John Fahey and the Spiders from Kansas City
IN SEARCH OF THE EXCEPTIONAL
THIS ISSUE: Maybe the earth really was flat in the 1980s.
During my first attempt at college, I lived in a dormitory where my next-door neighbors had an informal trade in pharmaceuticals; their most ardent customers were my neighbors across the hall. One of the latter was a fellow named Pete, a good-natured guy (if a bit sanctimonious in his disdain for music he considered insufficiently bluesy) whose heavy rotation list was, at the time, topped by John Fahey’s The Voice of the Turtle. I merely disliked the record the first time I heard it, but in the days ahead I came to loathe it. I found it repetitive, masturbatory, technically inept, and dead boring. Pete hated my music, too.
But at 18, I was an insecure listener. I projected my own pretensions onto every musical artist I encountered—and so it never occurred to me that some of Dylan’s best songs were intended as humor, or that at least half of Robbie Robertson’s songs didn’t mean jack shit, or that listening to Led Zeppelin was okay because it was fun.
That was almost a half-century ago; in the ensuing years, I learned to love a lot of music that was lost on the teenaged me.
I have also learned to forgive myself—for that shortcoming, at least—although lingering embarrassment prevents me from disclosing all of the great composers and writers and performers whose stuff I didn’t get the first or sometimes even the second or third time around. The fact is that, at 18, I simply hadn’t listened enough, read enough, or lived enough to grasp all of what I was hearing. I hadn’t snuggled enough babies or mourned enough elders or done enough heavy lifting in the times between.
John Fahey didn’t cross my radar again until 5 or 6 years ago, when a record store opened in the rural village I then called home: an (Takoma C 1002), a collection of original and traditional instrumentals performed solo on a steel-string guitar, recorded in 1959 and, remarkably, rerecorded in 1964. When I saw it in the bins, I remembered how much I enjoyed the Fahey-curated-and-produced (2 CDs, Revenant 211), so it seemed I should give his own compositions and performances another try.
