I’d never heard of him, but now I have and I’m listening to him play “Red Pony” from 1969 on You Tube.
One of Leo Kottke’s important influences (artistically, and I IMHO personally).
We were milling around waiting for him to appear on the stage, which was merely a four-foot high platform at arm's length from our table. I ducked downstairs to the ladies' room, and when I came out, I told the disheveled, alcoholic-looking janitor that there was no more toilet paper, and returned upstairs. Soon, Fahey shambled onstage, a quart of beer in one hand and the guitar in the other. It was the man whom I had thought was the janitor. No lie, he looked like a homeless person, with that blotchy red-and-white complexion of the Irishman in his cups, and reddish blond hair flying every which way. He sat and played his astounding passages of music all evening long, stopping between every piece to swig the quart and ramble incoherently. I was just astonished at how he could appear so inebriated and also play the way he did.
He was an educated man with a master's in folklore and a deeply original style. I understand that he finally did hit bottom some years later, after three failed marriages due in no small part to heavy drinking, but he did pull himself together for awhile towards the end, and tragically died at 62 after a sextuple bypass.
Genius.
I have a number of Fahey albums that I haven’t played for a while. This article makes me want to get them out and play them again. Fahey pioneered what is called the American Primitive Guitar or making the guitar sound like what a guitar should sound like. That sounds like it should be obvious, but he was rebelling against the slew of musicians who bragged about making their guitars sound like other instruments. And Fahey was a finger-picker. Only finger-style guitarists can pull off the syncopation and innovations necessary for complex non-accompanied guitar music.