Pitchfork

John Fahey is a tough nut to crack. What was his deal? How did people relate to his music during his heyday? In the 60s he was a "folky," sorta, but read his funny and weird liner notes from those records and he seems cut from a different cloth. Fahey later crossed paths with pianist George Winston (producing Winston's first album for his Takoma label) and and Windham Hill founder William Ackerman, and thus came dangerously close to being branded New Age. His best-selling record (and the only way most people would know his name) was a Christmas album. Then in the 90s we knew him through his Drag City association, working backwards from Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing to see where it all started, and Fahey was canonized the patron saint of avant-garde folk. With all the new weird stuff from the past couple of years, he casts a longer shadow than ever.

It took me a long time to warm to the man's music. Years before I actually heard him, I would notice him being mentioned by other musicians, usually acoustic guitarists driving the road Fahey paved. In my mind Fahey developed an aura as a musician's musician, the dude with the chops and the idiosyncratic style that needed years of training to appreciate. Once I started becoming familiar with his records, the icy "musician's music" layer that had kept me from fully appreciating what he was doing began to thaw, and I began to understand the towering strength of his compositions. The songwriting hooked me.

Fahey was hitting on all cylinders throughout the 60s, stuffing great songs into more than a dozen albums. This prime era is well represented on this CD of previously unreleased live recordings, pulled from two shows in 1968 and 1969. It's only his third official live album, and the first from the 60s, so obviously The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick is an important release. Glenn Jones of Cul de Sac oversaw the preparation of the old tapes for release and contributes witty and personal liner notes, and the sharp packaging is a suitably tactile experience in honor of the man who founded the Revenant label.

Nothing is ever quite what it seems in Fahey's songs. "Requiem for Mississippi John Hurt" finds the pivot point between country blues and bluegrass, moving between a light, bouncing verse and sheets of furious picking on the chorus that manage to evoke both the hills of Kentucky and 20th Century minimalism. The stately "When the Catfish are in Bloom" sounds about 200 years old and parts of it probably are, as references to marching spirituals slowly pile up into a ringing cluster of notes. The slow opening of "In Christ There is No East or West" shows how easily melodic Fahey could be when so inclined, and "The Death of the Clayton Peacock," with its graceful slide notes hanging in the air like long curls of smoke, is pure atmosphere. With its strong selection of songs and impressive fidelity, The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick is a worthy summary of where Fahey was at this high point.

Musicians complain that critics like to pigeonhole. We're always straining to "stick you into a box" by scene, sound, or genre, summing up a life's passion in a single turn of phrase. Is it a fair complaint? Possibly. It's sort of an OCD thing, where we slip into thinking of music as a field of discrete categories, and expect artists to come to rest in their allotted slot (the record collection as coin sorting machine). It's normally a subconscious process, but it happens. There are exceptions, though, these initially puzzling artists that demand a more determined approach and, not coincidentally, rarely grow tiresome. Guys like John Fahey.