John Fahey Legend of Blind Joe Death Review
At the kickoff of my first year of college I bought Transfiguration online, listened to information technology a couple times and put it away. I couldn't hear any tunes and I was routed by the prospect of 15 instrumental tracks of acoustic blues, which I didn't really enjoy at the fourth dimension. When the schoolhouse twelvemonth ended I pulled information technology out again and institute that I liked the first 4 or five pieces. "Orinda Moraga" was the first to open up, then "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean"; and I took a new pleasure in the convicted slide playing of "I Am the Resurrection." From there I grew fond of the first side, refusing on principle to skip any tracks (fifty-fifty "Beautiful Linda Getchell," which I now like) and dug slowly into side ii.
My initial intense love (for awhile I called it my 2d-favorite album, after Tribute to Jack Johnson) for The Transfiguration of Bullheaded Joe Death has worn off by now, and I experience fix to evaluate information technology a trivial more critically. I dislike the proximity of "How Green Was My Valley" to the well-nigh identical "The Decease of the Clayton Peacock," although the erstwhile is the better song and the latter really does remind me of the peacocks that wandered around the RV park where I worked and listened to the CD last summer. (That high-pitched guitar squawk is nil like the truck-horn call of a real peacock, but together with the soft rhythmic strut of the bass notes information technology makes for an apt and funny tone poem virtually them. I appreciate information technology.) If they were farther apart both would be more enjoyable. I as well call up the "Old Southern Medley" is too long, and its good parts might have been better as separate tracks. Other than that I find information technology hard to complain about The Transfiguration.
I wish to note two things. Start, a lot of people seem to hear this as a "calm" album like the residual of John Fahey'due south earliest recordings, which Bob Christgau dismissed equally a "fantasy of sodden deliverance." The Guardian besides ascribes "an almost Buddhic meditativeness" (never listen the lame conversion of an adjective into a noun, and the fact that Fahey was a professed Christian who got briefly into Hinduism) toThe Transfiguration and lumps him in with the "new historic period" musicians of the Nineties. Having heard his highly abstruse 1997 CD City of Refuge I can run across where both are coming from, though he ended his career sounding more than like Jim O'Rourke and the Sonic Youth than similar annihilation from Windham Colina. But I've kind of come to agree with Christgau about The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Decease, which on the whole is for sentimental soaking-in, like an old Disney drawing, rather than rigorous secular meditation. Where the former blues guys like John Injure or Elizabeth Cotten made music in response to their environments, John Fahey pulls like a nineteenth-century classical composer from the themes and tropes of onetime blues to brand music reminiscent of the by. I requite Christgau credit for understanding this,* and for elevating the explicit Dixieland jazz of Rivers and Religion and After the Brawl above the early on stuff, even though I don't really love those records.
Which brings me to my second bespeak: h2o never rises above its source, and the John Faheys of the earth rarely surpass the bluesmen who influence them. I remember reading (I think it was in Lampedusa's The Leopard) some passage about shreds of themes from swollen symphonies being the only parts that last, and I think that the ponderous modernist Transfiguration will meet the same fate. If yous don't believe me, heed to Canned Oestrus or Kaleidoscope (the American band) or whatever other record-collector artist from the Sixties. John Fahey was one of them, trawling thrift shops for 78'due south and stealing tunes and picking patterns and whole songs, and he thought like one of them. But fifty-fifty though they loved the music those collector guys lived in a whole nother world not only from the blues people they copied, merely besides from the kids of their day, and whether or not they liked information technology they were in beloved with a tradition that had get totally irrelevant to the times. Yes, a lot of them recorded great rock covers of the old songs — I fabricated a playlist of those for the 11/29/18 episode of my radio prove. I love the rock and coil they fabricated out of old blues, and perhaps you do likewise. Simply do y'all take any acquaintances who do? (I hateful, if you lot do I envy you.) The artists who "made it" in the Sixties either weren't collector bands or they broken to/defined the loud, rhythmic, rootless new rock paradigm successfully. Beefheart, Hendrix and the Stones come to mind as defended blues fans who fabricated the shift and made fifty-fifty better music than their heroes. John Fahey didn't become rock until the Nineties, after he was located by his fans in my own college town of Salem, OR.** Even in his life habits he was a creature of the dejection, never of stone music, and he would never beat or even equal his friends John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten at that game. Similar all modernists, upward to and including Bob Dylan, he'due south a nineteenth-century sensibility marooned in the twentieth.
*However, I feel there's more to City of Refuge that I don't yet empathise, and I wonder if Christgau'southward ear isn't still so fibroid that he couldn't appreciate it for the same reason.
**When I learned about the re-discovery of John Fahey in an Oregon homeless shelter, I laughed out loud for two minutes considering it perfectly paralleled how he yanked Bukka White and Skip James out of retirement in the Sixties. Kinda mean of me simply then again, he literally institute James in a hospital bed and persuaded him to go on tour.
Source: https://noopinionshere.wordpress.com/2018/10/21/the-transfiguration-of-blind-joe-death-by-john-fahey-review/
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