Guitarist John Fahey once described his approach to live performance. “I just go out and sit down and pick up the guitar and I hypnotize them.”
Mesmerizing an audience was easy for Fahey. Trying to explain how he did so could be excruciating.
During an appearance on a Bay Area TV show in 1969, his host asked him about how he composed his songs. They seemed so translucent, matter-of-fact, while they drew on folk, blues, bluegrass, and country guitar picking to create something that felt almost ancient. How was this possible? “How? I don’t know how,” Fahey told her. She pressed, “I’m sure you do,” and he answered warily, without making eye contact, “I sit by myself, usually. There’s some beer around. I try things; I improvise by myself.”
As usual, he sat by himself when he appeared in Los Angeles in March 1969 at Elks Lodge No. 99, a lovely 1920s landmark west of Downtown in MacArthur Park with murals designed by Anthony Heinsbergen and brass elk antlers over the front door. Decades later, the lodge became the Park Plaza Hotel. In the 1980s, the space was home to Power Tools, a playground for funk, hip-hop, and performance art events, and then Scream, a showcase for punk and new wave. But in 1969, it was still an in-between place—a fitting setting for Fahey’s strange alchemy.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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Fahey knew how to hold a space. “He was the first one of what I call the white boys that I saw transform,” said the late musician Jim Dickinson in a 1998 interview. “He’d walk out onstage and he’d be this 23-year-old white kid. By the time he got to the center of the stage he had transformed into a seventy-five-year-old black man—physically. He’d start to walk slower, then his steps would get smaller and his shoulders would stoop. By the time he sat down with his instrument, he had transformed. He was Blind Joe Death.”
The Elks Lodge show was a fundraiser for students at the nearby Otis Art Institute. The poster spotlighted the headliner, electric bluesman Albert Collins, while also mentioning the opener: John Fahey—composer and performer of American Primitive tone poems for the guitar.
Skinny, with a cowlick hanging down, flicking ashes into his guitar, Fahey was hip and rude; he looked like a rockabilly artiste. His music was casually intense—even silence was part of the set, when Fahey stared out at the crowd between songs, saying nothing. Johnny Green, road manager for the Clash, once recalled, “He sat on his stool and never spoke. No one made any requests. He would smoke the whole cigarette and just look at us looking at him. This lasted for about four or five minutes.” Then he would introduce the next song. Then he would smoke again.
Backstage at the Elks Lodge, Collins’s manager, Fahey’s friend Denny Bruce, worried that his pal must be bombing, because the crowd of rowdy art kids was “too quiet.” But when he peeked out, he saw something remarkable: a roomful of young people sitting on the floor, listening intently. Once again, John Fahey had mesmerized the crowd.
THE UNCONSCIOUS PAST
Fahey could slow down his playing just enough to make the air shift, then double the tempo and turn a meditation into a dance. How did a hard-drinking crank learn to control time, rewire American musical history, and make it dance in strange new ways?
Everywhere he went, he wove the music that inspired him—acoustic blues, country, bluegrass, and assorted mountain traditions—into something never before heard. He made genres collapse, and he made America collapse, too, its regions meeting in a shared sonic space.
“He’s a massive innovator in 20th-century music. He is just a giant,” says Josh Rosenthal, owner of San Francisco’s Tompkins Square Records, which releases contemporary albums and reissues blues, country, gospel, and jazz. “No one did what he did before him.… He has a way of pulling so much emotion out of a song.”
Fahey called his thumb- and fingerpicking approach “American primitive guitar.” The work feels both considered and structured: It turns in unpredictable directions that upend the listener before a piece is finished. He was in touch with subterranean feelings from his earliest days. (His first piece, apparently composed when he was 14, was called “On the Sunny Side of the Ocean.”) “There is something about guitars—maybe something magical—when played right which evokes past, mysterious, barely conscious sentiments, both individual and universal,” he once wrote. “The road to the unconscious past.”
The pull was definitive for him: “Guitar is a caller. It brings forth emotions you didn’t know you had. It is a very personal instrument.”
Born in 1939, Fahey grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland. His father played music at home, and the family went to country festivals on weekends. Friends stoked his interest in the guitar, and then he fell in with record collectors who introduced him to the blues. By the early ’60s, American folk music was splitting wide open. Revivalists were digging through old 78s, while the West Coast was blurring the lines between tradition and experimentation, tangling disparate roots in a new fusion and exploring drone and repetition in ways that suggested what would later be called world music. Fahey leaned harder into this new kind of folk, and by the time he got to California, he arguably did more with it than anybody else.
He played at folk clubs and house parties around Washington, D.C., where fellow guitarist Max Ochs remembers sitting in a circle on the floor in his communal house and hearing Fahey play, around 1960 or ’61. “I loved to watch his left hand,” Ochs says. A few years later, when they met up in New York City, Ochs says, Fahey “had broken through some wonderful new way of thinking about music.” Ochs notes the simple melodies and repetitions that flow through Fahey’s music and links his work to that of French composer Erik Satie. “A small structural change in the chord underneath made the whole composition take on a new meaning,” he says. “He was an Einstein of the guitar.”
Fahey’s interests pulled him west, where the experiments were underway. California gave him room to stretch. Berkeley’s intellectual folk scene and Los Angeles’s creative ferment allowed him to turn his outsider curiosity into a new musical vocabulary.
He studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and revived Takoma Records, the label he’d started back East, one of the first musician-owned independents, releasing work by Booker “Bukka” White, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, the Brazilian master Bola Sete, and later George Winston, the pianist and guitarist sometimes tagged as an originator of New Age music. Moving to Los Angeles in 1964, Fahey shifted to folklore at UCLA and helped form the blues rock band Canned Heat (though he never joined).
He left a deep impression on young guitarist Ry Cooder, who learned Fahey’s woozy slide technique firsthand. Fahey explained that he used a bottle neck across the frets to achieve the sonic effect that he had first heard on the blues records he listened to in Maryland. When Cooder told him he still couldn’t replicate the sound, his mentor drawled, “ ‘Well, Ry, you have to retuuuuune the damn guitar in open tuning.’ And when I did that,” said Cooder, “it all fell into place.”
Fahey’s arrival in California coincided with a moment when the state’s music was remaking itself—from surf guitar and Laurel Canyon folk to psychedelic experimentation and spiritual jazz. His own fusion of back-porch blues and avant-garde dissonance gave that era a framework where the mystical and the modern could coexist. His vision showed the way for California musicians as varied as Jon Hassell, Taj Mahal, John Adams, and Laraaji.
INTO THE WILD
Fahey had created a sound that felt ancient and new, spiritual and modern, infused with a distinctly Californian kind of openness. Though he had experimented with taped sounds and sound collages and other avant-garde approaches, he was known as a solo guitar player. The Yellow Princess, in 1968, hinted at new directions: Sunnier and less melancholy, it included a collaboration with members of the L.A. band Spirit, his first attempt at rocking out.
But Takoma began to struggle, and so did its founder. In the 1970s, Fahey’s life unraveled: psychotic episodes, heavy drinking and a reliance on prescription drugs, and misfired collaborations. He was hungry for a new musical direction and recorded two confusing albums with New Orleans–style jazz musicians. Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni hired him to compose music for Zabriskie Point; Fahey got drunk and punched him in a restaurant. Not surprisingly, his music was barely used. At one point, the label Reprise Records even suggested that Fahey do an album with Laugh-In star Goldie Hawn (who grew up near him in Takoma Park).
By the early ’80s, Fahey had decamped to Salem, Oregon, where he continued to struggle with alcoholism and eventually took shelter in the Union Gospel Mission.
Then, in the mid-1990s, a rediscovery. A Spin magazine profile brought him fresh attention. He moved into a welfare motel and began buying classical records in bargain bins (he knew their real worth) to resell to collectors. He recorded again and reemerged with a wilder sound: loud, noisy electric. “A few of the old fans want me to play stuff that’s thirty, forty years old,” he said in 1997. “I just tell ’em to go to hell. I’m picking up more of an audience from younger people who have an open mind, who are more into experimentalism. I don’t want to live in the past.”
In 1996, he cofounded (with Nashville musician Dean Blackwood) a new label, Revenant Records, releasing box sets by bluesman Charley Patton, bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers, and free-jazz legend Albert Ayler. Revenant played up the “American primitive” concept, though now it carried the weight of both inspiration and critique. The phrase, Fahey once said, referred to his being self-taught, untutored. But there was criticism of the application to Black artists from the Mississippi Delta and others who were in multiple ways not at all like him.
Revenant released Fahey’s final album, Red Cross, recorded a few months before his death in 2001, after heart surgery. He was 61.
Fahey once said he tried to “syncretize” Bartók, Shostakovich, and bluegrass “into one guitar style,” and he did. He hypnotized not just his audiences but the culture itself—blending the country’s musical past into something both eerie and transcendent. His spell still lingers, especially in California, where curiosity and reinvention are their own religion.•
RJ Smith is the author of Chuck Berry: An American Life. He edits for the Capital & Main website, and has written for GQ, the L.A. Times, Vogue, and Maggot Brain. His The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, was listed on the NY Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2012," and his 2006 The Great Black Way won a California Book Award.
