John Fahey - Amazingrace Coffeehouse, Evanston, Illinois, August 24, 1974
We checked out John Fahey's amazing "Performance As War" essay a few weeks back, and had our senses thoroughly scrambled by Blind Joe Death's, er, unique insights and opinions. Now, let's get even more scrambled by checking out an excellent recording of the guitarist from right around the time "Performance As War" was published in 1974.
This era is, in my opinion, Fahey's peak as a live act, as he delivers long unbroken medleys that wind in all sorts of strange directions, but remain utterly focused and deadly. At the Amazingrace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Illinois, John plays an hour's worth of visionary acoustic guitar, summing up entire swathes of American music using only the barest of essentials. Mindbending!
Fahey Says: The great artist must be pied-piper AND exterminator, simultaneously. His piping must be seductively lyrical; His knife must be fast and sharp. His pauses must be long and serious ones; His Finale must create obituary. Hold them firmly, terribly. One did not write them in jest or because he was at a loss how to proceed. He indulges in the fullest, the most sustained tone to express emotions in the adagio. The very lifeblood of the tone is to be extracted to the last drop, by the performer from the audience, as when an embalmer, slowly, meticulously, takes the blood from one who has gone on before us. I arrest the waves of the ocean, but the depth must not be visible; or I stem the clouds, disperse the mist, and slow the pure blue ether and the radiant eye of the sun.
