDIENCE LAUGHS | 0:25:24 | 0:25:28 | |
Yeah? I hate his guts, but... | 0:25:28 | 0:25:31 | |
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE | 0:25:31 | 0:25:34 | |
I also hate his guitar playing | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
HIGH VOICE: He plays like a little old lady, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:41 | |
HIGH VOICE: with real long little fingers. Very dainty. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
John had a sick sense of humour There's different levels. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
One was his writing talents in the sense of titling tunes. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:01 | |
I don't remember what year, but I was living in London, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
and a student came by with and album he had just recorded, | 0:26:04 | 0:26:08 | |
and on it was a tune called The Assassination Of Stephane Grossman. | 0:26:08 | 0:26:11 | |
I thought, "what cheek!" I got really pissed off at that | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
so I then recorded a tune called The Assassination Of John Fahey | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
and then HE got really pissed off about it! | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
And then I don't know whether it was John or Manny Greenhill, | 0:26:22 | 0:26:26 | |
his manager, said, "what would be great for America, | 0:26:26 | 0:26:30 | |
"let's do an assassination tour " | 0:26:30 | 0:26:32 | |
And it was a great idea. Unfortunately my back gave out with herniated discs, | 0:26:33 | 0:26:37 | |
so I had to cancel the tour. He did a couple of dates, | 0:26:37 | 0:26:40 | |
and apparently told people that the only reason I wasn't there was cos he had killed me. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:44 | |
That is called a - what? A Hawaiian guitar? Yeah. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:49 | |
Is it called a Hawaiian? Is that what a Hawaiian guitar is, right? | 0:26:49 | 0:26:53 | |
It was made in Hawaii. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:55 | |
It's an ashtray, it's not a guitar. You're kidding me. | 0:26:56 | 0:26:58 | |
It's a real cheap guitar, it's. . | 0:26:58 | 0:27:00 | |
He could be a very strange person to work with. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:04 | |
There was a period where we just hadn't heard from John in weeks, | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
and I think even months at that point, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
and we were starting to get seriously worried about him. | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
Finally we got a phone call from Tasmania | 0:27:13 | 0:27:18 | |
that a recording studio | 0:27:18 | 0:27:20 | |
was calling to ask for authorisation to record a concert of John. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:25 | |
John wanted to do a live album | 0:27:25 | 0:27:27 | |
we authorised the money | 0:27:27 | 0:27:30 | |
and he recorded the album which came out, Tasmania. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:34 | |
MUSIC: "Waltzing Matilda" by John Fahey | 0:27:34 | 0:27:38 | |
He was self-destructive, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:46 | |
in a way that didn't allow him commercial success. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:50 | |
He really had no sense of business. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:52 | |
He didn't keep track of his money that well. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
That first time I went on the road with him, | 0:27:55 | 0:27:58 | |
he was facing divorce with his first wife, Jan, | 0:27:58 | 0:28:01 | |
so he demanded to be paid in cash at all his gigs, | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
and I wound up having to stuff these bundles of cash in my boots and my luggage... | 0:28:05 | 0:28:12 | |
It was just crazy, I was carrying, like, 15, $20,000 in cash. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:16 | |
You know, he had a real edge to him. I think that's why I liked him | 0:28:16 | 0:28:20 | |
SONG: "Amazing Journey" by The Who | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
In 1968, I released Tommy with The Who, | 0:28:26 | 0:28:30 | |
and Robbie Basho sent a copy of it to John Fahey, | 0:28:30 | 0:28:34 | |
who listened to it, and sent me the most delightful note. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
And he said quite simply, "I listened to it, | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
not quite sure what to make of it." | 0:28:40 | 0:28:42 | |
But he said something like, it was a... | 0:28:42 | 0:28:45 | |
You know, "an admirable endeavour." | 0:28:45 | 0:28:47 | |
I think that's what he said. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:49 | |
It was very touching. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:51 | |
Cos I suppose, you know, I'd thought of him as kind of a... | 0:28:51 | 0:28:55 | |
You know, living up a mountain or something. | 0:28:55 | 0:28:59 | |
Unreachable, you know, guy... And there he was. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:02 | |
And the letter that he sent me was incredibly kind, | 0:29:02 | 0:29:06 | |
but also quite, you know... He didn't... There was no gushing. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
He obviously didn't like Tommy but he begrudgingly and kindly | 0:29:10 | 0:29:15 | |
and with a twist of humour gave me... He gave me something. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
John Fahey's music didn't fit into a club, it was his own thing. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:38 | |
And then you get into his personality, and you're like... | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
This certainly did not fit into | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
any sort of genre or specific behavioural patterns | 0:29:44 | 0:29:47 | |
to impress people. He was just on his own trip. | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
And that's when I realised the guy was truly punk rock, | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
or whatever you want to call it His own artist. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
I think that's really the core of it. | 0:29:56 | 0:29:58 | |
Art for art's sake, on so many levels. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
And when you first set out and start listening to Fahey, | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
it strikes you in a way that you .. that you recognise something. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
You're familiar with it instantly, with the sound of the guitar, | 0:30:09 | 0:30:13 | |
the acoustic steel string guitar. so there is that familiarity, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:17 | |
and yet, when you start listening to where he goes melodically | 0:30:17 | 0:30:20 | |
and harmonically, you can tell that he's not about playing it safe. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:25 | |
The way he treated the guitar, | 0:30:25 | 0:30:28 | |
as though the guitar was certainly not by any means limited to | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
accompanying the voice, as though it was an orchestra, almost. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
You know, he used it like, the guitar as a band. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:37 | |
He was really one of the first people to do solo concerts | 0:30:37 | 0:30:41 | |
on a steel string guitar and not be singing. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:45 | |
MUSIC: "A Raga Called Pat - Part One" by John Fahey | 0:31:28 | 0:31:32 | |
He is sampling, in effect, before that term is being used. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:08 | |
He's got to be drawing on influences from musique concrete, | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
which is tape composition coming out of Western European art music, where people are using found sound. | 0:32:12 | 0:32:16 | |
MUSIC: "A Raga Called Pat - Part One" by John Fahey | 0:32:16 | 0:32:22 | |
Raga For Pat actually has him using two different records, | 0:32:22 | 0:32:26 | |
a Folkways album, songs from a tropical rainforest, | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
and another record of steam engines that he's playing backwards and forwards. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:33 | |
Turntablism! | 0:32:33 | 0:32:34 | |
John Fahey was one of the early turntablists in American vernacular music. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:38 | |
John's music evolved greatly through his career, | 0:32:45 | 0:32:49 | |
but it was not a straight path from point A to point B. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:52 | |
We used to sit around and listen to records for hours and hours and hours, | 0:32:54 | 0:32:58 | |
and it would always be all kinds of stuff, | 0:32:58 | 0:33:01 | |
from Charlie Patton to | 0:33:01 | 0:33:02 | |
Charles Ives, to Roy Acuff | 0:33:02 | 0:33:06 | |
to Booker T The MGs, to Rod Stewart. | 0:33:06 | 0:33:10 | |
I mean, he loved Rod Stewart! | 0:33:10 | 0:33:13 | |
Like those great classical composers like Bartok and Stravinsky, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:18 | |
he would take, you know, this approach of listening to different | 0:33:18 | 0:33:22 | |
kinds of music and incorporating it into what he played. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:25 | |
NEW ORLEANS JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS | 0:33:27 | 0:33:30 | |
Then came a little phase | 0:33:33 | 0:33:34 | |
where he got interested in playing music that was informed | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
by New Orleans jazz, old-fashioned love of rivers and religion. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:43 | |
I think of myself as a classical guitar player, | 0:33:55 | 0:33:57 | |
but, you know, that's the way it turned out. | 0:33:57 | 0:34:00 | |
I'm categorised as a folk musician. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:07 | |
"Dear Stephan, just got off the road, very tired, must be brief. | 0:34:07 | 0:34:11 | |
"I am moving to Salem, Oregon end of this month. | 0:34:11 | 0:34:13 | |
"Just bought a house up there. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:15 | |
"I'll no longer be working for Takoma Records. No loss. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:18 | |
"Well, I suppose we might stop fighting, but I must retain the right | 0:34:18 | 0:34:23 | |
"to call you with news, and you must stop staying "Peace, brother" to me. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:27 | |
"How nauseating!" | 0:34:27 | 0:34:29 | |
John was looking to get away from the big city, | 0:34:47 | 0:34:52 | |
and he wanted a quieter place. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
John had this idea that a state capital like Salem would | 0:34:57 | 0:35:03 | |
always have jobs because there'd always be government, | 0:35:03 | 0:35:07 | |
and so if the economy went really bad, | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
your house would never become worth absolutely nothing. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:12 | |
So he just moved to Salem, | 0:35:15 | 0:35:17 | |
and we started talking a lot on the phone and kind of hanging out, and | 0:35:17 | 0:35:20 | |
one day he said, "I just got a deal. I want you to produce our records." | 0:35:20 | 0:35:23 | |
And we started working together | 0:35:23 | 0:35:25 | |
and he was into, kind of, concept things at that point. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:29 | |
And how he produced was great. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:31 | |
He would call me up and say, "I got this idea for a record, | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
"think about this and call me back in two weeks." | 0:35:34 | 0:35:36 | |
I'd think about it and he had thought about some stuff. "Thinking about some tunes." | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
We'd either get together his place or my place | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
and we'd start putting it together. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:44 | |
And it was very well planned out ahead of time, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
preproduction was important. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:48 | |
We never went into the studio and just messed around. | 0:35:48 | 0:35:51 | |
I think the last time I did a record with him was probably '90, '91. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:56 | |
And that's when he wasn't really playing that well. | 0:35:56 | 0:35:59 | |
He wasn't doing that kind of music any more. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
I have taken a vow of silence. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:04 | |
For the next 30 years, unless.. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:11 | |
the occasion arises in which I need to talk. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:16 | |
Obviously, this is not one of those occasions... | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
So I will continue to play my guitar and transform the universe. | 0:36:24 | 0:36:28 | |
HE PLAYS GUITAR | 0:36:30 | 0:36:31 | |
I guess he had had some problems with | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
managing his sleeping for a long time. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:38 | |
When you are on the road and you have... | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
You're flying here and there, that sort of thing, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:44 | |
you are in different places all the time, that's one of the reasons | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
people get into sleeping pills which is what he was into a lot | 0:36:47 | 0:36:51 | |
was chloral hydrate, | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
which, um...was a prescription drug and he had it from a doctor. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:58 | |
So when he was taking the sleeping pills, I think | 0:36:58 | 0:37:02 | |
it did have an effect on his personality. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
He wasn't able to drink at all when he was on chloral hydrate | 0:37:05 | 0:37:09 | |
so he'd drink tonnes of Coca-Cola, which I think is probably what | 0:37:09 | 0:37:12 | |
killed him, finally, was diabetes and heart disease. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:15 | |
When he wasn't on chloral hydrate, he did drink quite a lot, alcohol. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:19 | |
He wasn't a street drug person at all, he wasn't... | 0:37:19 | 0:37:23 | |
get illegal drugs and get high, type of thing. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:27 | |
First of all, he didn't need that, his mind was | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
so imaginative that he didn't need to be...high. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:35 | |
HE PLAYS GUITAR | 0:37:37 | 0:37:39 | |
You have to realise that the entertainer's life is... | 0:37:43 | 0:37:48 | |
has built into it a bipolar... | 0:37:50 | 0:37:54 | |
..ingredient that you cannot escape from. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:00 | |
When you are on stage and when you're on the road, um .. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:03 | |
..you are on top of the world. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:08 | |
When the tour is over, even if you are exhausted, | 0:38:08 | 0:38:10 | |
you are at the bottom. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:12 | |
You don't notice it, but you are really down. | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
I've only began to notice this lately. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:18 | |
Or begun to pay any attention to it. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:22 | |
My solution to it is possibly a woman, | 0:38:22 | 0:38:28 | |
but it's a kind of sickness, being an entertainer. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
You have to be an entertainer. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:33 | |
That is, anybody who's an entertainer | 0:38:33 | 0:38:35 | |
is not an entertainer by choice | 0:38:35 | 0:38:36 | |
He's an entertainer because he has to be. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
He had a lot of pain. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:53 | |
Usually, everything would be prescribed by a doctor, | 0:38:56 | 0:38:59 | |
but he did have this habit of having run out | 0:38:59 | 0:39:04 | |
and being in a different town and giving the guy his prescription, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:09 | |
so he'd have multiple doctors | 0:39:09 | 0:39:10 | |
and maybe lots more pills than you normally should be taking. | 0:39:10 | 0:39:15 | |
SLOW BLUES MUSIC | 0:39:17 | 0:39:20 | |
But I think at that point, he sort of got a little apathetic | 0:39:31 | 0:39:37 | |
to what was happening, cos people thought he was a big drug-head | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
and he wasn't. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:41 | |
He was very laconic and when he would communicate with people, | 0:39:41 | 0:39:45 | |
he would be very... | 0:39:45 | 0:39:46 | |
Laid-back isn't even the word. | 0:39:46 | 0:39:51 | |
Laid-back would make it seems like he was really doing something fast | 0:39:51 | 0:39:56 | |
and he was really... | 0:39:56 | 0:39:57 | |
It would seem like he was on elephant tranquilisers sometimes, | 0:39:57 | 0:40:01 | |
as well as he had a drink problem, | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
so a lot of times his stage performance would be... | 0:40:04 | 0:40:06 | |
..to be nice, would be idiosyncratic, him on stage, | 0:40:07 | 0:40:11 | |
cos he would be doing some nutty things or he wasn't playing well. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:16 | |
But it all kept building up into this mystique, | 0:40:16 | 0:40:18 | |
so you got a real John Fahey mystique, | 0:40:18 | 0:40:22 | |
whereas behind that mystique there was a real human being with problems | 0:40:22 | 0:40:27 | |
with what everyone else has, | 0:40:27 | 0:40:29 | |
and he was involved in trying to understand those problems | 0:40:29 | 0:40:33 | |
with analysis, et cetera. | 0:40:33 | 0:40:35 | |
It was mostly memories of my father that came out in psychoanalysis | 0:40:37 | 0:40:41 | |
Mostly anger, frustration, | 0:40:43 | 0:40:46 | |
which on the surface looks like depression, usually. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:50 | |
My father was a paedophile. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
And then you get scared of people. | 0:40:59 | 0:41:02 | |
You know, here's your father, your family, | 0:41:02 | 0:41:04 | |
you're scared of your family.. | 0:41:04 | 0:41:06 | |
..and it transmits into being afraid of everybody, really. | 0:41:07 | 0:41:11 | |
Then you compensate for fear with drugs and booze and stuff and, uh... | 0:41:15 | 0:41:20 | |
..then you get troubles. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:25 | |
But... | 0:41:25 | 0:41:27 | |
..that's the way it goes. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:30 | |
All the things he experienced, | 0:41:40 | 0:41:42 | |
particularly this trauma of childhood sexual abuse, | 0:41:42 | 0:41:46 | |
those things clearly had a profound influence on his thinking, | 0:41:46 | 0:41:52 | |
maybe his relationships with people and certainly his art. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:55 | |
Um, playing the guitar helped keeping me from going nuts... | 0:41:57 | 0:42:01 | |
..when I was 14, 15, 16... | 0:42:03 | 0:42:07 | |
..17, 18, 19. | 0:42:08 | 0:42:11 | |
You know, I could sit around and bang on the guitar | 0:42:13 | 0:42:17 | |
instead of banging on somebody else. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:19 | |
All of a sudden, he kind of fell apart, as you know, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
and he stopped playing and he didn't want to play how he played before. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:30 | |
He never really liked to repeat himself, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:32 | |
cos I used to say to him, "Why don't you play Requiem For John Hurt | 0:42:32 | 0:42:35 | |
"the way you used to?" and he would get mad. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:37 | |
"I already did that!" It was kind of like Miles Davis in that sense. | 0:42:37 | 0:42:41 | |
Anyway, I was thinking, "He's going to find something. | 0:42:41 | 0:42:44 | |
"He'll do something. This just isn't it any more for him." | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
'People other than myself do not understand | 0:42:52 | 0:42:54 | |
'that I do not have a career. | 0:42:54 | 0:42:56 | |
'I've never had a career. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:00 | |
'I do not want a career, so I probably never will have a career. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:05 | |
'Fine. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
'That's the way I want it. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
'What I have is this, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
'and it is very important - | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
'I have a small, little niche carved out here | 0:43:18 | 0:43:20 | |
'where I play guitar for people every once in a great while. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:24 | |
'I make just enough money to get by and have a little left over | 0:43:25 | 0:43:28 | |
'and that's all I want to do.' | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
THROAT SINGING | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth took this great interest in him | 0:43:48 | 0:43:51 | |
so he met Thurston and they made music together | 0:43:51 | 0:43:55 | |
and John wound up making this electric music towards the end | 0:43:55 | 0:43:59 | |
of his career that was very different from anything he'd done before | 0:43:59 | 0:44:02 | |
All of a sudden, Fahey was big, it was this whole new crowd | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
that hadn't really heard of his earlier stuff and everything | 0:44:07 | 0:44:09 | |
and I thought it was great | 0:44:09 | 0:44:10 | |
and I knew he was going to come through with something | 0:44:10 | 0:44:13 | |
LO-FI DRONE | 0:44:15 | 0:44:17 | |
We did a lot of travelling together when we were trying to bring him | 0:44:17 | 0:44:20 | |
back into circulation, cos it was clear | 0:44:20 | 0:44:24 | |
that his work had been embraced | 0:44:24 | 0:44:29 | |
by everybody from the avant-garde to the underground. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:33 | |
Dropping his name frankly carried a lot of weight | 0:44:36 | 0:44:39 | |
with a lot of the communities I ran in, | 0:44:39 | 0:44:41 | |
so I didn't have to do a whole lot. | 0:44:41 | 0:44:43 | |
John was sent to New York. | 0:44:43 | 0:44:47 | |
I went to the airport, | 0:44:47 | 0:44:49 | |
I went to the gate, waiting around | 0:44:49 | 0:44:52 | |
and, unmistakeably, from the gate emerges this guy | 0:44:52 | 0:44:57 | |
and he's wearing sort of cut-off jean shorts, | 0:44:57 | 0:45:01 | |
not what you would expect from someone getting off of an aeroplane. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:05 | |
He looked more like he was getting off of a boat. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
Then he walked straight up to me and he said, | 0:45:07 | 0:45:09 | |
"Well, I'd like to thank your employers for sending you here. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:14 | |
"They always do really great work for me." | 0:45:14 | 0:45:16 | |
I don't really have any employers. | 0:45:18 | 0:45:20 | |
This was his way of saying, "OK, you're here to take me to the gig." | 0:45:20 | 0:45:26 | |
AMBIENT DRONE | 0:45:26 | 0:45:30 | |
You can definitely hear a man | 0:45:34 | 0:45:36 | |
in transition, certainly moving away, | 0:45:36 | 0:45:40 | |
maybe even writing off | 0:45:40 | 0:45:42 | |
the previous person that he was | 0:45:42 | 0:45:44 | |
crawling out of that skin altogether. | 0:45:44 | 0:45:45 | |
I think he was trying to take it further and further out | 0:45:45 | 0:45:48 | |
and he was trying to give you blocks of sound. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:51 | |
He was trying to make you uncomfortable. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:53 | |
He was trying to put you through all of the things | 0:45:53 | 0:45:55 | |
that he probably was going through. | 0:45:55 | 0:45:57 | |
A lot of stuff I've been doing for the last two years, | 0:46:05 | 0:46:09 | |
including Tuvan singing | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
and tuning all the strings on the guitar to the same note | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
and playing steel... | 0:46:15 | 0:46:18 | |
I didn't know what I was doing so I recorded a lot of it. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:23 | |
AMBIENT DRONE # Yes, yes, yes, yes... # | 0:46:23 | 0:46:29 | |
I took it round to various record stores | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
and two or three people at least told me | 0:46:39 | 0:46:42 | |
what I was doing already existed and it's called | 0:46:42 | 0:46:46 | |
gothic industrial ambient. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:49 | |
And it's a lot of fun, cos you get to scream and make noise. | 0:46:53 | 0:46:58 | |
LO-FI GUITAR | 0:46:58 | 0:47:04 | |
I think a lot of casual observation | 0:47:12 | 0:47:14 | |
of what he was doing in his later years was that, | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
"Oh, he was just kind of burnt out | 0:47:17 | 0:47:19 | |
"and upset with everyone and difficult to deal with | 0:47:19 | 0:47:22 | |
"and he played this kind of strange, abstract music | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
"as opposed to doing what he really could do." | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
That wasn't my experience with him. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:30 | |
My experience was that he was doing what he thought he should be doing, | 0:47:30 | 0:47:34 | |
because he perceived that the times were indicative | 0:47:34 | 0:47:38 | |
of this kind of presentation. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:41 | |
BLUES | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
This was another chapter of his creative life | 0:47:53 | 0:47:57 | |
that we wanted to bring to the forefront. | 0:47:57 | 0:48:00 | |
I've heard stories that he put paint on his feet, he'd spin on them | 0:48:00 | 0:48:04 | |
he'd take his shoes off and spin around on these works. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
Antifreeze, all these crazy materials. | 0:48:07 | 0:48:10 | |
I even heard one story that he would just drop trowel and spin around | 0:48:10 | 0:48:18 | |
with a naked backside and he called them ass paintings. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:22 | |
There you go, 45-H. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:26 | |
This one's signed twice. | 0:48:29 | 0:48:31 | |
This one says, "Tart" or "Jart 3". | 0:48:35 | 0:48:39 | |
There were just random little bits that he himself put on them | 0:48:39 | 0:48:43 | |
and when he was asked, "John, what are you doing?", | 0:48:43 | 0:48:46 | |
He's like, "This is what real artists do. | 0:48:46 | 0:48:48 | |
"They put things like this on the backs of their works, | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
"so that's what I'm doing." | 0:48:51 | 0:48:53 | |
Getting to know him, he was quite a complicated figure. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:57 | |
I don't think of him any longer in terms of being a musician per se. | 0:48:57 | 0:49:02 | |
I think of him more | 0:49:02 | 0:49:05 | |
as something of a sort of journeyman kind of thinker, | 0:49:05 | 0:49:12 | |
provocateur in the romantic mould. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:15 | |
SPOKEN WORD TO MUSIC: ..In life | 0:49:27 | 0:49:29 | |
and in death. | 0:49:29 | 0:49:31 | |
The Oregon capital... | 0:49:33 | 0:49:36 | |
He invited me out to Oregon where he was living - Woodburn, Oregon. | 0:49:39 | 0:49:45 | |
John Fahey living in the middle of nowhere in a one-room motel | 0:49:45 | 0:49:50 | |
Just the most vague stretch of highway, | 0:49:50 | 0:49:53 | |
the vaguest motel one could imagine. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:56 | |
One would never think that THE John Fahey | 0:49:56 | 0:49:58 | |
was living in that particular place. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:00 | |
His daily routine consisted of | 0:50:06 | 0:50:08 | |
looking for rare records in thrift stores | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
and anything else he could find with an interesting catalogue number | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
and bringing it back to his place, which was a bit of a dump, | 0:50:14 | 0:50:18 | |
and sort of leaving it in the corner and allowing it to gather dust | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
until some collector would call him up and say, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
"Hey, have you got this catalogue number?" | 0:50:25 | 0:50:28 | |
Fahey would miraculously say, "Yeah, I've got it." | 0:50:28 | 0:50:30 | |
We had arranged for the pick-up time. | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
He comes to the door and he's completely naked | 0:50:43 | 0:50:45 | |
and he's just standing there at the door and my brother tells me later, | 0:50:45 | 0:50:51 | |
I was trying to look away but I look inside and I see him | 0:50:51 | 0:50:56 | |
walking away from us, | 0:50:56 | 0:50:59 | |
his bare behind facing us and I see all these small, round, | 0:50:59 | 0:51:04 | |
brown tattoos on his back, and little by little the tattoos | 0:51:04 | 0:51:08 | |
dropped off and it was all the pennies and change. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:13 | |
He had rolled around on the bed in his nakedness | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
and everything stuck to him. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:18 | |
That just sort of summed up the guy. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:22 | |
He died at 61, | 0:51:33 | 0:51:35 | |
largely because he hadn't taken very good care of himself over the years, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
but I think if you had put the equation to him, | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
"Hey, this is the trade you're making. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
"You live the life you want... | 0:51:45 | 0:51:46 | |
"..but you're going to die at 6 ", | 0:51:48 | 0:51:51 | |
I think he would still have made the same choices. | 0:51:51 | 0:51:54 | |
SLIDE GUITAR MUSIC | 0:51:57 | 0:52:00 | |
For, lo, the winter is past, | 0:52:10 | 0:52:13 | |
the rain is over and gone... | 0:52:13 | 0:52:15 | |
..the flowers appear on the Earth, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:20 | |
the time of the singing of birds is come... | 0:52:20 | 0:52:22 | |
..and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
You can't get any more American than John Fahey in the sense that | 0:52:36 | 0:52:40 | |
he just took something that existed in our lineage | 0:52:40 | 0:52:44 | |
as Americans and American music | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
and tripped out somewhere along the line. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:49 | |
Went to outer space. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:50 | |
He's in his own bubble. | 0:52:50 | 0:52:52 | |
He claimed his space... | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
..and it feels as though he's not quite going to let it go. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:53:25 | 0:53:28 |