Browse by Artist: FAHEY, JOHN

Artist:	FAHEY, JOHN
Title:	How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	Book
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	DC 124BK

"John Fahey is feared and revered around the world as a guitar player and composer. His inventions for acoustic and electric strings are the stuff of legend. Since he began recording in Maryland in the late 1950s, Mr. Fahey's access to the unknown tongue has been made manifest on over 30 albums, and his presence has unsettled audiences from here to Tasmania. He has served as a spiritual model for guitarists as disparate as Leo Kottke and Thurston Moore. He has been called a musical visionary by everyone from The New York Times to Ptolemaic Terrascope. John Fahey is a giant of 20th Century American Music. This is well known. It is perhaps less well-known that Fahey's pen has the same world-gobbling ferocity as his guitar. His early records included savagely hilarious liner notes, and other sightings of his clamorous writerly discourse have surfaced over the years. Now, finally, here is a collection that makes an explosive selection of his work available for general public consumption. What else can we possibly say, except, 'Grab your ankles, dear readers. It's kingdom time!'." -Byron Coley, 1999. Introduction by Jim O'Rouke. 291 pages, paperbound. $19.98 suggested list price.

Artist:	FAHEY, JOHN
Title:	Vampire Vultures
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	Book
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	DC 245BK

"The publication of How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life did a great deal to spread the word of Fahey's literary talents, though sadly only a year before he died. Vampire Vultures is an unexpected gift and should ease the grief of those who thought they would never hear anything from John Fahey again. Originally a project of his own conception, it was to be an epic work that would expand on many of the characters and experiences he introduced in Bluegrass. Compiled from his private papers, Vampire Vultures includes notebook entries, short stories, and letters never sent, revealing the struggles and victories of a cult artist's life in modern America."

Artist:	FAHEY, JOHN
Title:	The Mill Pond & Collected Paintings
Label:	IMPORTANT RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	IMPREC 183CD

"The Mill Pond was originally released in 1997 as a double 7" that went immediately out of print. For its 10th anniversary, we're issuing it on compact disc housed in a deluxe letterpressed jacket and including an extensive booklet collecting John Fahey's paintings for the very first time. Limited edition. On this release, Fahey uses heavy reverb, electric slide and feedback to create an eerie mood. He gets a bit of help from Jeff Allman, who recorded the songs and adds some electronic noise in spots, and from Scott Colburn, who mixed the tracks, but this record is all Fahey. The Mill Pond is all over the place stylistically, so it should confuse those who try to pigeonhole Fahey into any one category. The Mill Pond further proves that there is only one category into which he fits: truly innovative guitar genius." "Four ecstatic, lo-fi grabs for the ring of eternity, recorded in Fahey's Oregon hotel room. Containing the first graspable evidence of John's throat-singing abilities, this represents the merging of the bull and the china shop. The crudity of the electronics and the delicacy of the stringwork makes for a wonderful match." --Byron Coley.

Artist:	FAHEY, JOHN
Title:	Red Cross
Label:	REVENANT
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	RVN 104CD

"Our late founder John Fahey's final album, Red Cross. An intensely personal project for John which he completed a few months before his death and originally intended for release in 2001. Red Cross can be heard as Fahey coming full circle, reinvigorated, at peace with both past and present. Includes spine-tingling interpretations of Irving Berlin's 'Remember' and the Gershwins' 'Summertime' alongside a number of stellar new Fahey originals. Featuring the acoustic fingerpicking of yore as well as some shimmering electric guitar vamps, Red Cross touches those peculiarly Faheyian regions in the heart and mind. A final, sparkling gem from a hue American original. Packaged in a special, limited-edition letter-pressed chipboard jacket with an inspirational pamphlet nestled insides."

Artist:	FAHEY, JOHN
Title:	Sea Changes & Coelacanths
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$22.00
Catalog #:	TOE 085CD

Subtitled: A Young Person's Guide to John Fahey. This compiles Fahey's earlier releases for TOE: 1997's Womblife and the live followup Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts; plus the Hard Time Empty Bottle Blues 12" (all o/p as individual releases at this point). "In the 43 years between his first recordings and his death in 2001, John Fahey stomped across the American soundscape, leaving behind footprints of influence so breathtakingly vast that entire genres now huddle within them. Fahey's mesmeric guitar compositions fused the blues' syncopated rhythms with contemporary dissonance; Eastern influences with musique-concrete. He was the first to demonstrate that traditional steel-string finger-picking techniques could be used to express a universe of non-traditional ideas, and his contribution to American music is immense. Sea Changes & Coelacanths compiles all of Fahey's mid-'90s recordings for the Table of the Elements label and embodies an artistic essence, with sounds that are undiluted, uncompromised, starkly honest, pure of vision, and in every way innovative -- just like the man himself."

Artist:	FAHEY, JOHN
Title:	The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick
Label:	WATER
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	WATER 139CD

Live at the Matrix, SF 1968/69. "One of acoustic music's true innovators and eccentrics drawing from blues, Native American music, Indian ragas, experimental dissonance, and pop, John Fahey was living in Berkeley, California in the late Sixties when this set at San Francisco's legendary Matrix club was recorded. Drawing the best material from his two sets at the club that night, The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick shows the influential fingerpicker at the height of his prodigious technique. Deluxe package with detailed liner notes by Fahey expert (and Cul de Sac member) Glenn Jones."

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