Why is John Fahey So Boring?

i think fahey is both mechanical & meandering. as the exemplar of extreme repetitive finger-picking patterns & alternating basslines, he has a mechanical quality, his right hand an unstoppable piston looping endlessly w/ minimal left hand work. cf. night train of valhalla, on the beach at waikiki, sun gonna shine in my backdoor someday blues, america... ppl like harris newman & leo kottke have extended this, but it's all from him.

he is also the consummate meanderer imo, a flaneur in his mental archive, recycling himself & others, inventing 12 minute intros to 4 minute songs &c. all that meandering is context tho, it ebbs, builds, & allows him to do things like slam down a rendition of camptown races as a triumphant, glistening, unstoppable finishing move.

always meant to hear Harris Newman. Ogmor, how do you rate him? I'm skeptical of the Constellation crowd and always confuse him with Frankie Sparo for some reason, but I hear he's done some worthwhile stuff.

harris newman plays standing up! i think he's underrated, he did some cool stuff. perhaps constellation association, and mb things like having star wars references for track names put some ppl off. he could play very fast, w/ very neat, clean timing, giving it a kind of hard swing. maybe it's just me but i think he is also audibly from the North, you can hear the cold steel in those strings, there are lots of tssty harmonies/dissonances in there, as well as more of yr standard constellation ghost-in-a-rusting-junkyard vibe on some of his slide stuff&duets. he has some really nice bass lines which he tends to deploy under fast droning notes, sort of like a dead-eyed viking maybelle carter.

his first album is mb a bit rougher, but i like his second record, accidents with nature and each other, after that he seems to have started to recycle himself.

...he is also audibly from the North, you can hear the cold steel in those strings, there are lots of tssty harmonies/dissonances in there, as well as more of yr standard constellation ghost-in-a-rusting-junkyard vibe on some of his slide stuff&duets. he has some really nice bass lines which he tends to deploy under fast droning notes, sort of like a dead-eyed viking maybelle carter.

Sold! Thanks. You oughta write press releases!

all jobs considered.

can't find it on youtube but my single track recommendation wld be "cloud city" from accidents

On it. There's a used coy of that album at my local shop, going there for labor day sale tomorrow, will pick it up. Thanks again.

if i knew dude wrote songs with star wars referencing titles i would have been buying his records like, years ago!

Have you heard his rendition of the Cantina Theme? Twelve minutes if meandering introduction followed by a machine-like rendition of the main theme. Jaw dropping.

lol, i feel like this is almost worth writing

just trying to fit my head back together after reading that Cantina Theme thing thinking it was about Fahey.

if you listen to in a persian market & do whatever the aural equivalent of squinting is, you won't be too far off

a fairly big fahey piece in the guardian in advance of a bbc screening of the documentary:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/26/john-fahey-blues-folk-guitar-pioneer

Fahey's so much better than any Brautigan I've ever read that fuck me like fried potatoes I don't like seeing the two linked.

half expect "fuck me liked fried potatoes" to be some reference to a song in the pop charts right now

agree about the brautigan thing, but that's not as terrible as i was expecting

uk tv alert: just remembered the fahey doc is on tonight @ 11.00 bbc4

R. Crumb didn't think he was boring: "John Fahey – he was a crazy asshole. A psycho."

i know i am the biggest fahey fanboy but i am really enjoying this. having a hot friday night in naming all the tracks as they show up.

omg this footage of him making fun of stefan grossman! aaah i need to record this.

glad i saw that but shit it's left me feeling sad about fahey now

i have felt v sad about fahey in the past, but now watching this, and especially seeing new footage of fahey, is just really exciting.

this was much better than the trailer led me expect! i thought it was balanced, didn't leave anything really major out or get anything really wrong, and handled his personal struggles really well. there got some great talking heads too: very cool to see terry robb interviewed, as well as barry hansen, melody fahey, keith from nnck, even pete townshend's bit was sweet. if it was half an hour longer there could have been more stuff about takoma records, bola sete, kottke, basho, some stuff about his writing, something on the records themselves, the liner notes & all the mythology, and if there'd been some more musical analysis, at least a bit about open tunings, finger-picking &c., that would have been cool. but, as someone who never met him but has consumed pretty much all the widely available material on him, i thought it gave a really good sense of him and i had an awesome time watching it.

Watched this half-asleep (its been a tough week). Like how there were a few readings from his books...possibly enjoy that more than the music. I felt like listening to Charley Patton a lot more than Fahey by the end.

The mocking attitude towards blues/collectors could've made the Blues doc that was on earlier in the eve a much more enjoyable experience, unlike the usual bore-fest that it was.

Didn't know Fahey was even that much of a name so that Townsend knew about him - thought he got him 'wrong' when he was describing the sensibility. Seems as if Indian Raga is a big component of what he does, not much 'rock n' roll' there at all, and by drawing on ancient court music it is THAT where the association to 'primitive' actually makes sense to me.

When is the Loren Connors doc being shown then?

I guess I'll see this when it comes out on DVD.

what i didn't quite get was why did robbie basho give fahey a copy of tommy, and why did fahey then feel compelled to send townsend a postcard about it, even though he didn't like it much? i guess they'd been corresponding prior to that or something

some of my favourite bits were just the music set to nature footage - sligo river blues and a burbling woodland stream. i could watch that stuff all day, very film national film board of canada

just remembered him using the soundhole on his guitar as an ashtray during that tv interview

ha yeah i loved that. and when he talked about the death of the clayton peacock and then the interviewer was like 'and so you wrote a song about it' and he said 'well, no, but it makes a good story'

went back & watched the first 10 minutes I missed which addresses some of what I was saying re:mythology, writing, records. the interview witb nancy mclean was interesting. I wonder if they approached other ppl like pat sullivan, dick spottswood. I don't know if there'll be abother opportunity to get those ppl on record

another

Did they talk to Leo Kottke or Peter Lang?

just remembered him using the soundhole on his guitar as an ashtray during that tv interview

Where was that interview from? And when? Mid-to-late 60s? Mind somewhat blown by the idea that John Fahey got invited on a television show in the 60s at all, the film was Canadian so maybe it was a Canadian TV show? Also the footage from Rockpalast, where he didn't look anything like himself!

Oh man, not sure when I will get to watch this, but sounds overall pretty damn cool. Thanks for the run-downs.

no kottke or lang. the fahey interview with laura weber is from "guitar, guitar", which you can get on dvd from stefan grossmans site. She's a slightly obnoxious presence but fahey's in his absolute prime & his playing is great.

Didn't know Fahey was even that much of a name so that Townsend knew about him -

I might have the chronology wrong here, but Townshend's art school roommate was an American with a huge record collection which, in addition to records by Ray Charles, Jimmy Reed, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, included a copy of Blind Joe Death.

ah, that would make sense.

i guess between us we could come up with a pretty big list of who and what was missing but i guess that no mention of the christmas stuff is a surprise. i don't know how much fahey fans rate those albums, but i was always led to believe that they're his biggest selling records by a long shot. is that right?

btw there's a youtube playlist with the whole of his rockpalast performance right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReW9uUYm-DA&list=PL0FB3153C659FD414

oh, that didn't work did it? go here instead

My first exposure to Fahey, back in the 80s, was to his Christmas albums and Live in Tasmania, and I think that was it. At this point I find his Christmas music genuinely boring (unlike most of his other output). But it makes sense that his Christmas albums would sell well, because I think Christmas albums sell well in general. (See all the well past their prime salseros who put out Christmas albums practically every year!)

If I heard him on the radio at that time (not impossible given the expansive playlist available on University of Pennsylvania's radio station back then), it didn't register with me. These were albums a friend owned.

But it makes sense that his Christmas albums would sell well, because I think Christmas albums sell well in general.

Yeah, pretty sure Low's biggest seller is their Christmas one too!

not much 'rock n' roll' there at all,

I don't think Townshend literally meant that Fahey was a rock 'n' roll guitarist (whatever that is), but that Fahey shared much of that music's techniques and, to a degree, sensibilities.

I think "the new possibility" sold upwards of 100,000 copies. takoma didn't keep records, fahey speculated that it cld have sold a million but really no one knows

That's kinda weak that they didn't bother to talk to Lang or Kottke, not like they would be hard to reach. Peter has tons of amazing tour stories, personal stuff

(Why I continue visiting ILM: I can toggle back and forth between a disco poll and a John Fahey thread.)

Anyone else think it odd that Jim O'Rourke wasn't interviewed for this? Maybe he was asked and turned it down, but I always assumed Jim played a significant role in Fahey's late-90s re-emergence.

no thurston moore, byron coley or glenn jones either, though the last was thanked in the credits

I'm ok with at least one music doc a year that doesn't have Thurston and rollins

there's loads of ppl they could have had for this. i thought having keith from nnck as a representative of that era was pretty good. a lot of the guys we're talking about are in the public eye a lot and have gone on record about fahey a few times, if they could have gotten more interviews i would have loved to have seen pat sullivan or dick spottswood or ed denson.. esp as pat sullivan seems to have helped fahey write a bit of his early output.

So I see this is out on DVD already. Anyone know if there are extras? Is this a 'one and done' kinda thing I should get from Netflix or something I'm gonna wanna own? On the Fahey freak scale I'm probably a 9 and a half, but I never watch DVDs more than once...

quoth some guy on amazon:

The DVD comes with a LOT of bonuses, making this package even more of a “must own”. For starters there are the extra interviews. We hear from Chris Funk (the Decemberists) (6 minutes), Dean Blackwood (co-founder of Revenant Records) (14 minutes) and Pete Townshend (The Who, as if you didn’t know) whose interview runs 31 minutes! Next comes about 45 minutes of performances by Funk, George Winston (on piano and harmonica) Stefan Grossman, Fahey himself and four others. The bonuses finish with a four part interview with Fahey from 1999 (12 minutes).
The package even go so far as to include a Fahey Discography (just album title and year, though) and a two-item Bibliography.

that's probably every thought pete townshend has ever had about john fahey. i suspect the '99 interview is the full version of one they show a clip or two from in the film, which is in the middle here -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZl5DaXl-VI

which is from the stefan grossman dvd i mentioned upthread. i think this may now have been repackaged - http://www.guitarvideos.com/products/vestapol-dvds/guitar-artistry-of-john-fahey-on-dvd - but used to look like this - http://www.amazon.com/John-Fahey-In-Concert/dp/B00016XN0M

fahey's right hand in the 69 footage is mesmerising, it seems kind of muscular, not especially elegant, but he's very controlled, wrist kind of locked down, not really moving that much. later clips he seems a bit looser