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Revenant
In Memoriam: John Fahey (1939-2001)
Distractions are the stuff of small dreams, and John Fahey was having none of it, ever. An essentialist if ever there was, Fahey pared his life back to the barest of bones, jettisoning the mundanities that plague the rest of us - paying bills, maintaining a home, exercise, ordinary hygiene - in favor of the work that was a spiritual necessity to him.
John was completely naked when I met him. And I don't mean that in some sort of highfalutin' metaphorical sense. He was flopped out on his bed, the way God made him, in one glorious sprawl. It was 1994, and I had flown into Salem, OR late at night, and he had left the door open for me. As I schlepped into his motel room, I may have been a bit startled at the sight, may have dropped my bag or something, because he stirred and then, spying me, extended his hand. I shook it, of course.
John came into some funds in 1995 or 1996, a small inheritance from his father's estate. Instead of investing it wisely, he used it as seed money for a new label venture, which he intended for me to run. Ornette, Beefheart, Dock Boggs. These were a few of the archetypes around which the whole Revenant "raw musics" concept coalesced. Charley Patton, too, of course. This was to be the undiluted stuff that folks were likely to have in their personal archives somewhere but which was unlikely to have ever seen "legitimate" release. Shelved together, the releases were to appear more like a set of substantial books from the same publisher. Weighty tomes, JF said.
Charley was his passion, really, when it came down to it. He had written his masters thesis on Patton, a rather intriguing move at the time (mid '60s), given that only a handful of people had ever heard of CP then. Things hadn't changed that much by the time the thesis was published as a book in 1970. A fairly tiny smattering of acolytes thanked their lucky stars and the book promptly went out of print, a status it maintained for more than 30 years.
When I first met John, I wondered if he'd had a stroke or something. He spoke with an odd, foggy lilt in his voice that gave the suggestion of brain damage to his motor centers. He never consciously attempted to dispel this impression. He would, however, do things like show up in Austin, where I live, clutching a sheaf of handwritten pages ripped from a spiral notebook, pages on which he had furiously scribbled lengthy, fully footnoted essays off the top of his head on the plane ride over, which notes would ultimately be transcribed, without any further edits being necessary (except as regards spelling; he was a notoriously creative speller), into the notes for the Revenant release of the day. He would shove the slightly grubby papers at me, saying, "I wouldn't mind something to eat" or "I remember a thrift store in the south part of town" and off we would go, the notes completely a thing of the past for him. The footnoting, which might reference obscure philosophy texts, religious treatises, biblical passages, releases on the Bluebird label circa 1929-33, and the minor works of Klimt, would invariably turn out to be accurate in every respect.
Fahey's not just dead, he's extinct. His kind. A genuine eccentric in an age of affectation, we won't see his likes again. And we are - I am - much the poorer for it. It is both a comfort and a stiff challenge to realize that his fingerprints are and will remain all over this raw musics enterprise of ours. I've got some work ahead of me.