FAHEY JOHN, AMERICAN PRIMITIVE GUITAR. In Christ There Is No East Or West -Take A Look At That Baby -Some Summer Day -Indian Pacific Railroad Blues -The Last Steam Engine Train -When The Springtime Comes Again -The Approaching Of The Disco Void. SHEET MUSIC BOOK WITH 3CD & GUITAR TABLATURE.
LIBRO DI MUSICA ACUSTICA, CON 3 CD.
SPARTITI PER CHITARRA CON :
ACCORDI PENTAGRAMMA, TABLATURE.
... in roots music as a living, breathing thing rather than a museum piece. Industrial guitar grind dominates City Of Refuge, bathyspherelike booms echo through Womblife. White gamelan sounds reverberate through The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones. Such experimentation might have isolated him from his peers through most of the last 30 years, but in the 90s he has discovered an affinity with the ever expanding global underground communitY. "I didn't know there was an alternative movement going," Fahey admits, "so I just kept trying to create similar things to the old. I was aware that there had been an experimental movement in the 60s with John Cage and his followers, but thought they had all gone. Then some friends introduced me to Sonic Youth. Until then I didn't know what was going on.
"As defined by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, this "alternative movement" was out of a desire for music resistant to "commodification", be it noise, lo-fi, 20th century experimental music and improv, or global and rediscovered American roots musics like bluegrass, folk and blues.
John Fahey's work feeds the new underground spirit on a number of counts, while Revenant - the label Fahey co-owns with his manager, the Nashville-based attorney Dean Blackwood - alerts new audiences to a hidden history of American music, retrieved from the tiny regional labels scattered across its rural hinterlands.
The surprising success of the six CD box set reissue of rogue archivist Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music (for which Fahey supplied award-winning sleevenotes) attests to a desire for music that emerges from and addresses real experiences rather than a marketing man's business plan. The Revenant archive releases, meanwhile, vividly recast the past not as nostalgia but as American Primitive or Raw Music. "It was Dean's idea to do that," Fahey modestly states, "but I provided most of the information, together with this collector called Gayle Dean Wardlow. Now that the American Primitive thing is catching on we'll do more. People love the title" The range of his enthusiasms combined with the breadth of his own music make Fahey a vital link connecting today's underground with a century of raw and experimental musics. For his part, he is only too pleased to be working within his newly adopted alternative music 'community'. His instant conversion has already produced one of its finest works in The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones, which teamed John with the Massachusetts post-rockers Cui De Sac, led by Glenn Jones. The title refers obliquely to the project's unpromising start as a "retro lounge music" session - quickly aborted - which Jones's sleeve notes describe as being akin to taking part In some "hellish sensory deprivation experiment". Was working with Fahey really that bad?
The guitarist chuckles mischievously: "Glenn told me after the Epiphany that he had got on a power trip. It had happened to him before, only he hadn't realized it. He did things like not letting me meet the other members of the band until the recording sessions, all kinds of tricks, so that he could remain ultimate dictator of Cui De Sac and the project. But that's an old battle, Glenn's a friend of mine and it came out OK."
AMERICAN PSYCHO
When Fahey was venting his disgust for his 60s recordings earlier on, he went at them with a ferocity out of all proportion to the quality of music. His negative attitude hinted that something deeper was going down than a mature reappraisal of his youthful endeavours. Eventually, his hostility relents, and the negativity lets up long enough to reveal the pain at its source.
"Mainly it's a parental situation:' Fahey explains, washing down more popcorn with gulps of sweet iced tea. "I was writing these things as an escape, as a possible way to make money. The sentiments expressed come out of a messed up situation. I was creating for myself an imaginary, beautiful world and pretending that I lived there, but I didn't feel beautiful. I was mad but I wasn't aware of it. I was also very sad, afraid and lonely. By presenting this so-called beautiful facade I looked good to myself and my audience.
"This went on for years," he continues. "I always tried to put a peaceful element into the music, but it was false because I was not at peace. I didn't know what 1was doing and felt pretty phony. I didn't understand any of this until I had psychoanalysis."
Entering psychoanalysis in the mid-80s helped him exorcise the past. "Before psychoanalysis:' Fahey recalls, "I used to accidentally get so high on prescription drugs and booze that, sometimes, I wouldn't show up for a show. Or I'd be there and not know it. For a while I thought 1was going insane. People would tell me I did these crazy things, but I didn't attribute it to the Quaaludes I was taking so that the memories of my father abusing me as a child wouldn't come back."
In taking Fahey back to the source of his traumas psychoanalysis invested the innocent symbols he had carried over from his childhood with sinister new meanings. Out of a boy's fascination with turtles and tortoises, he had elaborated a personal mythology based on the reptiles, using them as a repeat motif anchoring his art and discography in his childhood.
Under analysis he recalled how he burst out screaming when he first saw a turtle. "When I was about four or five years old I saw what I thought was a penis walking across the front lawn:' he shudders. "It was just a box turtle, but it kind of upset me ..."
Analysis related the encounter to the memory of being sexually molested by his father. "The obsession comes from the psychic meaning of turtles, reptiles and amphibians. In dreams they symbolize genitalia. That's why I went to a psychoanalyst because I had all these repressed memories." The unifying visual motif of his personal mythology and extensive discography turned out to be the corrupting agent of their potential destruction all alone. Remarkably, coming to terms with the full horror of such a revelation marked the beginning of Fahey's 90s regeneration.
AMERICAN PRIMITIVE
John Fahey was born on 28 February 1939 and spent most of his childhood in Takoma Park, Maryland, a small town on the outskirts of Washington DC. His early musical training was at once formal and frustrating. His parents occasionally took him to see 50s bluegrass stars like The Stanley Brothers, whose early recordings Fahey would later reissue on Revenant. But though he grew up with Country & Western and bluegrass, his first instrument was a clarinet. He abandoned it at 14 when he bought his first guitar, a $17 Sears And Roebuck special, with money earned from his newspaper round. After teaching himself to pick his way through the Eddy Arnold songbook, the young, lonely and slightly crazy guitar player decided it was time to start writing his own material. The year was 1954, and Elvis Presley was just beginning to make waves in America. If the young Fahey readily embraced the ...
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