Tuesday, 30 November 2010
2. Steamboat Gwine 'Round The Bend - John Fahey
If I said that a major influence on things I listened to in the late sixties and early seventies was an English DJ who I never heard over the airwaves, people who don’t know much about the era might be inclined to dismiss the concept as one of Hughesy’s more fanciful ideas.
However, if I mentioned that his name was John Peel the idea might not seem so strange to anyone who knows about British broadcasting from the pirate radio era onwards.
How did someone whose shows I never heard influence what I bought?
It goes back to the stage when I started buying and reading music magazines. From Australia there was Go Set and from the U.K. there were a variety of titles - Disk & Music Echo, New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds. They all had their charts, single, album and concert reviews and - most exotic for a sixteen or seventeen-year-old sitting down to read them in northern Queensland - the gig guide.
At the time, this part of the world was off the beaten track when it came to concert tours, even by Australian artists, unless you wanted to catch the occasional teenybopper package that passed through town and drove the girls at Pimlico High into hysterics. The blokes, of course, weren’t even slightly interested.
It wasn’t much better in the south. There’d be the occasional Stones tour or a package with a couple of semi-cool names but Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne were so far out of our reach that they might as well have been on another planet.
In that situation, looking at gig guides in the English music press was like observing the features of another galaxy through a telescope. And apart from concerts and club dates there were radio programs listed, and the radio included performances by guests of unimaginable coolness.
The most exotic of them was Top Gear - not that the name was all that far out, but the guests! Hendrix, Cream, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, The Nice, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - everyone who was breaking in 1967 and 1968 seemed to be listed for this show, and they didn’t turn up every few months - it seemed that someone like Hendrix was on the show every other week and the line-up for each show usually had two or three names I could only drool over...
So how did this come about? I hear you ask in your relentless search for knowledge and enlightenment.
To explain that, we need to travel backwards in time to a universe many people living today would find unimaginable, where television shut down before midnight, where radio stations didn’t just play records and do talk back.
Strange as it seems today, British radio at the time was restricted to one broadcaster, officially at least, and the BBC was limited to a minimal amount of what they referred to as Needle Time when records could be played on-air.
Everything else had to be specially recorded or played live in the studio by members of the Musicians’ Union.
The easiest way to cover the deficiencies of that set of regulations was to get the artists who were storming up the charts to come into the studio and play live. If you’re looking through the discography of your favourite British artist from the sixties or seventies and you see something called BBC Sessions that’s what they were, the band playing live so the track could be played on a radio station that couldn’t spend all its time playing records.
It took a while for me to figure out the way it worked because that code of practice was completely alien to someone listening to commercial radio in Australia, but you can see why whoever was playing not quite live on a top-rating radio show would be listed in the weekly gig guide.
On the other hand it didn’t take long to find out that the presenter of Top Gear was someone called John Peel and that he hosted the coolest radio show imaginable. He was playing the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & The Fish, The Incredible String Band, names I saw attracting rave reviews in the overseas press.
Sitting in suburban Townsville this seemed like a musical utopia.
Among the people Peel was championing at the time was someone called Captain Beefheart, whose Safe As Milk album actually gained an Australian release and was viewed as quite amazingly brilliant and someone called John Fahey, who, from what I could gather, turned up in some shape or form on almost every one of Mr Peel’s radio shows.
Fahey records with titles like The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death were reviewed in the English press, but these little bits of exotica were on some obscure independent record label called Takoma and were almost unbelievably difficult to get in our part of Australia. It was probably altogether different in the capital cities but we were away in the back blocks.
So John Fahey was one of those people I had on my chase these down some day list but I didn’t expect that day was likely to come any time soon.
Then, lo and behold, in the early seventies a Fahey record appeared on a major label, and, surprise surprise, the major label actually released the thing in Australia!
The album was called Of Rivers And Religion and from the time I collected the copy I’d ordered, I was rapt.
The cover, which to this day remains a favourite, had a picture of a a gathering of black people apparently dressed for church posed on a ferry made of tree trunks beside a water mill. The cover had a texture that suggested that the cover was on the bottom of a stream and you were looking at it through rippled water or something like that.
More impressive was the fact that the music on the record matched the feel of the cover perfectly and the vibe of the thing matched the sort of back porch music I’d found so appealing on the Taj Mahal album mentioned in the previous theme.
As time went by and imports became easier to chase down, my John Fahey collection grew, much to the bemusement of some of my colleagues who associated the name John Fahey with a school inspector who allegedly referred to himself as The Smiling Taipan. But Of Rivers and Religion remained in my list of indispensable albums, along with Love’s Forever Changes, Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and Mother Earth’s Living With The Animals - but more of them later on. ..
A little research revealed John Fahey was a musicologist of some note, with a masters degree in American studies and a biography of Charley Patton under his belt and that apart from knowing about the all old country blues stuff he did a fine job of playing it as well. American primitive guitar was the label Fahey used to describe what he did.
One weekend about twenty years back there were a few people sitting on the verandah in front of The Cave downing ales and swapping tales, a situation where John Fahey was often providing a background soundtrack.
One of those present was taking a break from his regular occupation as the pest control operative at Hamilton Island, and much of the tale swapping was concerned with the latest escapades of various local identities, so there wasn’t a lot of attention being paid to the soundtrack, or so I thought.
Most of my friends know better than to ask what they’re hearing, but for some reason The Barra turned to me. Professor, who’s this?
His visits to town were few and far between so I guess he was less aware than most of the shaky ground he was entering by asking such a question. Most of my acquaintances would have adopted a don’t encourage him attitude.
John Fahey, I answered. Good stuff, eh?
What I like about it is he doesn’t seem to be playing for anybody else. It's like he’s pleasing himself and everybody else can .... The Barra replied.
And that’s probably the best way to classify the tracks on this playlist - music that sounds like it’s being made on someone’s back porch by people who don’t sound like they’re particularly interested in pleasing an audience.
So what’s on the playlist?
Steamboat Gwine 'Round De Bend - John Fahey
