Subscribe...Record collectors are typically thought of as irascible loners, but in the Washington of the ’50s and early ’60s, there existed a group of scruffy young blues and folk fans who could’ve given the Illuminati a run for their all-seeing eyes. They thought of themselves as the guardians of a tradition the rest of the world had either forgotten or misinterpreted. They adopted fake names. They invented strange mythologies. They hatched plans to bring their favorite historical figures back from the dead--or at least back from the commercial oblivion to which the music biz had consigned them. But most of all, they inspired admiration and awe. Though they never used the term themselves, this bunch of vintage-78 obsessives was known by others as the East Coast Blues Mafia.The Thong Club
Director Michelangelo Antonioni flies Fahey to Rome to record some music for a love scene in his film Zabriskie Point. Fed up with the “orgy scenes” and Antonioni’s anti-Americanism, Fahey punches the filmmaker, knocking him out.Thanks, y2karl!
...Still, he is plagued with something called Restless Leg Disorder, which causes long periods of involuntary muscle contractions, as well as the persistent chronic insomnia that made him one of the first people to receive a prescription for Quaaludes when they were introduced in the '60's. Fahey had just begun to take his Quaaludes when the Italian director, Michaelangelo Antonioni, flew him over to Rome to record music for the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point.And here, from Chapter 3 of Nick Shillace's master's thesis linked above, here's John Fahey on Al Wilson:
Antonioni's conceptual sequel to Blow-Up is an Italian leftist's goofball cinematic view of late '60s American counterculture. It features a long sequence with nude couples making love in the desert, for which Antonioni wanted Fahey to do the music. When Fahey arrived in Rome, Antonioni showed him the segment in a screening room. "Antonioni says, 'What I want you to do is to compose some music that will go along with the porno scene.' I kept saying, 'Yes, sir.' Then he starts this, 'Now, John. This is young love. Young love.' I mean, that's young love? All these bodies? 'Young love. But John, it's in the desert, where's there's death. But it's young love.' He kept going, 'Young Love/Death' faster and faster. I was sure I was talking to a madman. I'm still sure I was.
"So I experimented. I had instrumentalists come in and told them just to play whatever they felt like. They had to pretend to understand what I was talking about, especially if Antonioni came in the room. That was fun. They were very cooperative. I came up with some sections of music that sounded more like death than young love. It was actually pretty ominous. I played it for Michaelangelo and he thought it was great. So he took me out to dinner at this really fancy restaurant and started telling me how horrible the United States was. We were drinking a lot of wine and I don't remember which one of us started cussing. It started real fast and ended in a fistfight. You have no idea how much that guy hates the United States. What a jerk. I did like 20-25 minutes, but they only used about two minutes. Somebody's driving along in the car and the announcer says, 'And now some John Fahey.' And that's it -- young love and death."
He [Wilson] came to see me. I had two records out at the time, so he asked me for a guitar lesson, right ? So he comes over to my house and he's got books, you know, everything I'd written and transcribed and he can play everything except for a few short passages the he wanted to make sure he had right. The guy blew my mind, you know, he knew so much about music.
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And there were videos of him playing The Death Of the Clayton Peacock and Poor Boy on YouTube to which I thought to link--along with the requisite tabs from JohnFahey.com --but as they were from a Vastapol concert video of him, they got yanked 'cause of copyright. Ah, well... You snooze, you lose, and avoid moral quandaries in the process.
posted by y2karl at 7:40 PM on July 13, 2006