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.
Nice of you to also highlight his mental problems. I always had the feeling that those were inseperable from his often meditative, tranquil way of making music.
Already at a young age he drank heavily and was addicted to French cigarettes (’the heaviest he could find’, booklet liner notes comment). And near the end of his career, he literally lived out of the back of a van, selling his then very experimental (and often electric) albums himself. Somehow I can’t imagine him having improved in any way if having been admitted to a mental institution, or having been given all kinds of psychotropic medications.
He just was that way.
In stark contrast to all of this stands the transcendental, ephemeral sheer beauty of his Christmas albums (four in all). The first two are by far the best (from the ‘60s) - an absolute joy to play in a cosy family setting, after Mass for instance. The latter two sound a bit more clinical, they appeared in the early ‘80s. But still, these are more than worthwhile too.
As I said, he’s an American institution, much like Moondog Jr., Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Harry Partch, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, and many, many more.
(That said: I always had my problems with Frank Sinatra. I found him to be a narcissist, with extremely violent character traits, not to mention his alleged connections to the mob, that saved him from incarceration after a particularly nasty incident in which he and the other Rat Pack members beat a dentist to a pulp in a restaurant. Why? Because that dentist had politely asked if Sinatra’s troupe could speak a little bit more silently, so that he himself could understand what his wife was saying).