E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mystery man Unraveling guitarist John Fahey on DVD BY TED DROZDOWSKI

John Fahey remains an enigma to most listeners, if he’s on their radar at all. Even to the guitarists who make up much of his avid body of fans, he’s something of a riddle. His career is marked by long stretches of disappearance and obscurity. And when he resurfaced in his final years to take control of a record label once again and occasionally to return to the stage, with his hefty belly, dark sunglasses, and farmer’s beard he resembled more the mythic bluesman Blind Joe Death — a pseudonym under which he recorded early in his career — than the slim, somewhat smug six-string innovator who emerged in the ‘60s.

We see both Faheys in the new DVD John Fahey in Concert and Interviews: 1969 & 1996 (Vestapol/Rounder). And though this entry in the Fahey catalogue renders him no less enigmatic, it does provide an up-close look at elements of his style not accessible through his recordings. The first segment, from ‘69, is from a TV show called Guitar, Guitar. At that point, Fahey was a razor-thin young man who resembled the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith and carried himself with an air of superiority, convinced he was pioneering a trail that led to a highly original and expressive style.

He was right on that count. And the Guitar, Guitar footage shows that his compass was his right hand, which picked chords and spare melodies that extended the sounds and tunings he’d learned from the recordings of Delta bluesman Charley Patton and other heroes like country musicians Maybelle Carter and Sylvester Weaver into an original fusion with elements of European classical music. Speaking with the show’s host, Laura Weber, he cites in particular the bold colors of Béla Bartók’s compositions. It’s surprising how little his left-hand chording changes as he runs through five numbers, including the pastoral "In Christ There Is No East or West" and an original medley, playing in dropped-D, open-D, and open-G tunings. That’s a quality Fahey’s premier inheritor, Leo Kottke, shares with his mentor today.

Fahey’s Guitar, Guitar appearance came a decade after he’d begun his recording career as a DIY pioneer, pressing 95 copies of his debut album and attributing part of it to the bluesman persona he fabricated, Blind Joe Death. He’d re-record the material in the ‘60s when he created his Takoma label, which took its name from his home town, Takoma Park in Maryland. He sold Takoma to Chrysalis Records in the mid ‘70s after launching the careers of Robbie Basho, Kottke, and other pickers and documenting a style that would eventually inspire Windham Hill label founder Will Ackerman and influence such diverse guitarists as the Magic Band’s Gary Lucas, the late Michael Hedges, and Cul de Sac’s Glenn Jones. In the ‘90s, many of Fahey’s seminal recordings, including his entries as Blind Joe Death, became available again when he co-founded the Revenant label. But before that, he went through more than a decade of personal hell. He grappled with depression and diabetes and poverty and a bout with the energy-sapping Epstein-Barr Syndrome.

Although his health was weakened and his body bloated by the time he appeared at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley in 1996, much of the worst was behind him. And somehow, it appears in the eight-song performance captured here on film, he’d managed to grow as a musician through his turbulent times. What’s striking about this set is the depth of his harmonic constructions, which were almost absent in the Guitar, Guitar renditions and his earlier records. Again, most of the action is in Fahey’s right hand, but his way with lightly droning sustained chords is mesmerizing.

Further insights into Fahey’s attitude about his music are afforded by the brief interview that follows the performance footage. In assessing his early days, he states that "everybody else was trying to copy folk music, but I never tried to do that. How could I be a ‘folk’? I was born in the suburbs." More telling is his observation that "mostly I was trying to express my negative emotions, like depression and rage, like Stan Kenton did — who I still love."

Maybe he was putting us on about vanilla jazz bandleader Kenton, because Fahey certainly had a sense of humor. After all, he vowed on more than one occasion that his favorite music was early bluegrass but he didn’t have the speed to play it. We’ll never know, since he died after sextuple-bypass heart surgery in 2001. But examining his legacy through this video does bring us closer to understanding the style and spirit of this special artist.