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Roads less traveled
Remembering John Fahey
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

It’s almost impossible to write about John Fahey’s music without mythologizing its maker. The guitarist/composer, who passed away during bypass surgery in February 2001, seemed to move in a sonic universe of his own making; it’s as misleading to call his work "folk" or "bluegrass" as it would be to call Sun Ra’s "bebop." His cranky, faux academic liner notes and personal habits have become part of his legend as well; he dismayed friends and fans with his flophouse lifestyle and his penchant for pawning his guitar. Fahey did help found Takoma Records, an early artist-run independent, in the ’60s; decades later, he used an inheritance windfall to seed Revenant, releasing music by fellow "American primitives" (his preferred term) from Dock Boggs to Charley Patton to the Bassholes.

Red Cross (Revenant) is the first collection of unreleased Fahey material to appear since his death. In an accompanying essay, sometime collaborator Glenn Jones (of Cul de Sac) attempts to eulogize Fahey without making him larger than life. He doesn’t quite succeed: "John Fahey paid a price for the only life he knew how to live." Ultimately, it falls to these late — last? — recordings to say what needs to be said, and the disc does just that.

Some tracks return to subgenres Fahey pioneered: "Charley Bradley’s Ten-Sixty-Six Blues" is a country-blues suite; "Motherless Child" reharmonizes a venerable American spiritual. Others serve as reminders of his breadth. The title track is dedicated to Guitar Roberts, a/k/a/ avant-bluesman Loren Mazzacane-Conners, and it conjures his slurred, ghostly playing. The Eastern-influenced "Ananaias" finds Fahey working outside his customary harmonic boundaries. Most poignant are two readings of Tin Pan Alley chestnuts: Gershwin’s "Summertime" and Irving Berlin’s "Remember." In each case, he simply runs through the refrain a few times. The phrasing and dynamics barely change, but you can hear Fahey gradually settling in, listening harder and feeling more at each go-round. On "Remember," his stately, almost nostalgic performance conveys something of the song’s absent lyrics: "You promised that you’d forget me not/But you forgot/To remember."

Few would wish to emulate John Fahey’s life; his playing is another matter. Consider Steffen Basho-Junghans, who has released several solo acoustic albums via the Portland (Oregon) label Strange Attractors Audio House. Actually, Fahey isn’t the German-born guitarist’s main man; he attached "Basho" to his name as a tribute to Takoma labelmate Robbie Basho, the alleged "father of American raga." Still, "The Takoma Bridge Incident," from the recent Rivers and Bridges, demands to be heard as a memorial. The piece moves through meandering modal passages, insistent displays of a single dissonant chord, and, toward the end, a reeling double-time breakdown. At 17 minutes, it’s as diffuse and hypnotic as Fahey’s 1965 epic "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party."

Elsewhere, the elegantly plucked "Rainbow Dancing" evokes Fahey’s rustic, jamming-on-the-porch side. What Basho-Junghans never captures is the essential simplicity of his predecessor’s music. As Glenn Jones points out, Fahey was a harsh judge of his own early recordings, dismissing many as "pretentious, or shallow and show-offy." As he developed, he grew more willing to suppress some of his considerable technical skill in the pursuit of emotional directness; Basho-Junghans never does. Rivers and Bridges may be more cleanly executed than the raggedy Red Cross, but it’s also less viscerally satisfying.

If Basho-Junghans’s disc exemplifies Fahey’s importance at the new-age end of the spectrum, M. Ward’s Transfiguration of Vincent (Merge) shows the impact of his mid-’90s rehabilitation on American indiedom. Ward is a singer-songwriter at heart, but he’s also an adept finger picker, and each of his three solo discs has included a few instrumental nods to the master. The current release has fewer than usual: only the opening "Transfiguration, No. 1" and the bluegrassy "Duet for Guitars, No. 3" seem openly Faheyesque. Ward has done the work needed to learn the style, but he’s not an acoustic purist, and he combines the influence with that of other farther figures: Howe Gelb (who appears on one track here) is his vocal model, and "Get to the Table on Time" is a Basement Tapes–era Dylan goof.

Ward has mastered one other feature of Fahey’s work: his self-mythologizing. Ward’s best songs ("Poor Boy, Minor Key") are often about playing music. On one, he asks his doctor, his mother, and a killer whale how to get his lover back. Each time, the answer comes: "Make her sad, make her sad, play a sad, sad song." But his idea of what counts as a sad, sad song is curious: the disc’s penultimate track is a cover of Bowie’s "Let’s Dance" slowed to a Smoggy crawl. Although the high notes ("And tremble like a flower") are beyond his reach, Ward still finds surprising emotional depths in this seemingly disposable pop tune. Does that make "Let’s Dance" the "Remember" of 1983? Check back in about 80 years.

Issue Date: May 9 - 15, 2003
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