The first time I saw John Fahey play live, I wondered if he could play guitar at all. The second time I saw him, a few years later, it was one of the most revelatory solo guitar performances I had (or have) ever seen. I'll explain.

The first encounter was at the Berkeley Folk Festival, the afternoon of July 3, 1967, two days before my fourteenth birthday. As part of the festival, there was an "Electric Band Concert," free, in Pauley Ballroom on the U.C. campus. My brothers and I were there to see the James Cotton Blues Band and the group Kaleidoscope. But one of the other acts that day was Red Crayola, from Houston, quite possibly the most psychedelic band of the psychedelic era (and, as it turns out, perhaps the longest-lived underground band, in some form or another, still in existence).

The edition of Crayola that I saw consisted of an electric guitarist (Mayo Thompson) and an electric bassist (Steve Cunningham, I belive). To give you an idea of just how free-form the pair's free-form improvisations were, their "drummer" was a large block of ice that sat on a barbecue grate, a couple of feet above a sheet of aluminum foil, which was miked. As the stage lights slowly melted the ice, the drops would randomly drip onto the foil--psst, phftt . . . chhht-chth . . . thsst. Occasionally one of the human members of the trio would pick up a child's toy and squeek it a few times.

Then the group announced that joining them for the next number would be the great John Fahey, and there was much oohing and aahing from the hippie crowd, who were all a bit older than I. Fahey was handed a Rickenbacker electric (might have even been a 12-string) and took a seat next to the others. I knew something was amiss when he tried to get the guitar's strap to reach all the way to the Rick's headstock--before discovering that there was a strap button on the instrument's cutaway horn. He truly looked as though he'd never held an electric guitar.

Then he joined in the free-for-all, which was mostly sound effects--devoid of any discernible melody, structure or rhythm. At one point he got a laugh from the crowd when he took the microphone and slid it, face down, along the strings.

Well, Cotton, or at least Kaleidoscope, couldn't come on soon enough for this adolescent, who was shrugging, "The great John Fahey--right." (Incidentally, if you want to hear what I'm talking about, that very performance was released as part of a double-CD--ooh!--by Chicago's Drag City label, as Red Crayola, Live 1967. Be sure to listen for the "drummer.")

Then a couple of years later my high school girlfriend, who was far from a music "insider," stumbled onto Fahey's Vanguard album The Yellow Princess. I had to admit that on acoustic the guy could play, and I even found the musique concrete collages of guitar and taped sounds, like "The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee" interesting. (Thank you, Debbie Olson, wherever you are.)

A couple more years later I saw Fahey perform a second time, opening for Doc & Merle Watson at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium. He walked to the lone chair on the stage, carrying two guitar cases, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. Considerably paunchier than last I'd seen him, he bent over from the waist and opened one case rather awkwardly, then sat down--loosening his belt buckle for a little extra comfort--and cradled his 6-string in his customary left-knee position. He tuned up (probably to open C, judging by his recordings) and slowly started fingerpicking a few phrases. He'd tune a bit, pick, adjust a string, pick a little more rhythmically, until he had segued into an open-position pattern.

He gradually sped up the tempo and threw in more pull-offs, hammer-ons, and bends with his left hand, and a faster, steadier fingerpicking pattern with his right. Finally he was rolling along like a freight train, but he still hadn't left the I chord. For a good four or five minutes, he kept up this locomotive pattern, with increasing variations and embellishments.

Then all at once--VOOMH--he shifted his index finger up and barred across the 5th fret, getting louder, more powerful, maybe a hair faster. And he stayed up there, doing the same thing--rolling along, adding little phrases, but concentrating on that rhythm.

Then he went back to open position, his head bobbing side to side, as he kept gaining momentum. Open position, open position--for literally minutes on end. And--VOOMH--the train shot up to the 7th fret this time.

"That sonofabitch," I thought, "he's playing a 12-bar blues." Except instead of it being a blues in 12-bar stanzas, it was a 240-bar blues, or a 480-bar blues--or maybe a 377-bar blues--lasting about twenty-five minutes or so. But absolutely a blues, as deep and personal as any with words--possibly more so, because he was saying it all with his guitar.

Without a word to the audience, he switched to playing slide on his acoustic Hawaiian lap steel for the second (and last) tune of the set, which I later recognized as "Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Phillip XIV of Spain" (Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes, 1963.) The mood was similar to the first, an extended study in economy, dynamics, theme-and-variations--and how all of those elements can convey expression and feeling.

I left that night convinced I'd seen two guitar virtuosos (Doc and Merle) and one musical genius (John Fahey). On February 22, the world lost that genius, when he died in Salem, Oregon, two days after having sextuple bypass surgery. He was not quite 62.

For the most complete and up-to-date story of Fahey's life--from his 1964 quest for blues singer Skip James to his "lost years" during the 1980s, suffering from alcoholism and Epstein-Barr virus, to his 1997 comeback experimenting with industrial sounds and his co-founding of the indie Revenant label, which released the fantastic Harry Smith Archives, Vol. 4 anthology of American folk music--I strongly recommend reading Edwin Pouncey's cover story for Wire magazine (August '98), which can be linked to by going to www.johnfahey.com. I can only add and/or repeat a few facts and personal observations here.

[Photograph by Tim Owen]

Part traditionalist, part experimentalist, Fahey was one of the true originals in the world of guitar--on the same level as a unique stylist (I'm not comparing technical skill here) as, say, Django Reinhardt, Merle Travis, Chuck Berry, T-Bone Walker and very few others. As musicologist Barry Hansen (aka "Dr. Demento") pointed out, Fahey "was the first to demonstrate that the fingerpicking techniques of traditional country and blues steel-string guitar could be used to express a world of nontraditional musical ideas, harmonies and melodies you'd associate with Bartok, Charles Ives or maybe the music of India."

In 1992, the best-known graduate of the school that Fahey founded (termed "American primitive guitar"), Leo Kottke, said, "John is one of the heroes of whatever this country has for a culture. What made John available to everybody was a point of view that really didn't exist before he came along. He kind of invented the audience for solo steel-string guitar playing and the industry behind it." (Acoustic Guitar)

Guitarist Will Ackerman, regarded as the father of New Age music and founder of the label synonymous with that genre, stated that "without the example of John Fahey, I could never have gotten to Turtle's Navel or the concept of Windham Hill." Indeed, the guitarist's (and the label's) 1976 debut owed its title to Fahey's fascination with turtles, much of its guitaristic approach to Fahey's impressionistic style, and its do-it-yourself spirit to the label Fahey co-founded in 1959, Takoma Records. (Ackerman has always credited Robbie Basho, a subsequent Takoma artist, as his biggest influence, but songs such as "The Pink Chiffon Tricyle Queen" and "The Rediscovery of Big Bug Creek, Arizona," the latter from Will's follow-up, It Takes A Year, are pure Fahey, not to mention song titles like "The Second Great Tortion Bar Overland of West Townshend, Vermont, Joe Pepsi Attending" and the self-penned, hysterically sardonic liner notes of his early albums--another thing Fahey was the master of.)

The 1973 debut album by Windham Hill's (and New Age's) biggest star, pianist George Winston, was produced by Fahey, for Takoma (as was Leo Kottke's 6 And 12 String Guitar two years earlier). In fact, Winston met Ackerman when he gave him a copy of another Fahey/Takoma gem, Ocean Waves, by Brazilian guitar great Bola Sete. (Incidentally, Fahey wrote a wonderfully passionate article on Sete for the January '76 issue of Guitar Player. Find it on microfilm or something.) Winston said, "John Fahey did everything I wanted to do, from playing solo concerts to starting my own label, and became my main mentor, role model, influence and inspiration."

But, while Fahey may have spawned some of the seminal figures of the New Age movement, he wasn't part of the movement himself. In fact, he was alternately amused by (and maybe bemused) and disdainful of any connection to it. No, Fahey may have ventured into trance-inducing ragas, but his music always had a sharp edge to it; it wouldn't have sold well in hair salons or plant stores. And whereas Windham Hill eventually sought to add artists that would conveniently fit under the same sonic umbrella--so that an "Evening With Windham Hill" concert wouldn't jar its patrons too much--Takoma seemed aimed at an audience of one, its founder, releasing albums by forgotten bluesmen like Bukka White and Robert Pete Williams, along with destined-to-sell-100-units items by Eddie "One-String" Jones and The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing. (Conversely, he later embraced the industrial school led by devotee Thurston Moore, guitarist of Sonic Youth, and added his own two-cents to that movement with 1997's City of Refuge. And his influence amongst guitarists was by no means limited to a couple of specific genres. As free improvisationalist Henry Kaiser states, "I was influenced by his concepts of harmony as color or timbre, of instrumental music with deep meaning, of elastic tempos, and of pure American guitar.")

My personal favorites in the prolific Fahey catalog change according to my mood. And since hearing of his death, certain albums and tracks naturally stand out in the steady stream that's been coming out of my stereo. A few I'd like to share with you are: his 1959 debut LP, on which he shared billing with his black bluesman alter ego, Blind Joe Death, and which he re-recorded twice (in 1964 and 1967); his various trademark versions of "In Christ There Is No East or West"; his extremely short and sad version of "Silent Night" on 1968's The New Possibility (one of the best Christmas albums ever made, illustrating that alternate arrangements can be appropriate, too); "Praying on the Old Campground," from 1969's Memphis Swamp Jam (credited to R.L Watson and Josiah Jones, but in fact duets of Fahey and guitarist Bill Barth); "Night Train to Valhalla" (from 1967's Days Are Gone By, because it reminds me a little of the rhythm I saw him picking at Stanford (as does "Yellow Princess," from the album of the same name, 1969); his understated slide work of "Steamboat Gwine 'Round de Bend," from 1972's Of Rivers and Religion; his sentimental renditions of oldies like "Don't" and "Sea of Love," from 1992's Old Girlfriends and Other Horrible Memories; "Requiem for John Hurt" and his touching paragraph on the bluesman (Requia, 1968); the version of "Poor Boy" from The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965), where he stops to shush his barking dog, then continues playing; his duet with Terry Robb on "Layla" (Let Go, 1984); and finally the simple beauty and feeling in "Yes, Jesus Loves Me," from the album of the same name (1980).

At last count, my collection of LPs and CDs by this eccentric guitarist whom I'd initially written off numbers 32. I wish I had even more, and I'm sure that I will. But more important, I wish he were still around to play more concerts and record more albums.

(C) 2001 - Dan Forte

[Ed.Note: You will find the John Fahey website at www.johnfahey.com.]