John Fahey - The Best of the Vanguard Years

I'll never forget the first time I heard John Fahey. I was in college, and one night, with some of my disreputable friends, piled into their ramshackle car and headed out into the country. After a while, a farmhouse loomed in the darkness, and we parked. Inside was an older couple (which means probably mid-30s) who welcomed us into their living room. Weird paintings were on the walls, old vintage acoustic guitar on the sofa, and in a bowl on what passed for the coffee-table were some green-and-white pills: Dexedrine, I was told. I passed. I similarly passed when the couple rolled some thin cigarettes and set them into the knuckles of some ornately-carved chicken leg-bones which had a hole drilled down their length.

It was at this juncture that they took out a record and put it on the turntable. Some of the strangest acoustic guitar music I'd ever heard began issuing from the speakers. Now, I may not have known much about drugs, but I did know something about guitar music, so I went for the album cover. It was crudely silk-screened with the words BLIND JOE DEATH. The other side was no more revealing: JOHN FAHEY.
Considering that there were only 95 copies of this album in existence (five of the hundred which had been pressed were smashed in shipment), it was pure luck that I ever got to hear it, but it wasn't the only copy in town. This Fahey character was something of a cult among the post-folkie, pre-hippie community on campus. To be honest, the more I heard of him, the less I understood. My rigid thinking At the time had trouble absorbing his vision: it started with country blues and hymns, but took these starling points as a basis for a kind of improvisation that I'd never before encountered. It took me years before I could "hear" Fahey's music, because he was moving forward faster than I could figure out what he was doing.
He's 60 years-old now, and still pushing the envelope. , John Fahey was born on February 28,1939, in Takomo Park, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., and taught himself guitar while working the night-shift at a gas-station in Langley Park, where, since it was the only 24-hour business around, he also got to meet some pretty peculiar characters, people he still remembers fondly. He was also fortunate in having neighbors who were among the earliest scholars of country blues, including Dick Spottswood, who would later rediscover Mississippi John Hurt, and who introduced young John to the wonders of scratchy old 78s with ghostly voices and magnificent guitar work, beginning with Blind Willie Johnson, the slide-guitar virtuoso and preacher, whose music disturbed Fahey incredibly, but which, he found, he couldn't gel out of his head. Spottswood also showed John how to knock on doors of older people and politely offer to buy their old records, which soon turned into a thriving business for him.
Fahey made his first recordings in 1958, which shows how far ahead of the curve he was. They were, appropriately enough, 78s, made for another neighbor who made them at home. Invigorated, he began thinking about putting out an LP. and a friendly priest pointed him towards a pressing plant which would make them in quantities as low as a hundred. That was about how many he could afford, and even with the five smashed ones, it took him several years to dispose of all of them. He called the label Takoma.
By 1965, which is when I first heard him, he'd gotten a philosophy degree, hung out in Hawaii listening to the slack-key guitarists down there, and enrolled in UCLA's graduate folklore program. He'd also done a bit of touring on the folk circuit, and, with his partner in Takoma, Ed Denson, they went to Mississippi and found Bukka White, one of the Delta blues legends he'd collected on 78s. Not long after wards, with Henry Vestine and Bill Barth, two other renegade guitarists based in country blues, he went back and found Skip James languishing in a hosptlal. The three paid some of his bills, saw him get his health back, and helped launch him on a new career performing, as White had been doing, for an entirely new audience of appreciative listeners.
Fahey had also put out a couple of more records for Takoma, which would develop into a refuge for musicians with odd visions. They bore titles like Death Chants Breakdowns and Military Waltzes &The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions. Not your standard folkie fare. Nor were his performances, fueled by some suspicious soft-drinks which he kept by the side of his chair, he'd play a tune, then launch into a philosophical disquisition (that philosophy degree wasn't just a way to get a college degree: it represented what has been a lifelong passion) which would often be three times the length of the piece he'd just played.
By 1969, Fahey and Takoma both were on the map. Takoma had added records by the reclusive Robbie Basho (who reportedly made Fahey look gregarious) and a young Minnesotan named Leo Kottke. He'd passed on on L.A. songwriter who'd sent several scantily-clad maidens to the Takoma office where they'd had sex with everyone but Fahey (thus sparing him the gonorrhea they all came down with), because he didn't have the equipment to play the tape they'd brought with them. He also declined to go out to the ranch in the desert where they lived to hear the guy perform live, but not long afterwords he became famous without help from Fahey or Takoma, as Charles Manson, mass-murderer.
At this point, Vanguard Records, a leading folk label, approached him to see if he'd be interested in recording for them. Since among the producers the label had was his old friend and fellow blues scholar Sam Charters, Fahey decided to give it a shot, and recorded two records for them. With an expanded recording budget, he was able, with the assistance of his friend and neighbor Barry Hansen, to start experimenting with tape music, collages, something which had interested him for some time. The two albums,The Yellow Princess and Requia And Other Compositions for Guitar Solo, show Fahey in a number of different contexts from those his fans had come to expect. There were some full band recordings with members of the L.A. band Spirit and former Byrds drummer Kevin Kelley (two of which, "March! For Martin Luther King" and "Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg," appear on this record), some solo recordings, including the moving "Requiem for John Hurl," and, on the Requia album, a four-part composition "Requiem for Molly," on which he and Hansen engaged in some primitive and pioneering sampling, throwing in some bits from their extensive record collections (Hansen has gone on to fame as radio's Dr. Demento). There was also a meditation which starred one of the oddest "musicians" anyone had ever recorded: "The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee" plays Fahey's guitar off of the sounds of the wind blowing through this famous bridge's wires and the odd percussive noises it makes when cars drive over it. But there was also some regular old guitar-picking, and "Lion" and "Irish Setter," to name but two, can stand with the best of Fahey's work anywhere.
Although released during a time of increased musical experimentation, the two albums outraged Fahey's fans, and drew horrible reviews (although later they would prove collectors' items to members of a new avant-garde inspired by the likes of Sonic Youth and Merzbow). They" didn't sell, either, so Fahey went back to takoma, where he came out with, of all things, a Christmas album, [The New Possibility, which went on to sell hundreds of thousands of records, and is still a big seller, since people apparently like the idea of Christmas carols approached in a Delta blues style. I know I do.
Fahey sold Tokoma to Chrysalis records after a while, and recorded sporadically for them through 1983, by which time he'd left Los Angeles for Oregon. He toured just as sporadically, at one point performing in tasmania and recording the concert because he was certain nobody'd ever done a "live in tasmania" album and he wanted to be the first.
Then, tragedy struck. In 1986, he came down with Epstein-Barr Syndrome, a virus which sucks the energy from its victim, while leaving him otherwise fine. Diabetes followed, and, after that, a divorce. Unable to work, depressed, drinking too much, and in bad health, Fahey lost everything he had and pawned his guitars. He moved into a rescue mission, and then a welfare motel. It was only with the re ease of a two-CD retrospective, compiled by Barry Hansen, for Rhino Records in 1994, that people started asking what had happened to John Fahey. A reporter for the Portland alternative paper found him in his motel, a bit confused, but otherwise okay, and put the word out that he was still alive.
Since then, John Fahey has regained his health, his altitude, and his drive and he's found a whole new audience for his music. He continues to experiment with sound, gratified that a new generation has discovered his older experiments and been influenced by them, and, with a young enthusiast named Dean Stockwell, has started a record label, Revenant, which reissues "American primitive" music like that of country banjo player Dock Boggs. He performs electrically and acoustically, writes, and is engaged in a number of long-term projects.
lf it were up to Fahey, he'd tell you not to buy this album. He's constantly denigrating his old work, always filled with enthusiasm for what's coming next, and, as an artist, that's how it should be. However, the other night, I put on this album and followed it with his latest one, a live solo electric guitar concert. What I heard was a straight line: a concern for fascinating structures, a willingness to play with sound (listen to how the harmonics he strums on some of the tracks on this album die away to reveal other harmonics, an encyclopedic knowledge of American music, and a sense of improvisation which puts most of his contemporaries in the shade.
Okay, John, tell ya what: you don't buy this. As for the rest of you, this is a great place to start discovering a seminal American artist. The fact that he's still going strong in his seventh decade should be an inspiration to us all.
SLEEVE NOTES -Ed Ward

John Fahey - The Best of the Vanguard Years

1		The Yellow Princess (4:48)
2		View (East From The Top Of The Riggs Road B & O Trestle) (4:53)
3		Lion (5:06)
4		March! For Martin Luther King (3:39)
5		The Singing Bridge Of Memphis, Tennessee (2:49)
6		Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City Of Bladensburg (4:06)
7		Charles A. Lee: In Memoriam (3:58)
8		Irish Setter (7:13)
9		Commemorative Transfiguration And Communion At Magruder Park (5:57)
10		Requiem For John Hurt (5:05)
11		Requiem For Russell Blaine Cooper (8:51)
12		When The Catfish Is In Bloom (7:36)
13		Fight On Christians, Fight On (1:54)
14		Requiem For Molly (Part 3) (2:28)
15		Requiem For Molly (Part 4) (2:55)

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It's Jo And Danny - Lank Haired Girl to Bearded Boy

It's Jo And Danny may be a daft name for a band, but in this case it's very fitting. This London duo have made a debut album that is simply the sound of two music lovers pouring every influence they've got onto a four-track recorder. There's no frills, no big production and no big names; instead, the guitars, drums, vocals, a studio on loan and a little imagination all guarantee that every minute of these awkward, misshapen tunes sounds totally home-made. From the psychedelic freak out opener "Solar Plexus" to the freak folk instrumental "Arkle", it's clear that there's no hidden agenda, no obvious direction and no master plan; just two people, who don't give a damn what other people think, making music that's odd, innocent and downright beautiful.

It's Jo And Danny - Lank Haired Girl to Bearded Boy

Solar plexus

2. Hippy thinking

3. Benbecula

4. Repentant song

5. Love expression

6. Arkle

7. Bell's corner

8. Pilgrim's prayer

9. Ones with open mouths

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James Kelman - Seven stories cd

Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor (where he became sensitised to the look of words on the page), which was followed by periods of work and unemployment and a brief spell in the USA. A keen reader, it wasn’t until the early 1970s, in his late twenties, that he began to seriously acknowledge his creative ability, enrolling on a writing course under the tutelage of the influential Philip Hobsbaum, alongside fellow aspiring writers Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard.

Variously described as gritty, essential, authentic, postmodern, existential, realist, socialist, experimental, original, traditionally working-class, traditionally Scottish, traditionally European in its similarities to Kafka, Joyce, or Beckett, or just incomparable, the work of James Kelman sparks commentators into a labeling frenzy which necessarily falls short of a true appreciation of this highly gifted writer.

Published first in the USA, Kelman had to wait until 1976 for his work to receive a British audience, in Three Glasgow Writers (with Alex Hamilton and Tom Leonard). But it was really during the following decade that Kelman’s unique voice started making waves on the Scottish literary scene. Not Not While the Giro, his first book-length collection of short stories, was published in 1983 by Polygon, and with his first two novels, The Busconductor Hines (1984) and A Chancer (1985), Kelman firmly established his artistic flair and commitment to showing real life in Thatcherite Britain as faithfully as possible (far removed from the falsities and stereotypes of the media).

The Busconductor Hines is the moving and frequently irreverent tale of Rab Hines, a family man and, as Kelman once referred to him, a ‘working-class intellectual’; a highly imaginative soul increasingly disillusioned with the monotony of his job. A Chancer, a book which the author had been struggling to finish for many years, is the brilliantly restrained narrative of a younger Glaswegian man whose only real sense of purpose is derived from the betting shop and the greyhound tracks.

In the late 1980s Kelman began to receive the recognition he deserved, when first his short story collection Greyhound for Breakfast (1987) won the Cheltenham prize and his third novel, A Disaffection (1989), took the James Tait Black award and made the Booker shortlist. With its nods to Kierkegaard and Kafka, A Disaffection brought extravagant literary comparisons on its author, and furthered Kelman’s championing of the ‘working-class intellectual’.

In 1994 James Kelman’s name shot to mainstream as well as literary prominence with the novel How Late it Was, How Late, the powerfully unsettling story of a few days in the life of Sammy Samuels, a tragic ne’er-do-well who is beaten blind by police and struggles to get by in a world of unremitting tension and danger. General astonishment followed when this most unlikely contender won that year’s Booker Prize, the most prestigious, anglocentric of book awards. Inevitably, this caused a fierce debate in the broadsheets which divided opinion between those who admired Kelman’s unwavering description of life on the edge and those who failed to see past the swearing. Simon Jenkins in The Times sneeringly referred to Kelman as an ‘illiterate savage’, while others believed that serious criticism constituted counting the instance of the f-word.

Following his Booker triumph and a new legion of supporters (although his novels have never achieved bestseller status), Kelman took up successive teaching posts on various creative writing courses, while his fiction took a rather new direction. In 2001, Translated Accounts emerged, a strange collection of anonymous testimonials introduced as originating from ‘an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation’. While challenging his readership more than ever, Translated Accounts also offers a humanitarian, hard-hitting indictment of post-9/11 right-wing political newspeak, and wisely avoids commenting overtly on real people or places (and thereby narrowing the relevance of the message).

Kelman’s You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), is a return to his old style, albeit in a new setting. The first-person narrative belongs to Jeremiah Brown, a Glaswegian expatriate drinking in a small town somewhere in the USA, brooding over his past and his ex-girlfriend. There is renewed satire of governmental discourse and its treatment of ‘unassimilatit aliens’ like Jeremiah. As in the previous novels, what is striking is Kelman’s appreciation of the heroism of ordinary human beings just getting by, and Jeremiah Brown, with all his bad luck and resilient humour, is one of his best creations yet.

James Kelman - Seven stories here

the same is here again

roofsliding

learning the story

the witness

acid

are you drinking sir?

a wide runner

His most recent novel Kieron Smith, Boy[2008] has been descibed as 'Magnificent and important ... might just be Kelman's greatest achievement to date' 'A vibrant, beautiful portrait of childhood ' 'I have read no other depiction of the inner life of a boy that comes as close as this to The Catcher in the Rye '

Of all the words used to describe James Kelman, perhaps the most pertinent then is ‘essential’. Kelman’s commitment to the ordinary individual struggling against systems of oppression, both in his work as a novelist and as a political activist (which he describes in his two collections of essays), is admirable. But it is the way he writes, his calculated subversion of the English language and his total disregard for convention, that singles him out as a truly great contemporary writer, and as much as one would like to avoid the labels, the comparisons with Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett are inevitable and much deserved.

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An Interview with James Kelman

The Fall - The Peel Sessions

This cd was the first time release for some of the sessions the fall recorded for the john peel show & is the perfect taster forthe complete sessions boxset.

SLEEVENOTES
Since the compilation of this record, The Fall have recorded several further sessions for my Radio 1 programmes. The band is recording another in a fortnight's time. It'll be the band's 22nd or 23rd. Possibly their 24th. We don't seem to be able to agree on this, although doubtless there'll be someone on the Fallnet who'll know. Or maybe the people who put together the Fall fanzine. The Biggest Library Yet' at 199, Wellington Street, Retford, Notts DN22 6PR, will be able to tell us.
What I'm trying to say is, there are folks out there who know more about the Fall than Mark E. Smith himself does. They certainly know a lot more than I do. Surely the Fall is and has been the most analysed and discussed band in pop history. There have been times, as with football teams, when the fans have grumbled, feared for the future, left a performance shaking their heads in disbelief. I always cite a night at The Junction, Cambridge, in this last context. But we always come back, yearning for more. This past year has been especially turbulent, of course, resulting in an all-new Fall. Anticipation is high.
In addition to the Radio 1 programmes for which these recordings were made, I also recorded several programmes for stations in Germany, notably FSK in Hamburg and Radio Brandenburg in Potsdam, and all the Germans that are moved to write to me as a result, mention the Fall. Can I clear up a dispute over the lyrics to 'Dead Beat Descendant'? Do I realise that Mark sings at the end of this Adult Net track? "Here, John, is a cassette of Fall covers. Perhaps you will play it in your next sending?"
The Germans will not have heard these tracks before, apart from those that have been bootlegged. I still hope that before I move on to become a new face in Hell myself, I will be able to see the release of all the Fall sessions (however many there have been), but this assortment will do to be going on with. {Note, by the way, that 'Cruisers Creek' was produced by Mark Radcliffe, still the jewel in the Radio 1 crown.)
You'll never know how difficult it was to write these notes without trying to incorporate all the titles on the album into them. Smile.
John Peel Autumn 1998

the fall - The Peel Sessions

1. Rebellious jukebox

2. Mess of my

3. New face in hell

4. Winter

5. Smile

6. Middlemass

7. 2x4

8. Cruises creek

9. What you need

10. Athlete cured

11. Dead beat descendant

12. Black monk theme

13. Idiot joy snowland

14. Free range

15. Strychnine

16. A past gone mad

17. M5

and because it's wednesday you get the complete peel sessions here at youngmosstongue

Thurston Moore - Root

The premise behind this record was simple, Thurston Moore recorded several guitar shorts and sent them out to various artists- the result: 25 new musical pieces and orignal artworks by such names as Derek Bailey,Alec empire, Blur, Merbow and more. As there are varied artists retooling Thurston's works, the output is eclectic, ranging from experiments in statics, traditionally structured songs, and those who veer on tangents; ending in bossa-nova like chords. An exceptional work which should be played from beginning to end.
Thurston Moore - Root

. Derek Bailey

2. Alec Empire

3. Mogwai

4. Luke Vibert

5. Donald Christie & The Underdog

6. Blur

7. Mark Webber (Pulp)

8. Stereolab

9. Cheap Glue (Republica)

10. Add N To X

11. Springheel Jack

12. Hypnotist

13. Mellowtrons

14. Warren Defever

15. VVM

16. Third Eye Foundation

17. David Cunningham

18. Echo Park

19. Merzbow

20. Richard Thomas

21. Stock Hausen & Walkman

22. Twisted Science Vs. Burzootie

23. Bruce Gilbert

24. Arashi Vs. Red King

25. Russell Haswell

thurston moore interview
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