Fahey John - Dance of death: the life of John Fahey, American guitarist

JOHN FAHEY hovers ghostlike in the sound of almost every acoustic guitarist who came after him, from Leo Kottke to Jimmy Page. In essence, John Fahey is to the solo acoustic guitar what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric: the man whom all subsequent musicians had to listen to.

Fahey made close to forty albums between 1959 and his death in 2001, most of them featuring only his solo steel-string guitar. He fused elements of folk, blues, and experimental composition, taking familiar American sounds and recontextualizing them as something entirely new. His artistic voice transformed the cultural landscape of his timeand ours.

Yet despite his stature as a groundbreaking visionary, Faheys intentions as a man and as an artistremain largely unexamined. His memoir, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, was largely fiction; his liner notes were full of half-truths. John Faheys real story has never been tolduntil now.

Journalist Steve Lowenthal has spent years researching Faheys life and music, talking with his producers, his friends, his peers, his wives, his business partners, and many others. He describes how Fahey introduced prewar blues records and the men who made them to a broader public; how his independent label Takoma set new standards; how he battled his demons, including stage fright, alcohol, and prescription pills; how he ended up homeless and mentally unbalanced; and how, despite his troubles, he managed to found a new record label, Revenant, that won Grammys and remains critically revered.

This portrait of a troubled and troubling man in a constant state of creative flux is the compelling story of a great American outcast.

Copyright 2014 by Steve Lowenthal

Foreword copyright 2014 by David Fricke

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-519-9

All written material by John Fahey used by permission of the copyright holder and in cooperation with his estate.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lowenthal, Steve.

Dance of death : the life of John Fahey, American guitarist / Steve Lowenthal.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-519-9

1. Fahey, John, 1939-2001. 2. GuitaristsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

ML419.F35L69 2014

787.87092dc23

[B]

2014007354

Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

Index

I saw John Fahey in performance only once, very late in his journey through American blues, roots, and expressive mysteryin the late 1990s, only a few years before his death, at a New York club, Tramps. It was a telling measure of the guitarists cult heroism and odyssey of troubles to that point: the room was packed with older fans, recent devotees, and alternative-rock cachetI stood against a wall near the low, small stage with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and Faheys great critic-champion in that decade, Byron Coley. But that night, Fahey was an opening act, warming up the room for another dogged, gifted folk-blues survivor, John Hammond Jr. History was in the house, in abundance. Fortune determined the billing.

Faheys set was a rare local sighting. It also came with baggage and warning. Faheys poetic facility and improvisational briothe soul and dazzle of his routinely breathtaking 1960s recordingshad suffered through neglect, ill health, poverty, and his long, perverse war with celebrity and public admiration. And Faheywho infused the acoustic guitar with a pioneering, orchestral luminescence and storytelling articulation on (to name just a handful of diamonds) 1965s The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, 1968s The Yellow Princess, and the 68 Christmas present The New Possiblitywas playing a Strato-caster, casting rippled shadows of digital delay across his recent electric minimalism, bossa nova sway, and suite-like wandering.

The effect was at once discomfiting and hypnotizing, a quietly insistent contradiction of Faheys history and legend, bound up in a music that felt like he was talking to himself in a crush of strangers. I watched and listened with keen, grateful acceptance, privileged to be so close to a figure of such revolutionary passion and fusion. I also knew that Faheys storied virtuosityhis unprecedented advance in the 1960s through pioneer folk, Delta blues, and advanced classical harmonies, with complex fingerpicking grace and velocity, to an invention he wryly dubbed American Primitive Guitarwas not coming back again.

The music he played at Tramps was, nevertheless, classic Fahey: aggressive in its striving, beautiful in its deep hurt and candor. There were outbursts over misfiring gear and odd, digressive banter. There was consistency too. Faheys lifelong evasion of convention and expectation, on his most eccentric and sublime albums, was just as true that night, in his playing, manner, and, after the last note, vanishing. I never saw Fahey in his generally acknowledged prime. But I witnessed the impulse, challenge, and restless artistry at their purest, just in time.

I would have liked more, earlier. Fahey never made it easy. In 1970a little over a decade into his recording career, right as I was discovering the strange, colorful lore and intimate force of his 1968 album The Voice of the Turtle in the library at my campus radio station, Fahey already sounded like a magus at a crossroadsitching for a fight, lost in his work, desperate for peacein the opening line of his first Rolling Stone article: I just want to make a whole bunch of money so I can pay my psychiatric bills. Even in the best of times, Fahey toured irregularly, elevating and taunting his audiences in equal measure, with a peculiar sense of geography and occasion.

Faheys descent, by the early 1990s, into itinerant destitution a compound product of alcoholism, failed relationships, and the Epstein-Barr virus, which struck the energy and precision of his playing to a severe, permanent degreeironically mirrored the lives of those prewar blues and country singers and specters that Fahey studied and loved on the way to his own records and a UCLA masters degree in folklore and mythology. But Fahey had cultivated anonymity from the start. Half of the original pressing of his self-released 1959 debut, John Fahey / Blind Joe Death, was credited to a pseudonymous bluesman, a mask Fahey often used later for both retreat and fun. After Faheys death in 2001, his friend and collaborator Barry Hansena.k.a. Dr. Dementopointed out to me that three of the tracks on The Voice of the Turtle, my entrance into Faheys music, were old blues 78s that Fahey dubbed from the shellac and credited on the album to Blind Joe Death. To Fahey, that wasnt deceit; it was a pranksters homage.

Fahey was no Delta ghost; he grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, in a troubled household, under emotional-combat conditions. He was an enterprising loner. Fahey started his own label, Takoma, named after the old neighborhood, to release John Fahey / Blind Joe Death and sold copies at the Maryland gas station where he worked, between filling cars. He also slipped copies of the album into local thrift and record stores, making it seem as if the LP had arrived by vapor, under cover of darknessa prophetic gesture for a man who made most of his music away from the mainstream industry, slipping in and out of earshot, always in some kind of motion or flight. Even as he entered the world, with that first album, Fahey was expert in the guile of exile.