#2
John Fahey –
How Bluegrass Music Destroyed my Life
(Drag City Press, 2000)

Put simply: if John Fahey had never played a note of music in his life, then written this book, he’d still be a genius.

Writing these posts over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realise that I’m actually quite bad at communicating the spirit of these great books without lapsing into the same bunch of overblown clichés each time.

As this one is actually one of my favourite books – music-related or otherwise – and is furthermore one that conveys a perspective on the world that is anything but overblown or clichéd, I’ll try to spare Fahey that ignoble fate, and do my best to stick to the facts.

I first became aware of John Fahey’s writing via the voluminous sleevenotes that accompany most of his early Takoma albums. Sadly I no longer have copies of these, because I got the CDs out of the library or borrowed them off friends, but I remember them as being absolutely superb - an inspired mixture of fake blues scholarship, wild poetical imaginings and vicious satirical humour that I wish someone (Drag City? Whatever’s left of Takoma these days?) would issue in book form, because I’d love to read them again one day.

It was through these sleevenotes, and Fahey’s similarly inspired song titles, that I first learned of the worship of the Great Koonaklaster and his totem animal the turtle, of the ways of the Cat People of Sligo Creek, and of the other bedrocks of Fahey’s personal mythology, all of which attain a significance beyond the level of mere obtuse injokes during the course of ‘How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life’.

In classic style, this volume was apparently compiled from a box of “sticky and suspiciously stained papers, covered edge to edge with intense and feverish prose”, provided by Fahey after Jim O’Rourke and other Drag City associates persuaded him to hand over some of his writing. Rather than the rambling madness you might expect however, Fahey’s manuscripts feel very much like the carefully managed result of years of careful refinement. Still unhinged, meandering and grouchy enough to beat the band of course (he's got a reputation to keep up, after all), but also a clear summation of the most important things he has learned and perceived in the course of many years of thinking, feeling and doing.

As well as having a lot of extremely interesting things to say, Fahey also wrote excellent prose, with a rare feel for language and rhythm. If he’d made the effort to get a volume or two of this kind of writing published during his lifetime, in a format that wasn’t viewed merely as the memoirs of an obscure, cultish musician, I have little doubt that he could have become a significant literary figure – hailed as a natural heir to the legacy of Brautigan and Vonnegut and etc etc etc, but with a far darker, more isolationist undercurrent than either.

Thinking further though, the whole notion of Fahey playing any role whatsoever in the fatuous, self-important world of American ‘letters’ seems supremely unlikely. Had any prospective publishers or writerly colleagues come calling, it’s likely he would have greeted them with the same disdain and disgust he seemingly reserved for a good 90% of the adult world. Beyond the shining lights of the few individuals he considered friends and ‘genuine’ people, Fahey seems to have considered even most of the residents of his own strange, small backwater of the music world with supreme suspicion, and his book goes someway towards explaining why.

As I say, I’m not going to go into it all here - I’m simply going to try to convince you to read it. And if you’re at all fond of reading books written by American people in the 20th century then I think you SHOULD read it, regardless of whether or not you give a hoot about John Fahey, or even know who he was.

Contrary to the title, this isn’t really a music book. Certainly, there is a lot of talk about music in it, and a lot of appearances by notable musicians, but that’s simply because that was the world Fahey inhabited. It’s not really a book about music, so much as it a book about Fahey’s unique and humane, but sometimes frighteningly extreme, philosophy of life, and the experiences (‘real’ or otherwise) that helped form it.

Of course, there are anecdotes. Mighty, wonderful anecdotes, about how he punched Michael Antonioni in the face, and saw a desperate and drunken Hank Williams play a secret concert on a riverboat shortly before his death. About how he and his accomplices hunted down Skip James in the depths of Louisiana and learned the dark secrets of the ‘Sphinx Chords’. About how he unlocked a vault of repressed childhood memories whilst fighting a monstrous ‘alligator gar fish’ on a fishing expedition with Bukka White. About how he fell in love with a witch, and played his guitar all night at the dance of the cat people and… wait, hang on a minute.

Well, as Damian Rogers says in his introduction, Fahey “..travels between worlds with the same nonchalance most of us feel catching a bus to work”. Who are we to judge which of his worlds are more or less ‘valid’, as movie directors and rock stars prattle their obscene fancies across the shelves in every airport and train station in the world, whilst this beautiful and visionary volume languishes remotely in a few hundred record collector lairs, gathering dust behind armoured miles of shellac..?

Well, so much for ‘just the facts’. Best make this all I’m going to say on the matter. Just read this book, for Great K’s sake.

Labels: books, John Fahey