Pitchfork

John Fahey was a lover, first picking up the guitar in a gas station as a means of picking up chicks. So a good way to become enamored with Fahey's catalog is to just pick any track fixated on a woman, and go from there: "Impressions of Susan", "A Raga Called Pat", "Requiem for Molly", "Beverly", "Juana", or on this particular disc, "Marilyn". Each lady is lovely, dark, ultimately unknowable. Is Juana really a waitress in Oregon? Was Molly really out on Knott's Berry Farm? Who was this Marilyn?

She is lush yet sad, and that might even be her squinched up on the cover, painfully reclining and staring out into space. When Fahey is playing her, it's at a much slower pace than the rest of the first side of this 1974 reissue. Second guitarist Woodrow Mann's second guitar glistens across Fahey's lead, each taking their sweet time in waving goodbye to her. The small diversions they take along every line are as exceptionally awkward as any of Thelonious Monk's irregularly melodic spurs, yet for all the unhurried and dissonant playing, the quickly picked finale shines a brighter hue on this lovely figure.

Apart from the ladies, this particular session shows how Fahey's talents took him much further afield of the blues path than most people will credit him for. Here he tackles in succession "In a Persian Market" and the Hindu chant "Jaya Shiva Shankarah", the two guitars twining around their Byzantine themes with a heck of a lot of flange, giving the fluctuating fingerpicked patterns a secondary weaving of soundwaves.

"Old Fashioned Love" is prime Fahey playing in its own right, but with the midway appearance of the old timey orchestra consisting of jug, banjo, clarinet, tuba, trumpet, trombone, piano, and drums, the ditty goes to a place seldom heard elsewhere in the man's catalog. The affected cymbal crash at the end also gives it an odd modern spin that confounds them ornery notions of time and nostalgia. John was never that easy to glean. "Boodle Am Shake" sounds straight off the shellac itself, Fahey blending into the background of the ensemble perfectly and sending up that wonderfully ridiculous refrain-- it's the one of the few instances of standard singing in his oeuvre.

Fred McDowell's standard "Keep Your Light Trimmed and Burning" is recast here as a 1920s big band number to excellent effect, the Fahey arrangement a particular surprise. Very rarely would he work with so many attuned musicians before or after this point. The set closes with one of his truly magical works, "Dry Bones in the Valley (I Saw the Light Coming Shining 'Round and 'Round)", which was a gateway for many through the cover version exacted with Tony Conrad on Gastr del Sol's Upgrade and Afterlife set. The effects are off, the session musicians sent home, and it's a beatific example of Fahey's opened steel strings resonating into the infinite, droning yet with numerous emotional contours unfurling in the chiming notes. It may have aged 28 years, but Old Fashioned Love remains a consistently surprising collection of Fahey's many loves.