fahey week 2020 day 7 - fahey week ends (basho day)

fahey week ends for 2020 with basho day. it is the anniversary of the birth of john fahey and the death of robbie basho on the chiropractor’s couch. basho was a big fellow plagued with back trouble. unlike fahey who lived long enough to repudiate his earlier ‘cosmic sentimentalism’ basho didn’t and he probably wouldn’t have. while also coming from takoma park basho’s vision was a lush religious, romantic one. basho sings too, often wordless and yearning, there are spoken word interludes and dedications to his guru.

to go all biblical the american primitives begat the wyndham hill new age guitar school. while fahey embraced electric guitar, noise collages and song titles such as the death and disembowelment of the new age, basho let himself be recorded by wyndham hill and arguably produced his best work visions of the country. but it wasn’t what the new age-ers were looking for.

fahey week 2020: 'the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come...’

‘...and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land...' - song of solomon 2:12 (king james bible)

horsemouth picked up the idea of fahey week from the delta slider blogspot. (lord knows how long they’ve been running with it).

on sunday, 22 february 2015 we find the first fahey week post on horsemouth’s folk archive.

the next year we have a complete fahey week, horsemouth goes through fahey’s recorded output backwards in 7 year hops beginning with monday, 22 february 2016’s excuse me sir. do you have a minute to talk about john fahey?

in 2017 horsemouth looked at the various collaborations of john fahey.

in 2018 horsemouth begins it with his thoughts on a radio documentary - an interview about fahey’s life and work by nicholas thompson with steve lowenthal, the author of fahey biography the dance of death.

in 2019 horsemouth read and commented on an account by john jeremiah sullivan (in a collection of his journalism pulphead - dispatches from the other side of america) of phoning up fahey in pursuit of an old blues lyric.

of course there are other times in the year when fahey makes an appearance. there are probably earlier posts on horsemouth’s facebook pages or entombed under the dead weight of myspace. he’ll dig them out for you.

but there, now we’re all caught up.

(ban)jolin, (ban)jolin... (to the tune of jolene)/ controversy on the american primitive scene

so horsemouth now has ayesha’s banjolin to play with. what a beast. that was his morning.

last night ayesha and horsemouth adjourned to a little pub round the corner from hers, sank two halves (an almost perfect amount of beer), and in mixture reminisced and cast a wary eye over the political situation. in the cold light of day the brexit party victory in peterborough has not come about (they’re still a protest vote phew). it all continues to be rubbish. social housing is not getting built.

emma (of emma and rob) was coming up to visit - horsemouth said to say hi.

in the day horsemouth wandered eastwards as far as baker’s arms tescos and south/ westwards in a loop back, succeeding in getting lost, passing leyton parish church (closed for reclamations) and the almshouses, approaching the asda business park from the wrong direction.

it is the point of transition in horsemouth’s year where he has to learn to live without the structure of work, to set himself tasks, but also to go and do the things that are important rather than avoiding them (as is his wont). for the rest of the month? saturday he goes to pick up his guitars from howard’s (and perhaps pass on the banjolin to him). he needs to get up to his parents at some point, solstice on the 21st, probably leave time for the leigh folk festival. then it is the midpoint of the year.


horsemouth was recently involved in some controversy on the american primitive scene - over on john fahey some gentleman had taken against young american primitive guitarist gwenifer raymond’s playing (he wanted slow and contemplative rather than fast and furious, with taste there is no arguing).

consequently when horsemouth found a bbc wales mixtape show by gwenifer (one of her tunes followed by a mixture of welsh indie pre-war blues and such like) he thought it better to post over on american primitive guitar (which is much more the spot for young american primitives or people posting their own stuff). it got likes. it’s good stuff.

then, perhaps somewhat unwisely he mentioned that perhaps he might post it on john fahey too. only to be told that no john fahey should be left for john fahey.

at this point loads of people weighed in to defend horsemouth’s freedom of speech and right to post wherever he chose. (thank you people). having used the word controversy horsemouth found himself at the heart of a controversy. so far so cash from chaos - ‘create generation gaps’. (or indeed edward bernays’ crystallizing public opinion).

what horsemouth (free speech hero) should do now (of course) is advertise his own material - but he might wait a while until it appears less crass.

horsemouth dun voted (living with john fahey)

it is the anniversary not just of the deaths of clyde barrow and bonnie parker but also of the defenstration of prague that kicked off the 30 years war in europe.

meanwhile horsemouth voted for possibly the last time in a european election. it’s PR and it’s over ‘the seaside towns’, and how long the MEPs will actually sit in office (so how much of an effect they will have good or bad) is moot. we won’t know the results until sunday

it is off course getting messy in the uk, but it is getting messy in europe also - a generational shift is taking place between the europhiles and the eurosceptics. macron has arrived too late to play batman to angela merkel's robin. there’s a shift right-ward. there will be flag waving by the eurosceptic right who will do well in these elections - but actually, like the UK, it is not clear that the real levers of power in europe are in the european parliament anyway.

it is a vote with real consequences but horsemouth is happy to have it as a proxy second referendum - he just wants to get a sense of the actual distribution of forces. the brexit party will win big he thinks - even getting seats down into london and the south east.

the collapse of the nostalgically rebranded ‘british steel’ is a case in point - bought from tata (who’d milked the subsidies and bailouts and worker’s pension plans) by the venture capitalists of greybull for one pound, possibly unsaveable under european competition rules, possibly unsaveable under WTO competition rules, hoist on brexit uncertainties and carbon credits and in any event dirty old industry with 60 year old blast furnaces, its raw materials coming from abroad.

the real issue (for horsemouth)  is the vampire squid subsidy farming capitalism of greybull and the like, the chronic short-termism of government. whatever is worth money of it will be saved out of the wreck, whatever subsidies that can be given will be farmed and then eventually it will go tits up yet again (to be rescued yet again and relaunched at yet a lower level). who will emerge as ‘the saviour of british steel’? - probably farage. go on - it’s just perfect.




'Some day they’ll go down together 
 And they’ll bury them side by side 
 To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief 
 But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.' 
 Bonnie Parker, “The Story of Suicide: The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

'see my face from the other side' (fahey week 2019 begins)’

fahey week, as inaugurated by delta slider, the 22nd to the 28th of february, begins again for this year.

horsemouth has recently read two pieces about fahey from outside the fahey canon and he feels he should respond to them.

the first was an account of an attempt to tour late era john fahey round the uk that ended in disaster and lawsuits, horsemouth has discussed it earlier but will probably return to it.

the second is an account by john jeremiah sullivan (in a collection of his journalism pulphead - dispatches from the other side of america) of phoning up fahey in pursuit of an old blues lyric for a piece he was fact checking for greil marcus.

the record with the difficult to hear lyric was on last kind words blues,  a record that is actually a duet by geeshie wiley and elvie thomas - horsemouth has read sullivan writing on this theme before, in his excellent april 13th 2014 article for new york times magazine the ballad of geeshie and elvie 

horsemouth finds another piece by daphne a. brooks in the february 7, 2017 edition of oxford american again she hears the line differently from sullivan and fahey, she hears it as 'see my face from the other side' 

another song of theirs crops ups in ralph ellison’s the invisible man.

fahey (on this occasion) was friendly and helpful (doesn't sullivan realise how rare that was?). fahey identifies the line as  ‘lord, blessed daughter, don’t you be so wild’. fahey is only mentioned in passing, as part of that strange tribe - the white blues aficionados - but sullivan detects, in fahey’s pointing out that early blues singers ‘didn’t care about the words’ and ‘were all illiterate anyway’, a

‘reflexive swerving between ecstatic appreciation and an urge to minimise the aesthetic significance of the country blues’ 

sullivan wants to save the memory of the blues musicians (and their words) from the blues aficionados and collectors - he wants to save them as writers capable of great aesthetic effects achieved by purposeful juxtaposition and conscious understanding of form.

and so (horsemouth thinks) would fahey - but it doesn’t take literacy to be capable of creating (‘writing’) lyrics like these (that is a modern prejudice). blues was often music for dancing played for extended time with improvised lyrics using many ‘floater’ lines from other songs. listen to some son house - you’ll see what horsemouth means, the same backing tracks recycled over and over with new lyrics as the situation demands. musicians going to record would probably pick their best lines but little seems through composed - most of it seems inspired juxtaposition, a skillful arrangement of the lines that worked. and the lines that work are the ones that we remember - and the singers who sing those lines are the ones that we remember. it is not for nothing that musicans call a memorable line (or muscial phrase) a hook.

the hook we hear - it catches us - but the other lines have become indistinct.

there is an analogous argument to the conscious creation argument in sullivan’s pulphead piece about blues musicians learning from records (rather than from direct face to face contact in some imagined ur-folk moment). this happened, the musician’s tell us this in their surviving testimony, but it proves little about the process of creation.

getting recorded was, in any event,a rare event. in attempting to free the bluesmen up from the mystification spread over them by the (predominantly) white collectors sullivan ends up casting that mystification (that ‘blues twilight’) over the music of fahey - instead of robert johnson it is fahey who becomes haunted and hoodooed and damned and ‘irony free’.

horsemouth thinks one can safely say if there was one thing fahey was not it was irony free - all of fahey’s career is a deeply ironic (indeed postiviely sarcastic) attack upon the ethnographer’s interpretation of the blues, the folkies’ version of the blues, an attempt to defend the object itself from its fans. his is a similar mission to sullivan's.

the point of departure for sullivan’s comments on fahey is in fact fahey’s ironising.

fahey infact wants to save the bluesmen as writers capable of great aesthetic effects achieved by purposeful juxtaposition and conscious understanding of form but in terms of the music not so much the lyrics - he has little interest in the lyrics, and has excised them away in his own work in an attempt to reveal what lies beneath.

in this disparagement of the lyric he is like adorno, but like adorno they have a way of sneaking back into his argument.

with sullivan we have a piece that allocates central place to the lyrics that begins with the inaudibility of lyrics. (horsemouth mentions this in passing - it proves nothing).

sullivan searches intending to find dispatches from the other side of america but he is trapped within the machine of writing that is a machine for myth making. all he can do, as can we all, is redistribute the facts and themes and attributions round the point of the indeterminacy.

in all our struggles for truth and clarity we wrestle with ghosts but they will not out of the flesh.

(if you enjoyed this piece horsemouth prattles on in a similar way in his appreciation of the artist steve mcqueen’s film hunger entitled hungy ghost which can be found on the metamute website).

let mermaids flirt with me

so goes the song by mississippi john hurt. horsemouth is listening to the american music show acoustic blues special.

as a bonus last night horsemouth discovered that michael hurley (the original writer of the werewolf) is a) still alive (79 and still going strong) and b) has a documentary about him (presented by a somewhat annoying sock puppet). he still in good voice too and horsemouth can’t knock his picking.

Snock 'N Roll: Adventures With Michael Hurley (Complete Documentary Short) from Marc Israel on Vimeo.


online also there is an account of an abortive attempt to tour late era john fahey round britain - trust breaks down right at the start, mysteriously fahey arrives early at the airport, he’s sick, old and mean. fahey announces he is going home (and then goes on to play several of the gigs with a rival promoter). in doing so he makes an enemy of the original promoter - a texas lawyer with a side career in americana. the lawyer hounds him till his death.

when mississippi john hurt dies he wants to be taken to the sea and given to the mermaids - we see hylas being dragged down to a watery doom by nymphs (lots of nymphs) in john william waterhouse’s painting recently on display/ not on display in manchester.

yesterday horsemouth did some shopping - 5kg rice to the gods of the apocalypse (chris grayling et al.), lots of tins of beans. and cooked a chickpea and swede curry.

‘what happens next? what about the fifty years before you die?’

to lift a line from nik cohn’s awopbopaloobopalopbamboom, a jilted love letter to rock and roll (written in a cottage in conemara in the spring of 68 when he thought it was all over).


last night horsemouth watched takoma park city tv’s panel discussion on the takoma music scene in 1962 (midway through daniel bachman played a gig). fahey always talked it like he came from a cultural desert - but of course there was a scene, a succession of coffee houses and record shops, a network of blues aficionados and record collectors (not least the famous cellar door club - where richie havens and john fahey later played, where miles davis recorded). the seegers lived nearby, their maid was the blues guitarist elizabeth cotton.

fahey kept the names from his hometown for his songs  (the sligo creek immortalised in sligo river blues, his record label named after the neighbourhood itself, revalation on the banks of the pawtuxent) - he records tracks for collector joe bussard, then records and has independently pressed 100 copies of his first album blind joe death and then he’s away to university of the west coast. really and truthfully takoma park records was properly born elsewhere - more down to ED Denison than fahey.

they struggle with fahey (a notoriously difficult character) - he’d gone away, they’d stayed - but now he is the city’s most famous son.

winnicott and the grey monk

horsemouth has been posting over at american primitive guitar group on facebook.
he posted a link to bandcamp’s round up of the scene.

anyone missing? asked horsemouth
- glenn jones and daniel bachman replied the massive, mark fosson also.

label wise a nod to dying for bad music and not just tompkins square and takoma park would be good.

the british guitarists - bert jansch, john renbourn, davy graham, wiz jones, etc. are excluded on principle. they don’t have the rhythm says fahey in a german tv interview. but look at what davy graham gets up to with modal guitar, look at renbourn and jansch’s goodbye pork pie hat and alike.




in horsemouth's humble opinion the best appreciation of fahey is to be found on blog the hum's blogspot here (and written by an avowed guitar hater too), and in part three of the article a guide to loads of american primitive guitarists even horsemouth has never heard of.

happy birthday swami satchidananda

sunday 22nd december 1974 there was a gig to celebrate the 60th birthday of swami satchidananda (the poster has surfaced on dust-to-digital).

two musicians horsemouth had heard of before played at it - alice coltrane (whom you might expect as a follower of the swami) and john fahey (who you might not expect as a notorious curmudgeon). so two of horsemouth's musical heroes crossed paths (he wonders what they made of each other).

also playing that night was michael jarrett - singer-songwriter and co-writer of late elvis hit I’m leaving (not the guy of the same name from NY dancehall scene and bobby konders' massive sounds - er. mack daddy - was the hit horsemouth believes). this - the imperfect first take of elvis trying to record it is great - very love-like.





also playing was his (michael jarrett I’m leaving that is) then wife, the actress sally kirkland, and the bhajan singer sant keshavadas (who is still singing and teaching horsemouth believes - no he's wrong, sadguru sant keshavadas's wife has taken on running the temple of cosmic religion, but his singing is still available on youtube and soundcloud)


.
fahey said he hung around the spiritual community because he was in love with the swami's secretary (shanti norris), which is as good a cop out clause as you could ever hope for. this would be round about the time of fare forward voyagers (soldier’s choice) (1973) possibly fahey's best long form fusion of east and west and originally dedicated to swami satchidananda.

alice coltrane established her vedantic centre up in woodland hills near LA the year after (1975).

does horsemouth play american primitive guitar?

John Fahey 1981 Santa Monica from Creative Differences on Vimeo.



...or APG as he has seen it.

but does he? what’s the definition? could be.

'every man do his thing a little way different' - there's a kottke clip where he hails fahey as the founder of it and mentions charles ives. but if everybody cooked with the same recipe - something like 'solo steel strung acoustic guitar incorporating classical music elements into old blues and folk tunes' - then it wouldn't it get dull and same-y very quickly?

the guy at dying for bad music seems to be able to find acres of this stuff (and most of it is fairly decent and interesting) . but basho is not fahey is not lang is not kottke - even fahey is not fahey (look at his later electric phase). and horsemouth definitely prefers some things to others.

the day before yesterday horsemouth walked up through the valley of the agapemonians to walthamstow and bought books - a history of mermaids in art (with illustrations - down boy) and a. alvarez’s bluffers guide to samuel beckett in the fontana modern masters edition (sally army opposite the william morris museum - one pound). he could have doubled down - four books/ CDs/ DVDs for a pound - but as you know he has storage/ hoarding issues.

he was due to be babysitting (but the gig got cancelled - maybe tomorrow). yesterday he helped howard move some stuff and an old friend came to visit (and pick up a copy of musicians of bremen volume one). sunday the clerkenwell festival with andrew minty (probably).

an absolute precariousness (in the mirror of practice)

‘for individuality, considered as an absolute, amounts in practice for the masses to an absolute precariousness or ‘contingency’ of conditions of existence, just as ownership (of oneself, of objects) amounts to a generalised dispossession.’ - etienne balibar, the philosophy of marx., p. 37-8.

the equinox 2018 has just taken place (16:15 on tuesday, 20th march). it is also the anniversary of the visitation of alice coltrane by the spirit of igor stravinsky.

"stravinsky has once again wonderfully inspired me. the infinity sound of the eternity permeates his music. I am truly grateful to stravinsky for his offerings, and for the sharing of his gifts with us: and for the channel through which he communicates to me from the other world."  - alice coltrane. her version of  spring rounds can be heard on the eternity album.

from the equinox onwards  horsemouth will no longer be in the long dark tunnel, he will have emerged into the light. there will be easter, there will be british summer time, there will be may eve, there will be the summer solstice. sometime between may eve and the solstice (roughly equidistant) - horsemouth will be finished work for the year.

phew this will be a lucky escape (though there is of course ‘next year’ looming over the horizon towards the end of september - but it is far enough away that it doesn’t have to be thought about (yet)).

thereafter horsemouth will devote himself to playing music and reading books and going on long pointless walks. yay.

denise has recorded a vocal for sliabh (said sleeve if horsemouth is reliably advised) - himself and howard have it (by the wonders of email) and should be able to add it to the track. just in time.

a helpful soul has put up a copy of fahey's master's thesis

fahey week 2018 day one - john fahey and the dance of death

horsemouth begins it with his thoughts on a ‘radio’ documentary - an interview about fahey’s life and work by nicholas thompson, the editor-in-chief of wired, former editor of newyorker.com, an avid fingerstyle guitarist, with steve lowenthal, the author of dance of death: the life of john fahey, american guitarist.

this is a very useful interview because it shows how wide the church of fahey fans is - these two dudes profoundly do not get it. their main problem is that they find his alcoholism and indifference to success perplexing - everything must be judged against the yardstick of money and success (or fall into that aesthetic catch-all weird). they find themselves drawn to fahey’s work - but he’s not as good, they tell us, as leo kottke, michael hedges, william ackermann etc. - the guitarists they really admire, clean, upstanding technically proficient guitarists. and so they treat his memory with a degree of rubber gloved embarrassment.

fahey's disdain for the folk scene gets some approval, as do his record collecting trips to the south when he was young (hey those things are valuable, what a smart guy), as does his rediscovery of classic blues singers (skip james - live human being - seamlessly brought in with the records), as does his making of a christmas album (see smart commercial move).

but the moves that were not smart they find dark and disturbing - even when (in the era of kurt cobain and daniel johnson as they frame it) being some kind of an outsider artist was a viable strategy in the music industry, fahey would not do it, moving to salem oregon, living in a welfare hotel, ill, alcoholic, eventually dying, listen to the pun in this, of complications from a sextupal bypass.

and yet there is something in fahey’s playing that reaches them (indeed something in playing fingerstyle guitar that reaches them - beyond merely being good at it) but they cannot quite see clearly what it is.

there’s some bandying by steve lowenthal of the term ennui - for which horsemouth reads dread, world-weariness. and yet, even as it discusses fahey’s distance from the blues, the music that black people produced as a result of their experiences in america, it is a show that fails to mention black people. and yet it is in this music that fahey found the expressive material to deal with his own dysfunction (as lowenthal puts it). and it is only in terms of this dysfunction that fahey’s story can be told.

but this is not the only source of fahey’s routine - there is also an avant-garde, modern classical music root that is similarly difficult to re-incorporate into a philistine world of mere success. steve felt inspired to write this autobiography (after writing his doctoral thesis on fahey) because in the liner notes to one of his albums (the transfiguration of blind joe death) fahey had imagined a doctoral thesis writer in 2010 writing about a little known guitarist - one john fahey. just as fahey hid behind the name blind joe death for half his first album (itself simultaneously an engagement with the myth of the bluesman and a parody on it), so he could hide behind parodies of earnest liner notes and ethnomusicologist’s doctoral theses.

it’s a good routine but sometimes horsemouth is not sure that everyone gets it (and on the other hand there’s no point explaining a joke).


the dance of death and other plantation favourites

this was how fahey titled one of his albums - what was safely immured in history (and european history at that) comes back home.

george sand begins her the devil’s pool with an account of seeing an illustration from hans holbein (the younger)’s the dance of death. a ploughman ploughs a field but death capers alongside him as he does - as he does in all the other illustrations, as cup-bearer to the drinkers etc.

these were meant to remind the medieval body politic that all were subject to death equally - and to warn them of the vanity of earthly life and the necessity of attending to their religious duties. george sand (from somewhere nearer our time) points out that this memento mori was all slightly futile - and yet the form of the argument has returned to us as we (or novelists of sand’s time) threaten the rich (in novels) with visions of their future executioners.

 ‘we prefer the sweet and gentle characters which can attempt and effect conversations to the melodramatic villains who inspire terror; for terror never cures selfishness but increases it... I have allowed myself to be drawn into this digression for the sake of a labourer; and it is the story of a labourer which I have been meaning to tell you...’

fahey’s strategy relies on two things - one is a classical treatment of folk and blues themes derived from ralph vaughan williams/ bela bartok, the other is a respect for the playing ability and technical innovations of an earlier generation of blues musicians. fahey is not interested in turning this into propaganda for social justice  immediately (like the folkies) but is interested in it as music as something with the power to reach into the human soul.

12 flatlining groundhogs (death is not amused)

groundhog day is over. horsemouth has repeated and repeated and repeated until he has learnt his lesson and become a caring sharing human being capable of being sympathetic to andi mcdowell’s vacuous airhead character. it is a story of the type - humanisation of the misanthrope.

as far as horsemouth remembers the morning of groundhog day was cloudy - thus meaning the sacred badger (once a sacred bear now a mere groundhog) does not see its shadow and thus assumes that given the dampness and the clouds winter will soon be over. it retreats back into the burrow to snooze a bit more. it can’t be soon enough for horsemouth’s lungs (which are distinctly fucked).

work jogs on (or it did - it has been a bit tense of late).

so the guy who wrote source code has written the re-make of flatliners - plotline: good looking medical students experiment with near death experiences, death is not amused (and will not be cheated). similarly see also final destination. this one is not for straying despite the diminishing returns (is that a stockpicking term?)

this week ends with the anniversary of the death of sheridan le fanu (author of green tea, monkey paw and carmilla  arguably the first lesbian vampire short story). .

john fahey (horsemouth’s guru) is to be honored with a three-day american primitive festival in his hometown of takoma park, MD in april. this is happening in conjunction with the release of a double LP / CD package of first generation american primitive guitarists and banjo players, (with 6500 words of liner notes) in march.

a tribute to john fahey (explicador)

horsemouth has spent some time watching footage of leo kottke cursing tuners (the politics of tuning), praising john fahey (tribute to john fahey) and bemoaning the 12 string guitar.

‘I owe my whole adult life to john fahey... a good friend, and he’s the guy that synthesized all these strains, from parlour guitar to charles ives and came up with a place that everybody already knew but john had the... to put it together. this is a tune that he wrote, he denied that he wrote it, that’s the kind of guy he was...’

(meanwhile...)

bunuel adjourns to his favourite bar in a converted monastery (the paular hotel in northern madrid) and has a martini. he sits there and dreams and thinks (free associating without the supervision of a psychoanalyst).

bunuel’s drink of choice is martini.

bunuel’s drinking companion is, wait for it wait for it, jean-claude carriere (the adapter of robinson crusoe and ghostwriter of bunuel’s autobiography).

after 45 minutes exactly carriere appears and asks him what he is thinking about.


for instance - bunuel remembers the early days of film in Saragossa, films would not only have a musician to accompany them but an explicador, someone there to explain to the audience what was going on.

bunuel and carriere didn’t write it all of the autobiography- bunuel’s sister conchita wrote some of it. she remembers bunuel being bought a toy theatre (isn’t this in bergman also?)



soon, marjorie cameron,the music is by leona wood

john smith (1952) experimental light projections (tiger is lion)

for horsemouth is has been a long holiday - he finished work in mid-may, he won’t be fully back at the grindstone until after the autumn equinox, and yet he won’t get paid (other than dribs and drabs) until the 3rd week of october. to add to this last year getting paid started a month early (woo-hoo) so it also finished a month early also, and horsemouth has had all his back tax, he’s even paying a little into a pension. result? horsemouth will be dipping his savings, dodging his rent, living on lentils until mid october.

but hey - the best part of a month spent abroad (ireland and porto), the best part of a month spent in the cloud forest, the best part of a month spent at his parents, and (best of all in horsemouth’s humble opinion) it will be three gigs played (one as the musician of bremen, one as musicians of bremen, one at the monkey-on-a-stick party as who knows yet) and new tracks recorded.

later he goes to record with howard. 

they should (of course) have recorded the gig(s) in some fashion - b-boys got to document.




last night there was an online discussion of john fahey’s live in tasmania - an unlikely recording event (but true). he plays his way through waltzing matilda - using the techniques from his immediately prior album yes! jesus loves me - teasing apart the victorian conventions. he reworks his older tunes under changed titles -tiger is lion, tasmanian two-step is hawaiian two-step/ spanish two-step and return of the tasmanian tiger is revolt of the dyke brigade. the approaching of the disco void is a re-working of wine and roses. in a typical fahey move indian-pacific r.r. blues is actually beverly, a studio recording from his album after the ball with added applause (at least according to wikipedia).


 

a chapter from an historical novel

'There is nothing better than the hackney road, at least not in the seaside towns; for there it is everything. What does this street – the beauty of our seaside towns – not shine with! I know that not one of its pale and clerical inhabitants would trade the hackney road for anything in the world. Not only the one who is twenty-five years old, has an excellent mustache and a frock coat of an amazing cut, but even the one who has white hair sprouting on his chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish, he, too, is enchanted with the hackney road. And the ladies! Oh, the ladies find the hackney road still more pleasing. And who does not find it pleasing? The moment you enter the hackney road, it already smells of nothing but festivity.' - adapted from gogol's 'the nevsky prospect' (a short story much concerned with mustaches).

the last time horsemouth and howard were in the pub (slightly over a week ago) howard opined that the beard (as social phenomenon and facial appurtenance) was dying back - nevertheless horsemouth could immediately count 7 in the beer garden.

horsemouth has been reading gogol and has to modify his previous opinion - gogol’s technique works with/ against just about any type of material - it is just that the recognisably modern world of the nevsky prospect and the overcoat is closer to us  than the ukrainian tales ( flying to st. petersberg on the back of a devil to steal the tsarina's shoes). (he has been neglecting the return of the political - chantal mouffe for a gogol compilation).




two and a half hours of john fahey

and his label takoma records - commencing with fahey playing 'in christ there is no east or west' ending out with robbie basho playing 'mountain man's farewell'. along the way there's harry taussig, homegas, bukka white, leo kottke, robert 'pete' williams, peter walker, bola sete, richard ruskin, william ackerman, six organs of admittance, cul-de-sac and calexico.

mardi gras (fahey week 2017 ends)

happy mardi gras people. make those pancakes (round and golden like the sun that is coming). fahey week ends for 2017. if they have it where you live go and celebrate.

this year horsemouth has mostly concerned himself with general notions of creativity (as well as listening back through to the john fahey he actually owns - ok ok he can’t find his copy of fare forward voyager right now but it will come when the time is right).

now he’s on to iko iko...

it’s a beautiful world right now (horsemouth would like to do more tunes you can dance to).

accessions diary - ivo andric bosnian chronicle (two squid oxfam).

the various collaborations of john fahey (the end of fahey week 2017)

well there’s the singer and bassist from spirit/ jo jo gunne (mark andes and jay ferguson) together with an ex-member of the byrds (kevin kelley drummer sweetheart of the rodeo) on the yellow princess, there’s red krayola (horsemouth believes - see live 67 and apparently there are lost studio recordings), there’s cul-de-sac (the epiphany of glenn jones), there’s flautist linda mclean, there’s tape-collager barry hansen (and then there’s the people he had on tape - like fiddlers hubert thomas and virgil willis johnston), there’s a pre-canned heat alan ‘blind owl’ wilson and then there are the three (to my knowledge) john fahey orchestra albums - of rivers and religion, after the ball and old fashioned love.

that’s a start - more soon.

tomorrow horsemouth will be busy (though he is free wednesday) so this probably wraps it up for fahey week this year. horsemouth has conducted a re-listening exercise to the fahey albums he owns (and plans to go buy some more). 

saturday there may be more house watching (out in sunny walthamstow).

the village band of grassano

the village band of grassano was returning from nearby sant’arcangelo when the bus skidded and went off the cliff - the local shepherds still avoid the area at the base of the cliff claiming they can hear brass instruments playing. sant’arcangelo itself has the horns of the local dragon in the church - killed by a nearby feudal lord for the grazing rights to the meadows alongside the nearby river. to do this he required the assistance of the virgin mary. ‘the village is built of the bones of the dead’ says the town crier/ grave digger of gagliano - in his youth he was a wolf tamer. (this much and more we learn in carlo levi’s christ stopped at eboli, carlo levi the exile in lucania an area even more remote and fucked up than grassano - a region that  that not even christianity had properly reached. gagliano is (like akenfield) a fictionalised version of a real place).


there is a photo of late era (cleaned up) fahey on his way to a gig (from the front cover of womblife) - or is it? it looks suspiciously like he is moving, he looks suspiciously like the fahey of santa anna days. horsemouth has continued his fahey week celebrations by listening to death chants, breakdowns and military waltzes, and the dance of death and other plantation favourites (volumes 2 and 3 respectively). the downfall of the adelphi rolling grist mill was a live recording with flautist nancy mclean (she plays on lewisdale blues off voice of the turtle also) - allegedly recorded in march (so perhaps an anniversary) but horsemouth cannot yet discover the date.

years have gone by (ninety years without slumbering)

'many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call history. buffeted here and there at random I have been not able to return to my peasants as I promised them when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise.’ - carlo levi, christ stopped at eboli.

horsemouth was listening to days have gone by - repackaged as volume 6 of the fahey experience by takoma from 1967. there is a photo is fahey from oregon in the 90ies - drinking like a fish and into prescription painkiller darvon. horsemouth has found a link to a description of his funeral (his last earthly gig before the great gig in the sky). the photo on the cover of days have gone by is of john fahey when he was a) good looking and b) liked annoying people - the a didn't last very long. the b lasted him to the end of his life

the album opens with an instrumental named revolt of the dyke brigade (fahey annoying people) and ends with the hymn we would be building by jean sibelius. in between there’s a sounsdscape piece with manipulated whiporwill noises and a version of ‘old-timey’ tune my grandfather’s clock (by henry clay work author of marching through georgia) . it allegedly features one r. grubbert gardner on additional guitar.

my grandfather’s clock features in the 1963 twlight zone episode ninety years without slumbering whose pay-off line was the following; ‘ clocks are made by men, god creates time. no man can prolong his allotted hours, he can only live them to the fullest—in this world or in the twilight zone.’

john fahey’s body lies a mouldering in the grave but the truth (of his playing) is marching on - just as the tune of john brown’s body became the battle hymn of the republic.