John Fahey, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life

From Dirty Linen #95 (Aug/Sep '01)

How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
by John Fahey
Drag City ISBN 0-9656183-2-3 (2000);
291 pp.; $19.98

It's a sad fact that, had it not been for John Fahey's death, just before his 62nd birthday in February, many readers would not have discovered this stack of idiosyncratic scribblings. How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life is usually, for convenience's sake, called a memoir, but that term begs the question: When autobiography and magic realism meet, does the autobiographer believe his own magic?

The oddness of this book is especially apparent to me because I, like Fahey, grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Like him, as a child I found mysteries, magic portals, strange spirits in the very earth of the place. (A would-be archaeologist, I dug in the yard, unearthing shards of pottery that revealed to me a lost Atlantis. Years later, I learned that my house was probably built on a garbage dump.)

Fahey's "Azalea City"(aka Takoma Park) is far more sinister than mine, with child molesters and their corrupted victims behind every lamppost and bungalow wall. The spirits he meets are seldom beneficent, and he's no angel, either. He becomes a kid terrorist ("The ultimate trip was to try to shoot a cherry bomb so that it went into a passing car through an open window and exploded... We never accomplished this noble but technically difficult feat. On the other hand, you'd be surprised what you can do with rotten apples."). He meets girls for furtive sex and cosmic enlightenment in Spring Park. And ultimately he flees his birthplace but returns to it, again and again, in his collection of tales.

In the world outside Azalea City, he meets bluesman Roosevelt Sykes and, in the book's sweetest passages, learns a survival secret. He blasts show-biz types like Steve Goodman and Michaelangelo Antonioni (by whom he was hired to work on music for Zabriskie Point), as well as the "hippies" (who, in a peculiar revenge never described by Fahey but undoubtedly known to him, invaded Takoma Park in the late 60s, transformed it into a cultural and political paradise, and became the educated, gentrified class who unwittingly made it too expensive for working-class folk like Fahey's family and mine to live there). He reveals himself as a seer and a sonofabitch, a man from a fractured past whose encounter with the holy spirit, in the form of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys doing "Blue Yodel Number Seven," further shattered his life into a mosaic of broken glass: cluttered, erratic, sharp-edged, and sometimes blinding in its sharp clarity. In short, his book is a lot like his music, and it reveals its writer's utter, warped sincerity. — Pamela Murray Winters (Arlington, VA)