Glenn Jones on music of John Fahey that really expanded his mind

As a teenager, US guitarist Glenn Jones saw Hendrix, Beefheart and The Stooges live, and was spat on by Janis Joplin, but it was the music of John Fahey that really expanded his mind

Glenn Jones with John Fahey on the former’s key fob from the Kowlon tiki bar, 1989

After discovering Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love in 1967 (described as “a guided tour of Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell” in the weekly supermarket supplement that came in our local newspaper), I began hounding my father for a guitar. I was 14.

Consider that just a few weeks earlier I’d brought home Herman’s Hermits – Their Greatest Hits, and you have some idea how quickly things were changing for me, how many doors were opening and how big the world suddenly seemed. A year later I was taking in Big Brother & The Holding Company from a front row seat at a movie theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey on a rainy Tuesday night, and gloried in Janis Joplin’s spittle spattering my face.

I saw Hendrix play for nearly three hours at what is reckoned to be one of the best concerts he ever gave: the second show with Band Of Gypsys on New Year’s Day 1970 at the Fillmore East. Just a few weeks later at Ungano’s in New York City, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band blew my little mind – the group was more aggressive, more blindingly intense than any I’ve ever heard, before or since. By the early 70s I was writing letters to Sun Ra and Harry Partch. In 1973 I saw The Stooges at Max’s Kansas City on the second date of the Raw Power tour, and a few months later attended the reopening of the Kitchen at its new location at Broome and Wooster Streets in New York, which was celebrated with two nights of the music of John Cage, with both the composer and Merce Cunningham in attendance. Musical epiphanies were not only possible then, they were practically unavoidable.

I first heard the music of John Fahey in my Life Drawing class at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1971, where I was a first year Fine Arts student. I made a mental note of the name, and on spring break went nosing through the John Fahey bin at Sam Goody’s in Paramus, New Jersey, one of the record stores that had sustained me through my high school years. After poring over the five or six Fahey albums they had in stock, I bought The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party And Other Excursions. I suspect my choice had something to do with the cover. It gave off that whiff of obscure inscrutability that had so drawn me to ESP records by The Godz, James Zitro and The Holy Modal Rounders, records that looked as otherworldly as they sounded.

I didn’t know it at the time, but The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party was Fahey’s most experimental album to date. The recordings, made between 1962 and 65, find John toying with knotty dissonance (“Guitar Excursion Into The Unknown”), backwards tapes (“Knotts Berry Farm Molly”) and open tunings (the title track is in open G minor). Also included were recordings of Fahey’s guitar accompanied by flute (“900 Miles”), veena (“Sail Away Ladies”) and church organ (“Will The Circle Be Unbroken”). But it is the 19 minute title track that is the album’s outstanding feature. A kind of musical stream of consciousness made up of 11 discrete parts separately recorded and then cobbled together (with all the seams still showing), it unfolds very slowly, as so many of Fahey’s works do, its heavily reverbed opening chords giving way to syncopated picking. The ascending/descending pattern that begins after 38 seconds still gives me goosebumps, as does the section played with a slide beginning at 10'25".

What was Fahey trying to convey with this piece? Resignation? Triumph? Fear? At the time, Fahey said (tongue in cheek?) that it that expressed “...futility, a hopelessness and general existential despair complicated by ontological absurdity.” In the 90s, when Fahey was routinely trashing his earlier works, he called it “a histrionic, disorganised outpouring of blather”. Whatever; here commenced my mania for the music of John Fahey.

What didn’t I get from John? From him, I discovered open tunings. I began playing with my thumb and two fingers instead of with a pick. I began trying to syncopate the way he did. I fell in love with the prewar blues, gospel and hillbilly recordings that had so influenced him. More importantly, my preconceptions about what was required to play music were shattered. After hearing Fahey, I understood that all you needed was the will to play: you didn’t have to be in a group; you didn’t need lots of expensive equipment; you didn’t need to write lyrics or sing; and you didn’t need formal musical training. One person with an instrument could tell stories.

I finally met John in 1978. We became friends, writing to each other and talking over the phone. He played Boston once or twice a year and stayed with me whenever he was in town.

In 1989, I formed Cul De Sac. We covered John’s “The Portland Cement Factory At Monolith, California” on ECIM, our debut album. I vividly recall playing our version of the song for John (with much trepidation) in my car, in the middle of a rain storm in the parking lot of the Kowloon, a tiki bar-cum-restaurant-cum-comedy club in Saugus, Massachusetts. As the windows grew foggier, Fahey made me play the track again and again.

And, in the way things happen, this led to Cul De Sac’s 1996 collaboration with John, The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones, an album Fahey titled and which I’ve written about at length elsewhere.

Today, more than four decades after that trip to Sam Goody’s, I am one person with an instrument trying to tell stories. John’s music still makes me feel like no one else’s. There are things about it I still don’t understand. I still puzzle at some of what he came up with, and at some of the choices he made. But after The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party nothing was ever the same.  Glenn Jones’s My Garden State is released this month on Thrill Jockey

98 | The Wire (May 2013) | Epiphanies