OBITUARY
FROM THE MUSIC DESK
John Fahey, 1939-2001

by ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

John Fahey died in Salem on Thursday. For 40 years, he was one of the great and terrible forces in serious American music.

Fahey played, rediscovered, reinvented, twisted, recontextualized and jerry-built all kinds of sound, from primordial blues to doomed folk to industrial, experimental, adventuresome noise. In many ways, his life seemed cut to fit the archetype of an American musician.

There was the troubled childhood, the early exposure to deep-rooted country sounds, the $17 Sears-Roebuck guitar, the discovery and lifelong wrestle with black music's dread and joy, the expansion into late-century experimentalism. Fahey warred with demons and ultimately conquered them (or, at least, forced an armistice). By the time of his death, he'd surged out of obscurity to become an éminence grise for experimental musicians in Portland and everywhere else.

Most of what follows consists of Fahey's own words:

"I was writing these things as an escape, as a possible way to make money. The sentiments expressed come out of a fucked-up situation. I was creating for myself an imaginary, beautiful world and pretending that I lived there, but I didn't feel beautiful. I was mad but I wasn't aware of it. I was also very sad, afraid and lonely. By presenting this so-called beautiful façade, I looked good to myself and my audience."

--Fahey on his early recordings, from a 1998 interview with The Wire magazine.

"Fahey's bittersweet songs of death, strummed or picked on his steel-stringed acoustic, were the ideal accompaniment for anyone who hadn't entirely bought into the '60s California dream. His adventurous juxtapositions of found sounds, snatched from old, static-ridden 78s, and his own playing opened up the '60s to the wounds left by earlier struggles, which no amount of hippie peace and love chanting could heal."

--The Wire

"I do wish I had more money. As for fame, it can go to your head and you can become full of yourself. This I was always afraid of and so it didn't happen to me. It began to happen to me once, way back around 1969. Fortunately I noticed it before anybody else did and I cut it out.... When I come off stage, I do not want adulation, I do not want to be worshipped. I just want to be treated like an average guy.... While I recognize in the back of my mind that I am an occasionally brilliant guitar composer and arranger, innovator and player, I also know that I am not a great technician. Perhaps that is why I manage to keep some humility.

"As for the source of the music, I believe it comes from the unconscious; that there is no such thing as talent. There is simply a lot of hard work and more hard work and after that, more hard work. I believe Thomas Edison said that."

--Fahey, from a letter to Ron Cowan, writer for the Statesman Journal in Salem

"Where I was brought up was very prejudiced towards Negroes. I was taught to hate and fear them. I didn't like black music very much, I wouldn't even listen to it. Dick Spottswood and I were in a store where they were selling old 78s. They weren't catalogued or anything, they were just lying around. We were going through them and I was not picking up any records by Negroes for myself because all I wanted was bluegrass. I found several black records and gave them to Spottswood. Then we went over to this other collector's house and he put on the Blind Willie Johnson. I started to feel nauseated so I made him take it off, but it kept going through my head so I had to hear it again. When he played it the second time I started to cry, it was suddenly very beautiful. It was some kind of hysterical conversion experience where in fact I had liked that kind of music all the time, but didn't want to. So, I allowed myself to like it."

--Fahey, from the Wire interview

"Thank you , Blind Joe, for my 'transmutation' into a richer and fuller understanding and appreciation of not only guitar music, but music as a whole. Your gifts will always be remembered and appreciated."

--A fan, on the message board at www.johnfahey.com.