John Fahey - And the Turtle Spoke

John Fahey (middle name taken from his father, Aloysius) was born in Washington in February 1939. Shortly after the birth of the couple's only child, the Fahey family moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, in search of peace and quiet, as well as shelter from the traffic of the big city. Takoma Park is the classic small town, a perfectly ordinary happy island for well-to-do families, with its decent little houses in distinct Victorian style, yet surrounded by trees and woods, a reminder of the area's old wilderness. The contrast is echoed in the social makeup of the community, with wide pockets of poverty among groups of African-Americans forcibly pushed to the margins, as well as a strong shared feeling of abandonment and isolation. The first echoes of the street protests and youth rebellion of the big cities reach Takoma Park only once the shockwave has already faded; teenagers, therefore, find themselves having to repress their sense of unease and, paradoxically, to seek distraction and an escape route in something old-fashioned and conservative: the folk tradition, still harking back to the nation's founding fathers.

Aloysius is the most typical middle-class father and master of the house, a devout Catholic, despotic in running the family, sturdy in build, athletic in physique: all qualities utterly foreign to John. What father and son do have in common, though, is a passion for music, the piano at home, and listening to and attending concerts by local bluegrass revival bands, along with the homegrown kind, and classical records. John's more personal development, however, owes more to his mother Jane, in keeping with his shy, introverted nature and his very earliest creative inclinations. With his childhood friends, John then lets his seething imagination run completely free, fantasizing about the darkness surrounding the town and inventing his own personal small-town mythology, chattering about creatures and the ghosts of old ancestors, holding forth on the magical ambiguity of the characters who inhabit it, and giving everything a fantastical name.

Aloysius and Jane eventually divorce, right as their son is in the thick of high school: John's classic adolescent unease then turns into genuine anguish. To soothe it, he takes refuge more than ever in music, and specifically in the great music of unease, that of the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries, falling in love in particular with the great Russians, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and thus with their innovative compositions, the first major warning signs of the upheaval of traditional tonality. With his first guitar he fumbles his way through some of their themes, in the process getting his first taste of dissonance, atonality, and tempo changes. But John also finds refuge and support in the friendlier tradition of country music (he will learn Jimmie Rodgers's "Blue Yodel no. 7" by heart). This is, in a way, his own personal brand of youthful rebellion, the impulse to change the world, even if only his inner world.

While at school Fahey became acquainted with organist Anthony Lee, in whom he found a friend and companion sharing his passion for a music that had been forgotten, if not outright banned, by the establishment: underground avant-garde music. The two fell especially in love with one record, Harry Partch's "Plectra and Percussion Dances" (1957), their point of contact with the strange ideas of the most creative American musicians of the period. Also numbered among these, at the time, were the first stirrings of Moondog and Sun Ra, alongside the very earliest experiments of the American minimalists. Fuelled by these passions, Fahey's introverted rebellion found a home, toward the end of the 1950s, in a community of underground artists and musicians at the St Michael Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile the fledgling guitarist spent hours experimenting on his instrument, even copying what he heard on the radio. But young John set himself apart from everyone else already at this early, formative stage: he began to treat the great musical categories of his roots (bluegrass and classical) as evolving transformations rather than sealed compartments. More broadly, he conceived of music as a pure emotional conduit. Fahey didn't work from transcriptions — in fact, he didn't even know what musical notation was; he relied on no grammatical pedantry, but drew instead on his impatience to absorb, process and retransmit through the strings of the acoustic guitar and the gestures of the purest folk music; above all, he had no direct teacher. It was a wild, spontaneous return to the primitive method of the prewar bluesman. Though still only in his head, and perhaps still only hazily, the "American Primitive" strain was being born. As if he had an orchestra in his mind, Fahey poured the art of weaving, counterpoint and polyphony from classical music into fingerpicking, the technique most typical of bluegrass. His was a genuine singularity: he was the only artist in his circle, and probably in the whole country, trying to do what he was doing, even though his beginnings were still extremely muddled and his technical shortcomings (he couldn't even tune a guitar properly without help) were still very much in evidence.

Another tributary feeding into Fahey's formation was certainly his collecting of old folk and blues records, a passion that surely also arose from the enormous success of Harry Smith's six-disc "Anthology Of American Folk Music" (1952), a record that, incidentally, also accounts for much of the birth of the whole Greenwich Movement, from Bob Dylan to Joan Baez. But Fahey largely despised the white folk revival, which he considered born old and disconnected from the present, and he also had little patience for the already illustrious Pete Seeger's "Goofin Off Suite" (1955), which he found too didactic, mannered, and lacking in both roughness and depth. And yet, on the other hand, the guitarist, still blindly and unwittingly steeped in the racial prejudices passed down to him by his father and the Takoma Park community, initially snubbed Black blues without reservation. He would free himself of this, and it would be a true epiphany, upon chancing to hear Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied" (1929), which opened up a whole universe to him, Charley Patton and Skip James above all. To make amends, he first reactivated the adolescent mythologizing streak of his fertile imagination, fantasizing about a kind of road-to-Damascus revelation, a chance encounter with a legendary bluesman, a certain Elmer Williams (in reality "Guitar Frank" Hovington, whom he stumbled upon purely by chance during a fishing trip), from whom he claimed to have learned his first blues lessons.

The young guitarist then became a relentless, dogged hunter of old 78 rpm blues records, setting off on trips to the sacred sites of the South, of the Delta, even going door to door asking old families, in a manner not unlike that of Alan Lomax. From here his technical command of the guitar improved markedly, growing in confidence and fluidity. His arrangements, besides drawing on his passion for modern classical music, were now grounded in the blues as well. Aside from a handful of very early home recordings in which he tried using his own voice, driven mostly by a wild urge to embody a new bluesman, Fahey soon dropped the idea altogether, confining himself to his instrumental gifts and the ideas he had developed up to that point. With his thumb he pounded out a heavy, insistent bassline, while with raised strings and slide picks he mimicked Black vocal styles, from spirituals to gospel to the drawling, modulated blues of the plantations.

His first pseudonym was thus Mississippi Stompers. But to complete his atonement, and above all his total self-identification, he soon adopted the stereotype of the blind bluesman (also a nod of irony toward his own initial blindness to the world of Black music): Blind Thomas. Under this moniker Fahey recorded six tracks for an obscure contemporary label, Fonotone, and got some radio play. His aim, at this early stage, was to create a kind of historical hoax, a prank worthy of Orson Welles, or of Michelangelo. During his years of collecting, Fahey had also absorbed the habits typical of that audience, its weaknesses and its compulsive reflexes. With his detached intelligence, Fahey, for the time being, was content to watch with amusement the first reactions to these extremely low-fidelity recordings. And yet, in doing so, he also managed, in his own small way, to return to that purity of folk's original source he so longed for, thereby delivering his own practical response to the revival fad.

The next step, however, was more serious. Fahey decided to found his own record label, Takoma Records, clearly named in honor of his home suburb, with which to gather recordings, his own and others', entirely devoted to the most authentic and creative music, one that could range from folk into new genres as well. The first release was Blind Joe Death (1959), effectively a split album between Fahey and himself under a new, phantom alter ego — still blind, as any self-respecting Black bluesman should be — Blind Joe Death himself. This spectral figure, the most heartfelt creation of his inner mythology, would become the obsession of his entire artistic life from here on. One of the two sides of the record was thus entirely credited to this new historical fabrication, and amounted, in effect, to genuine selections. In this way, Fahey cast himself not only as a bluesman but also as a record collector and devotee of American roots music, replicating, in his own fashion, Smith's project from years before, gathering traditionals and reworkings of old standards, without forgetting another of his sources of inspiration: Episcopal hymns. The second side, credited solely to Fahey and thus gradually revealing his very first genuine artistic ambitions, was still cautiously hidden behind covers of blues songs ("Deperate Man Blues", "Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues"), albeit reworked with wit, though it could also boast an original composition, "Trascendental Waterfall", his first true gem, a restless, spectral country-blues piece, already fairly well developed in timbre and dynamics. On this record, true in every way to his handmade origins, Fahey made the most of the poor recording quality to sound as authentic as possible, with a bare-bones package and minimal artwork to heighten the sense of mystery, the typical obscurity of a recording lost in time.

The record circulated and won acclaim. After a considerable stretch spent moving house, studying and giving his first performances (including a legendary show at the Unicorn in Washington), Fahey followed it up perfectly with Death Chants, Breakdowns And Military Waltzes (1963), another modest success. Thanks to these first earnings, Takoma was able to start thinking a little bigger, expanding to include artists who were, if anything, even more marginal than its own founder: Bukka White, Daniel "Robbie Basho" Robinson, who would go on to become the label's other cornerstone (and later also Fahey's artistic rival), as well as a record influenced by La Monte Young, a long saxophone delirium accompanied only by the arcane resonance of cymbals, Charlie Nothing's (Charles Martin Simon) "Psychedelic Saxophone" (1967).

But  Death Chants, and in particular some of the epic excursions of its standout track, “America” (metronomic, sprawling, danceable), also serve Fahey as a springboard toward an awareness of his own potential, and thus a more deliberate career path. It is, in every sense, a transitional work, a connecting link that leads directly into the more mature  Dance Of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (1964). The album shares with its predecessor – and the two titles are almost interchangeable – the “danse macabre” tone that frames it: “Wine And Roses”, and above all the seven minutes of “Dance Of Death”. Broadly speaking, his folk-blues sketches now also make room for a genuine musician's commitment alongside the learned mystifier, with a few still-unintentional hints of Indian inflection (“How Long”) and dissonance (“Give Me Corn Bread When I’m Hungry”), and an intensive, rather unorthodox use of slide (“Worried Blues”, “Revelations On The Banks Of The Pawtuxent”, and a “Poor Boy” recorded in duet with his new acquisition, Bukka White). There's also a “What The Sun Said”, perhaps his first vision (in four panels), his first true tour-de-force of chiming tones, staccato notes, stopped chords, and above all silvery cascades of arpeggios in splendid bluegrass figures (not to mention the rhythm, with its tempo changes and syncopations) – in short, his first composition in free form. That same year, buoyed by this newfound awareness, Fahey also recorded a new version of  Blind Joe Death. Later still he would record a third version, also known as  Vol. 1 (1967).

Interest in Indian raga and modal music emerged during this period, borrowed partly from the early experiments of fellow guitarist Robbie Basho, and partly – more distantly, but perhaps even more influentially – from the contemporaneous “Fantasias For Guitar & Banjo” (1963) by Sandy Bull. Naturally, this new dimension became contaminated too, both stylistically and in appearance. On  The Trasfiguration Of Blind Joe Death (1965) the guitarist returns to his personal myth to pronounce it dead and then, indeed, transfigured. It's another prophetic title: Fahey and Blind Joe Death finally merge into a single, inextricable creative entity, from which the pillars of his music descend. Many of the tracks here are no longer reinterpretations or rearrangements, latent inspirations or imaginary covers, but all of it at once: hence the sketches of “Tell Her To Come Back Home”, “Beautiful Linda Getchell”, “Bicycle Built For Two” and even a lengthy “Old Southern Medley”, a definitive tribute to Louisiana blues.

The key tracks, though, lie elsewhere. Fahey now opts for transcendence in a first small trip: “I Am The Resurrection”, a primal example of his “western raga”, a genetic cross of bluegrass and Indian folk music in which tonal chords blend with extended modal passages, and classic cascading arpeggios alternate with guitar onomatopoeias of sitar and tabla. There are also oblique stomps like “Orinda-Moraga”, and above all his finest impressionist vignette, “On The Sunny Side Of The Ocean”, an icon of his arpeggio work in a state of celestial rapture, alongside the dematerialized slides of “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Death Of The Clayton Peacock”, even with hints drawn from ancient China.

The nineteen-minute suite “The Great San Bernardino Party”, found on the subsequent  The Great San Bernardino Party & Other Excursions (1966), though still somewhat disjointed, is where this vignette-style writing is finally gathered together. At last his secular reinvention of the sacred – until now perhaps still confused and playful – finds full expression in a polyptych that is truly epic in scale and ambition. Fahey expands the early hints of “On The Sunny Side” into something arduous and audacious, almost medieval, cast in four panels. In the first, a wandering arpeggiated toccata gives way to a pastoral foxtrot that seems to turn into transfigured meditation. In the second, a moan in the shadows breaks into violent surges. Mystic trance returns in the third, the most rarefied of the four, a vanished promenade of bluegrass and blues notes once again seized by an arcane rapture. The final panel is croaking, perhaps the first hint of the “voice of the turtle”, and it is the last trance. The quality of the recording itself also plays a role in the composition, so full of echo and emptiness that it practically amounts to his own reading of the psychedelic music of the era.

Thus “The Great San Bernardino Party” becomes the template for two further adventurous excursions, again in four parts, spread across the albums of the period,  Requia (1967),  Days Have Gone By (1967) and  Voice Of The Turtle (1968): “Requiem For Molly” and, even more ambitious, the half-hour, multi-part “A Raga Called Pat”. Here, the modes and feelings that had until then been the strongest among his influences reach their sublimation: classical symphonism, naive creativity, convoluted and intricate narrative, the neo-medieval poetics of death, painterly impressionism, and the profane revision of Christian stereotypes and beliefs, bordering on blasphemy.

Orchestral, railway and war-related samples (aviation, gunfire, military fanfares, even Nazi anthems), of storms and blues singing, alarms and Martian waves, whistles and sounds of nature (wind, branches, birds), both real and distorted through electronics, Zen chants and ceremonies, and last but not least his own diaphanous, eerily absorbed strumming, all overlap, giving rise to the strangest associations and the shrillest dissonances. It's a chaotic multiplicity of suggestions that blends description and naturalism; Fahey now understands and spells out everything: both the past pieces – subtle, allusive, elusive – and this new tendency to foreground visions through sound sources lifted wholesale from nature and technology, in a flicker of crackle and decay that almost obscures, erases, his guitar.

In the four parts of “A Raga Called Pat”, in particular, the most Eliot-esque poetry takes shape. Fahey plays off to one side, half distracted and half entranced, in a commentary that is impassive yet receptive to the constant, sordid flickering of increasingly unintelligible sonic substrates. The interaction between his guitar and the tape of concrete sounds is deliberately left to chance, and so the poetry that emerges from it is spontaneous and automatic. “A Raga Called Pat” achieves transcendence, where “Requiem For Molly” remains in immanence, but both are worthy offspring of the electroacoustic and collage avant-garde of the '50s and '60s. There is just one limitation: his instrumental stream of consciousness is now imposed, almost like a caption, rather than merely suggested.

A worthy appendix to these two avant-garde works is the long “7/3 Afternoon”, improvised live with Red Crayola and later included on  Live 1967 (1998).

The period is also dotted with less forbidding tracks, small gems that would go on to have no small impact on both contemporary and future generations: the vibrant Appalachian run of “When The Catfish Is In Bloom”, the lightning clusters of chords in “Portland Cement Factory”, the subtly melancholy pastoral fantasy of “Impressions Of Susan”, the multifaceted, fatalistic vignette “Requiem For Russell Cooper”, as well as “The Story Of Dorothy Gooch”, a new version of his “Some Summer Day” introduced by nightmarish dissonances. From  Yellow Princess (1968), the most successful album of the era, come also “Irish Setter”, a prelude to his future masterpieces, a country-blues pastiche of dances and monumental decelerandos into rarefaction, expansion and condensation, and “Commemorative Transfiguration”. While lacking the heavy studio tampering of “Requiem For Molly”, these vignettes are nonetheless adorned with small touches, often reverb effects, that only barely highlight the player's feelings. The dedications of the period – Linda, Brenda, Dorothy, Molly, Pat, Susan, the “yellow princess” (by Saint-Saëns, ed.) – finally reveal a romantic dimension in the guitarist's inspiration, too: the female figure.

These experiments even reached the attentive ear of Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1969 the director was wrapping up location scouting for his “Zabriskie Point” (1970); the film's key sequence takes place in the legendary Death Valley. Long accustomed to the avant-garde, as well as a devotee of impressionistic music, Antonioni pictured Fahey's cryptic chromaticism, broad filigrees, desert-like tapering lines, lightning-fast picking and sudden dances of death as the perfect counterpart to the vision-hallucination he had in mind. Unfortunately, a falling-out between the two put an end to the project (rumor has it that during an argument the director heatedly aired his views on the flaws and limits of American culture, provoking resentment in the guitarist), forcing Antonioni to scale back Fahey's contribution to the soundtrack (only a small excerpt of the already-released “Dance Of Death” would be used, and for an entirely different scene), and to seek out new candidates for the role (Jerry Garcia would be chosen instead). But for Fahey this was truly the classic moment of ascent, sealed too by a series of duets with his blues-adventuring partner Bill Barth, later collected on  Memphis Swamp Jam (1969).

Fahey was now ready to launch into the last and most difficult frontier of his inner artistic territory: composing unbroken poems for solo guitar, finally giving full voice to the turtle, his favorite animal, his personal mascot, good-luck charm and totem. In his mythological imagination, the turtle sits at the top of the pyramid, the Zeus of the moment, repository of the joys and sorrows, hopes, illusions and bitterness of an entire people, the slow, inanimate song of the centuries, of the valleys, of the pioneers' migrations, of the painful, laborious shifting of the frontier, living symbol of a generation, and ultimately an archaic archetype, a shrine of history and wisdom. And it is also the symbol of his art. For the guitarist, the task now was to focus solely on the potential of his guitar, leaving behind interference and influence, fragmentation, attempts and reinterpretations, blues imitation and thus the imitation of low-quality old-timey sounds. To illuminate his own soul and, in doing so, finally give the sound of his strings a pure quality as well, rediscovering a solemn asceticism.

Thus were born the four great fantasias of his maturity, “Mark 1:15” and “Voice Of The Turtle”, on  America (1971), originally conceived as a double album (cut down to a single at the last minute, for fear of repeating the commercial failure of  Voice Of The Turtle, which is nonetheless paid tribute to in the eponymous track), and “When The Fire And The Rose Are One” and “Fare Forward Voyagers” from  Fare Forward Voyagers (1973), probably his best album (certainly his least sprawling, full stop). “Mark 1:15”, a primal track that contains the seeds of several ideas yet to come, is the latest iteration of his “western raga”, an endless tapering and thickening of chords and arpeggios that almost dissolves tonality altogether, a slow caress, a watery flow that breaks against rocks and brush, revels in moss and riverbeds, lingers over the tiniest forms of life and then rushes over sudden waterfalls, accelerating and decelerating as it follows only its wildest instincts.

This monochromatism is answered by the broad, shimmering palette of “Voice Of The Turtle”. The linchpin of his entire career, this poem is a genuine wordless narrative. The journey becomes solemn, broadening to embrace the whole array of the elements, through vivid chains of arpeggios. Compared to “Mark”, though, there's a small melodic idea here, the slow, wary advance of the turtle, its Homeric tale told backward through time, through green valleys, forests, vistas and crossings, all the way to terrible sea storms (the guitar even goes so far as to mimic the spray breaking over the boat with cascades of harmonics). It is, then, a guitar both mythological and lyrical, humble and wandering, almost elderly, and at the same time charged with magic and a constant drive toward exploration. It often builds in volume and in majestic dynamics, frequently toward chords that turn harsh, made of strings struck roughly (full pick strumming, quite rare in his career), or toward glimmers of harmonics, illustrating the contrast between the smallness of the wayfarer and the vastness of lands, waters and skies. At the peak of his technical mastery, Fahey is able to draw on every possible figure, right up to a final acceleration in which he reveals himself, without any further restraint, as an enthusiastic virtuoso, in a grand finale, a pyrotechnic run through his finest folk counterpoint.

For the following two pieces he draws explicitly on evocations of T. S. Eliot's “Four Quartets”, in particular the third, “Dry Salvages”, taking the titles of the compositions from its very verses: “When The Fire And The Rose Are One” and “Fare Forward, Voyagers” (plus the brief “Thus Krishna On The Battlefield”). “When The Fire”, stylistically even more intricate and daring, initially incorporates the modes and forms of “Voice”, before cloaking them in a renewed and even more severe mystic trance, in a jagged flow that is nonetheless as powerfully solemn as the opening movement of a Romantic symphony. To achieve this, Fahey draws on a titanic succession of figures, from pastoral dances to flamenco inflections, from Native American accents to the most reverent country music, right through to Persian filigrees, always teetering on the edge of the abyss. But the close is once again intimate, impressionistic, glorious in its forlorn call to ancestral peoples, to forebears who no longer have a voice, across infinite lands. The turtle seems to have exhausted its voice, expressing itself only through suggestions that grow ever harder to grasp, an oracle of the hopes of the Native American people. The “American Primitive” of his beginnings is thus charged with a deeper collective feeling.

A full twenty-three minutes of “Fare Forward, Voyagers” constitute, finally, the last and most radical venture beyond the bounds of the natural. The structure is tripartite: a slow, solemn, ecstatic theme, already feverish in its own way, frames what is its true heart, an extremely prolonged vortex shaped between breathlessness and rapture, brimming with impossible daring, soaring peaks and terrifying slowdowns, an absolute blaze of crepuscular, impressionistic virtuosity, a fresco of immense sensations, of fiery meditation and joyous, spasmodic tension. It is an almost continuous, unbroken stream, despite a sense of death that is renewed and sharper than ever, now verging on the panicked compared to the small “Dance Of Death” pieces of a few years earlier, drawing on tonality, atonality, Eastern modality, and of course every blues scale besides. No one had ever conceived of the acoustic guitar in such a vast and exhausting way, spectacular in its humility as an invisible titan of time and space.

Exhausted by so much creative, technical (and physical) effort, Fahey also needed far less significant records to relax his muscles and catch his breath: collections of Christmas traditionals, New Possibility (1968) and Christmas With John Fahey (1975), and works arranged with even a full dixie combo, Of Rivers And Religion (1972) and After The Ball (1973), flawed and superficial in the way they overflow with certain already naive overarrangements from Yellow Princess ("March For Martin Luther King"). Only Old Fashioned Love (1975) falls in line, albeit trivializing it, with the transcendental turn of a few years earlier, and in "Dry Bones In The Valley" he again stretches out into the epic sweep of his metaphysical prairies.

Unfortunately, for the rest of the following two decades his work would be dominated precisely by this easy side, this heartfelt yet regressive return to his origins as a more or less sophisticated imitator, despite the researcher and the creator hungry for harmonic conquests within him — a sign of a trust almost always misplaced in his own compositional abilities.

Meanwhile, though, Fahey was fine-tuning his Takoma label, completing the triad of American primitivism alongside himself and Robbie Basho, by signing Leo Kottke (his "6 And 12-String Guitar" would be the label's commercial peak) and Peter Lang, with whom he also released a portfolio album, John Fahey, Peter Lang & Leo Kottke (1974), and then discovering and relaunching Bola Sete, at the time an obscure samba guitarist for whom he felt a fierce spiritual kinship and whose one of his masterpieces, "Ocean" (1975), he would produce. The period was also intense in terms of live performance, taking him all over the continent in long medleys of his own and others' compositions, later also recorded on God, Time And Causality, taped in 1977 but shelved by his own label (it would only be released in 1989 by Shanachie).

Visits Washington DC (1979) is still strong with his trademarks, complete with new, deeply personal female dedications, "The Discovery Of Sylvia Scott", "Melody McBad", "Ann Arbor". The record lays bare, almost revealing it like a magician's trick, his improvisational method, based on a flow of notes and chords that is even contradictory, and it remains one of his best — if not the best — of his second maturity. With his main style somewhat atrophying, the guitarist absorbs and disguises new and varied idioms, such as flamenco and batucada, alongside the sacred hymns always lurking in the background ("The Discovery Of Sylvia Scott"). The acoustic strings flutter light and thread-like through the weave and warp of his favorite places in space and time, but this time tempered by the gaze of a good-natured dreamer, a smiling, bittersweet optimism, forcibly oblivious to the anguish just passed. The vast, spectacular sequence of "Melody McBad" and "Gran Finale" (which reworks a leftover from America from when it was still planned as a double album, "Dalhart Texas 1967"), a full seventeen minutes, nonetheless returns to the usual mix of registers and tonalities, the familiar dissonant palette: rarefied touches suddenly thickening, slowing down and then immediately speeding up with mounting tension, ending in a breathless dance.

The following year Fahey sold Takoma to Chrysalis, a label devoted to more mainstream fare, and at least survived the bankruptcy. By his own admission — and in an excessively harsh bout of self-criticism — as if that weren't enough, Fahey even began disowning his creative triumphs, forbidding himself his great impressionistic tapestries: he would come to consider them pompous, even pretentious, and swore to himself he would no longer embark on those sprawling journeys of his own devising. The results of this premature senility, Railroad (1983), a collection of simple sketches, and Let Go (1984), made up of almost nothing but covers, were accordingly rather feeble. Even more oddly compiled is Rain Forests, Oceans And Other Themes (1985), on which he also tries a few experiments, such as using a drum machine to emulate Moondog's relentless percussion on "Theme And Variations". And the relaxed touches of "Melody McOcean" serve as a follow-up both to "Melody McBad" and to the now-legendary "On The Sunny Side Of The Ocean", thus forming a kind of saga in disguise. If artistically these are his most barren works, these albums nonetheless represent some personal triumphs as a musical connoisseur: the reinterpretations alternate between Stravinsky and classical music and the blues, tropicalia and pop, covers of friends and esteemed contemporaries, and revisions of pieces by artists from a more distant past, ranging from the most accessible to those least suited to his own poetics.

At the height of his melancholy, Fahey also summons back his old imaginary sidekick for I Remember Blind Joe Death (1987), which boasts at least one "Improv In E Minor", yet another of his symphonic ragas, moving in its slow, measured pace, before going on to record the lesser Old Girlfriends And Other Horrible Memories (1992), featuring the forlorn "Claire", "In Darkest Night", "View", the lackluster "Don't", and the cheerfully self-imitating "Diane Kelly", but above all a guitar-less track, "Fear & Loathing At 4th & Butternut" (a brief yet extreme variation on his western-raga for harmonica and organ drone), and the never-released Azalea City And Other Toxic Nostalgia (1992). Preceded by an album of short sacred pieces, Yes! Jesus Loves Me (1980), the decade also saw a fresh batch of Christmas records: Christmas Guitar Volume I (1981), Popular Songs Of Christmas & New Year's (1983), Christmas Guitar (1986), The John Fahey Christmas Album (1994).

Long in the grip of alcoholism, Fahey eventually sank into depression. This period of gloom, isolation and reflection, which had actually begun in the late '80s and was interrupted only by the anthology Return Of The Repressed (1994), would last well past the mid-'90s. Fahey, however, remained almost entirely oblivious to what he had helped stir up in the world of music. Although he had always strongly rejected the label, as early as the '80s some critics had pointed to him as a possible forefather — alongside his comrade Robbie Basho — of the new age phenomenon, particularly its acoustic strand, even a direct inspiration for hugely successful ventures like William Ackerman's Windham Hill, with all its disciples (Alex De Grassi and others). Even in certain traces of Durutti Column one can glimpse an early application of the guitarist's aesthetic. But this was merely the tip of the iceberg, if not actually a red herring.

In the second half of the '80s, during some of his tours, Fahey struck up friendships with two young musicians, two fans of his deeply influenced and driven by his teachings: Jim O'Rourke and Glenn Jones. It was they, both at the start of their respective careers, who first pulled him back from the brink of suicide, who helped him rediscover the essence of his own art, and who, in turn, helped stop the squandering of his talent; they introduced him to the circles of the most cutting-edge American underground, ultimately spreading his gospel. From Thurston Moore to the Louisville and Chicago generations, then David Pajo, David Grubbs, right up to Jeff Mueller and Sean Meadows, all of them applied Fahey's insights in various ways, showing him unheard-of facets, creative outlets, even subversions and heresies: cacophonies, stretched-out forms, dissonances, twisted improvisations, and above all a pervasive nervous energy that thoroughly fascinated the disillusioned Takoma musician, eventually infusing him with new inspiration.

And so Fahey's return to the scene didn't disappoint. Rather than simply aligning himself with the disciples he himself had artistically nourished, the guitarist once again showed himself to be a step ahead of everyone. It truly was a new lease on life, though sadly one that would last only a few years. It was first announced with a single cut directly onto his most coveted fetish object of all, the 78 rpm record, "Morning/Evening, Not Night" (1996), a still-cautious little work that mainly helped the guitarist reconnect with his art. That same year he founded a new label, Revenant, entirely devoted to experimental musicians. Finally, still with some hesitation, he opened up to the avant-garde on the new City Of Refuge (1996). Fahey stunned old and new admirers alike by picking up an electric guitar for the first time in forty years, on "Fanfare", using the occasion to reshape his style, bringing out and then distorting metallic dissonances, picking up the darkest signals once again coming from the Delta, far beyond the easy electrified blues-rock revivalism of past decades. The long tape-collage dissertation "On The Death And Disembowelment Of The New Age" is in fact the furthest extension of "Molly" and "Pat", a gaseous flow of samples, found sounds and electronics that metaphorically enacts the definitive overhaul of his status and his symbols. From the voice of the turtle come only cadaverous echoes, systematically broken by a perpetual implosion, ending in a cryptic close of glassy rattles. Even the proverbial acoustic solo excursion, "City Of Refuge I", runs twenty minutes (perhaps excessive) of pure harmonic embryos, often isolated by silences and sudden pauses, at times even atonal, within which a very brief, perpetually ragged honky-tonk theme is embedded. Next comes another experiment, "Hard Time Empty Bottle Blues", recorded live at the Yttrium Festival in late 1996 but left unreleased at the time.

He then produced his own "Metal Machine Music" via the double EP Mill Pond (1997) and the related Womblife (1997). On Mill Pond, built from the eponymous track already heard on City Of Refuge, further explored through the Martian reverbs and distortions of "Mill Pond Drowns Hope" and then pushed to its most radical consequences — from "Ghosts", with acoustic chords made heavier and deeper, overshadowed by a menacing, stormy vocal mantra, to its demonic appendix "You Can't Cool Off", right up to the ten minutes of "Garbage", a wreckage of clangs, detonations, hurricanes, screams, high-voltage short-circuits — this is some of the most extreme electroacoustic music in the genre's history, with the detached impressionist fully revealing his inner die-hard terrorist.

Womblife is equally inspired. This time Fahey barely touches the guitar at all, instead mostly reusing scraps of his own tape recordings and reprocessing them with O'Rourke's help. The approach is obsessive yet inspired, and the craftsmanship is often superb. The darting dissonances of "Sharks" are submerged in echoes and interference until they turn into pure psychedelic music. On "Planaria" his acoustic guitar emerges bewildered amid a gamelan din, blending into a concert of hallucinated chords and percussion; on "Eels" it converses in brief blues syllables with a faint, tension-filled flow of turbulence; and finally on "Coelacanths" it is turned into circus music (or nightmare music) and a funereal clockwork of resonances. These pieces form a single, unbroken composition, in which Fahey, moreover, seems gripped by a kind of ascetic sleepwalking. The closing "Juana", long but with no great new ideas left (and too close to Bola Sete's meditations), feels out of place by comparison.

After O'Rourke, Fahey turned to Jones for Epiphany Of Glenn Jones (1997), made in collaboration with Cul De Sac but also containing other personal experiments in the style of Womblife: "Gamelan Collage" (an equatorial-industrial chaos worthy of the Fugs' "Virgin Forest"), "Magic Mountain" (psychedelic, hallucinated, worn down by electronics), "Nothing" (fifteen minutes of spoken word, concrete samples and feedback, perhaps the most difficult thing from the whole period).

In concert, though, Fahey returned to the classic long medleys, captured on a record whose title is not coincidentally close to his distant past, Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts, And Other Contemporary Dance Favorites (1998). But not long after, having also become an abstract painter (his canvases would soon fetch quite respectable prices), the guitarist put together an unprecedented, unheard-of John Fahey Trio, with Tim Knight and Rob Scrivner, essentially an acid-rock ensemble given to unlikely experimentation (including spoken-word). Their recordings would appear on Live Session KBOO (2000), on the posthumous Vol. 1 (2002), and partly on his last two solo albums as well.

Most of Hitomi (2000), the last album released in his lifetime, is however given over to a kind of missal recited on electric guitar, with only the faintest trace of reverb, stripped of the distortion of "Fanfare" as well as of his most recent experiments — truly colorless, at times almost unbelievably amateurish. Only "Dance Of The Cat People", caught between distortion hurtling (literally) like a locomotive and deranged psychedelic organ improvisations, fully recaptures the stubborn taste for cacophony of these final years. The arc comes to a close with Red Cross (2003), released two years after his death, a slapdash and unfinished collection of assorted material.

John Fahey died in 2001 from cardiac complications. He had, however, managed to finish his autobiography in time, "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life" (2000). New autobiographical writings would appear in another posthumous publication, "Vampire Vultures" (2003).

At the turn of the millennium he had struck up a friendship with the No Neck Blues Band, and Pelt, in the very year of his death, released the double album Ayahuasca (2001), featuring the long three-part dedication “Raga Called John”. But there has also been no shortage of prestigious new disciples, starting with the solo work of Pelt's own Jack Rose, as well as the electronic translations of his friend Laurie Spiegel: Alan Sparhawk, Harris Newman, Phil Elvrum, Ben Chasny, James Blackshaw, Scott Tuma, Sir Richard Bishop, Steffen Basho-Junghans. In Italy, self-declared admirers and followers include Egle Sommacal, Angelo Bignamini, Stefano Meli and Michele Lombardelli.

Among the more recent names of the last few years, worth noting are Dunstin Wong, Mark McGuire, Daniel Bachman, Bill Nace, Bill Orcutt, Alexander Turnquist, Gionata Mirai, Cian Nugent, Chris Forsyth, Marisa Anderson, Jeremy Hurewitz (aka Rootless), Joseph Allred, Eli Winter, J. R. Bohannon.

Predictably, the posthumous releases attributed to Fahey are also often of questionable quality. The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick (2004) collects live recordings from 1968/69, On Air (2005) is a radio live session, the five-disc Your Past Comes Back To Haunt You (2011) is a box set of demos and lost early recordings, curated by Jones (who thus apes Fahey's own early releases), Twilight On Prince Georges Avenue (2009) is an anthology of his weakest period, and Christmas Soli (2013) selects tracks from his Christmas albums. Proofs & Refutations (2023) reissues on CD the double 78 rpm “Morning/Evening, Not Night” along with four previously unreleased tracks.

Among the best, aside from the aforementioned Return Of The Repressed, stand out Sea Changes & Coelacanths (2003), which collects the live album Georgia Stomps, the entirety of Womblife, and the previously unreleased “Hard Time Empty Bottle Blues”, Vanguard Visionaries (2006), a solid collection of classics, but aside from Trascendental Waterfall (2012), a box-set reissue of the first six LPs, none of them collect his greatest masterpieces. Between 2006 and 2007 several tribute albums also appeared (including Great Koonaklaster Speaks). To this day, a proper collection of his avant-garde 1996-2001 phase is still missing. In 1998, America was restored to its original conception as a double album, finally including “Dalhart Texas 1967”. In Search Of Blind Joe Death (2013) is a fine documentary directed by James Cullingham.

His gravestone in West Salem reads: “The voice of the turtle/ is heard in our land”.

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