Consider this John Fahey's epitaph: after 17
minutes of silence at the end of the cd he was working on when he died in
February 2002, comes two minutes and 15 seconds of yearning. Notes ring,
chords fall apart, dissonant and distorted sounds mesh with tones clear as a
bell. And as with much of Fahey's work, nothing moves very quickly. The
lines reveal his folk-blues fingerpicking background, but nothing gets
resolved. The notes hang in the air, some important, some only passing
interests, but none finding release.
John Fahey struggled with, or against,
his own musicality for much of his 34-year recording career. He
recorded and self-released the first solo steel-string instrumental album, but his early
innovations on folk guitar might be lost on contemporary ears. He stripped
country-blues playing from song structure, creating throughout the '60s
long, engaging yet peacefully perplexing pieces that rarely fell back on
recognizable choruses.
Those early innovations were
lost even on himself. In 1998, he told the British music magazine The
Wire that he was embarrassed to see his earliest records being reissued. "The
things I wrote are kind of beautiful, but they also have these chord
patterns and stuff that draw you down," he said. "I consider those songs
kitsch, because they are a mixture of emotions. They contain no clear
statements about anything, and now I find them disgusting."
His other
methods of escaping musicality -- using prerecorded sounds and musique
concréte structures
to create pieces that have been likened to John Cage and The Beatles -- are
nowhere to be found on what has turned out to be his last
recording. And despite his past protestations, it's a very musical disc.
Including Irving Berlin and George Gershwin pieces, in any event, is not the
easiest way to overcome emotion-laden chord progressions.
When a great
musician dies, it's only natural to wish for a swan song. + isn't it. In the
last few years of his life, Fahey abandoned the acoustic guitar, retained
Jim O'Rourke as a producer and founded the second standing band he would lead -- the
John Fahey Trio, an interesting amalgam of electric guitar, electronics,
keyboard and percussion. (His only other ensemble was the John Fahey
Orchestra, a much maligned and somewhat misguided early '70s project with
Dixieland leanings. The group had its charm, although the orchestra's two
records are probably Fahey's weakest.) Here he returns to the hollowbody for
a set that is open-ended but more overtly musical than his last several
recordings. Lovely blues waverings and lonely, echoing lines hit the purity
of emotion he sought spot on. If it's not his most
exciting record, it does help to make sense of the uncomplicated statements
he wanted his music to make.
And if not a swan song, + does the next best
thing a last record can do: it fills the listener with thoughts of what
might have been. It's interesting, at this point, to hear such melodic
material from him. Fahey was as given to making definitive statements as he
was to recanting those statements, and what the next record might have been
we can only imagine.
Comments and Feedback:
|
