In the early 1990s, years before he joined Sonic Youth or partnered with Wilco or tried his hand at singing, Jim O’Rourke was a kind of prodigy in the experimental music underground. He recorded albums in his early twenties for labels like Sound of Pig, Amsterdam’s Staalplaat, and John Zorn’s Tzadik. He made music with whatever was at hand and was proficient on many instruments, and he often performed in the context of free improvisation. But O’Rourke’s first instrument was guitar, and one of his deepest musical loves was the art of arrangement—the precise placement of this note in this pocket of space, the choice of this instrument for that note. The two obsessions met in glorious fashion on his 1997 album Bad Timing.
In the 21st century, we take music built around steel-string guitar for granted. New practitioners have emerged (William Tyler, James Blackshaw, Ben Chasny), a latter-day legend has come and gone (Jack Rose, R.I.P.), and an endless series of reissues of albums by major figures stream by (hello, Bert Jansch). But 20 years ago, the notion of solo acoustic guitar as a medium for expression of album-length ideas was only just emerging from hibernation. Some of its resurgence during that period could be traced to the work of critic Byron Coley, who had written an article in SPIN in 1994, in which he’d tracked down the then-obscure John Fahey in Oregon. Fahey had barely recorded in the few years previous, and was living off the grid and on the edge of poverty, occasionally sleeping in homeless shelters. That SPIN piece, along with the Rhino compilation Return of the Repressed, which put his out-of-print music back in stores, cemented the guitarist’s status as an icon of American music. Neither he, nor his instrument, have left the conversation since.
In North America, the acoustic guitar is often associated with “folk” music of a certain mood; from 1970s singer-songwriters to the ’80s emergence of new age and then onto the rise of “unplugged” music in the ’90s, the acoustic became associated with relaxation, intimacy, quiet contemplation—a sound ostensibly more closely connected to the natural world than its electric counterpart. But Fahey’s vision for acoustic guitar was something else entirely. He was among the first to fully grasp that the instrument had uniquely expressive qualities, that its possibilities as a device for melody, harmony, and rhythm were untapped, and alternate tunings gave it further flexibility other instruments couldn’t match. In Fahey’s hands, the guitar became an orchestra in miniature, and long, multi-part pieces with the thunderous sweep of a symphony could sit alongside rustic evocations of the past. Fahey’s guitar became a tool for collapsing time and space, able to incorporate the grand sweep of music history in a flurry of strummed chords, fingerpicked melodies, and raga-like repeating rhythms.
Fahey’s mid-’90s resurgence served as a backdrop for Bad Timing, and the connection colored how it was received at the time. The Fahey connect was further underscored by O’Rourke’s earlier work in Gastr del Sol, his post-rock duo with David Grubbs (they covered Fahey on their 1996 album Upgrade & Afterlife.) But while Bad Timing has deep spiritual connections to Fahey’s work, the actual music comes from a very different place. You could almost think of Bad Timing as as a record that’s trying to be a Fahey album but keeps getting derailed and ends up going somewhere even more interesting. It was originally written to be a solo guitar record, and O’Rourke has performed versions of the pieces in that setting, but as he worked on the music, he decided he wanted to take it into another direction, one that would incorporate his obsession with carefully arranged sound.
Expanding Bad Timing allowed O’Rourke to paint on a much larger canvas. “For me both Happy Days and Bad Timing were about my myths,” O'Rourke explained to writer Mike McGonigal in a 1997 interview in the zine Music. “A big part of my head is Americana. But the Americana I know comes from listening to Van Dyke Parks, John Fahey, and Charles Ives. That doesn’t exist, and I have to face the fact that it doesn't exist. I have to address that it’s nothing but a construct.” O’Rourke has always wrestled with the “Why?” part of record-making. He’s an avid and thoughtful listener and has absorbed a mountain of music, so with each project, he considers exactly why he should be adding to the pile. Bad Timing may be an homage to some of his heroes, but he takes their collective influence and bends it into a peculiar shape, a tangle of deep reverence and exuberant skepticism. It’s a fantasy that is aware of itself as fantasy, a self-conscious evocation of an individual artist’s obsessions that also functions as a neat historical snapshot.
Parks’ lush arrangements and his gentle irony; Fahey’s vast scope; Ives’ clash of folk simplicity and avant-garde dissonance—these elements are all over Bad Timing, and minimalism is the final piece of the puzzle. Though it draws heavily from the music of other cultures, particularly India, minimalism as a compositional technique is closely identified with American icons, in particular the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young. Glass, Reich, and Riley are best known for repetition—they build meaning through gradually shifting clusters of sound. Young’s music has alternated between repetition and carefully tuned and deeply physical drone. Two other composers, Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad, both of whom O’Rourke work with, further extended Young’s drone conceptions. For this group, held tones become a form of change; from moment to moment in a drone piece, you expect shifts and development to happen, and when they don’t, you’re constantly re-discovering where you are in the now.
Bad Timing has this mercurial quality. It flows beautifully and is easy for a newcomer to enjoy, but it’s also a series of head-fakes, regular juxtapositions that jar the music off course as it moves from one mode to the next. The opening “There’s Hell in Hello But More in Goodbye” starts off almost as a carbon-copy of Fahey in his most whimsical mode, with a sunny finger-picked melody that one could imagine a turn-of-the-century farmer whistling as he strolled across a field. But after a few bars, it drops into a single repeating pattern played on just a small handful of notes, like a needle slipping into a skipping groove, and it stays there, as a lone chord is examined, poked at, and wrung dry. Other subtle instruments fold in—organ, piano—and as “Hello” unfurls it becomes a pure drone piece, quieter and prettier but not so far from the Niblock-inspired hurdy-gurdy blast that defined O’Rourke’s previous album, Happy Days. What started as “folk” ends as a kind of raga meditation.
This kind of shell game happens throughout Bad Timing, as the individual pieces convince you they’re one thing while they’re in the process of becoming something else. “94 the Long Way” opens with a tentative, lurching fingerpicked section, hinting at possible songs behind it, but not quite committing, until finally a pattern emerges that mixes a lurching bass-string loop, repetition in the middle register, and a simple descending three-note melody that becomes the center around which the rest of the track orbits. It at first sounds too simple, like it’s barely even a melody, but O’Rourke adds cheery keyboards, gorgeous pedal steel guitar, and trombone, and it starts to feel like a John Philip Sousa march—you think of fireworks and parades and kazoos and guys in funny hats and rolling expanses of land stretching to the horizon.
The construction of the piece is impressive as new instruments are added every few bars and they all lock into place. But there’s also something joyously silly about it all, a cartoon of civic engagement. The bumptious cheeriness evokes children performing an exaggerated “whistle while you work” march, pounding forward in service of some high-minded collective ideal. The hint of camp extends further. I’ve always taken the “94” in the title to be a reference to I-94, the interstate highway that runs through Chicago. If you’re in the Midwest and you want to take a road trip, you’re almost certainly going to find yourself in I-94 at some point. O’Rourke’s song can be heard as an ode to the freeway, his acoustic Americana version of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”—indeed, the structure of the two songs is similar, and the snaking pedal steel is evocative of the gliding guitar in the Kraftwerk tune. It’s a soundtrack for looking out the window as you roll through the farmland of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
“Americana” is an inexhaustible descriptor entirely dependent on perspective. American music, after all, is by its nature fractured, a bottomless well of influences that zig-zag around the country and then around the world. Hyper-local folk forms are “discovered” and stolen from and then sold back in a gnarled form by professionals from far away. Aaron Copland, composer of “Fanfare for the Common Man,” was a gay, cosmopolitan Jew with communist sympathies, and he created work steeped in American myths, dreaming up places where he might not be entirely comfortable (or welcome) if he were to actually visit them. O’Rourke’s musical fantasy is steeped in the past but also feels ripe with the possibility of the present moment; it’s of history but it sits outside of it.
The second side of Bad Timing is essentially a single 20-minute piece split into two sections that grows steadily stranger while playing with ideas of nostalgia and memory. O’Rourke presents ancient notions of “American music” and then toys with them. The title track opens with another playful folk guitar figure before losing itself in haze of keyboard melody. For minutes on end, the song seesaws between two slowly plucked chords as hints of accordion nudge the tune along. You keep listening for changes, and you think you might hear something shifting, but you’re also happy to get lost in the repetition, the simple twinkling beauty and building tension of the arrangement.
And then it explodes: a huge distorted power chord launches us into “Happy Trails,” the final piece. Suddenly we’re in the middle of a psychedelic rock record, and it’s like a light switch thrown on, or explosive laughter that sucks the discomfort out of a room. After the lengthy fallout from that blast, there’s another extended fingerpicked acoustic passage, and then the song is overwhelmed with a crashing marching band fanfare (a possible nod to Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 4, where a brooding string passage is interrupted by blasts of horns that sound borrowed from another piece). Adding further contrast, pedal steel guitarist Ken Champion, whose impossibly beautiful swells of sound add so much poignancy to “94 the Long Way,” returns with a downright loopy solo fit for the Country Bear Jamboree. Then the song sunsets in a golden-purple haze of muted horns, returning to uncanny beauty one final time.
This seesaw between mischievous subversion and slack-jawed beauty is the key to O’Rourke’s best music. His sense of humor is both generous and slightly dark; there’s irony in his touch, but it’s not a negating one. It’s more about being open to hearing every possibility in a given piece of music. In a 2001 interview O’Rourke was asked if Bad Timing had an element of parody. “Not a parody at all, or infatuation, it’s more like trying to reconcile what is imagined, learned, real, and imaginary.” And then he added, “Is it really that impossible to believe that something can be funny and sincere at the same time?”
Bad Timing, and O’Rourke’s solo career that followed, is a convincing argument for creation in the face of self-consciousness. The “Why?” of music-making is under-explored. Does your individual record need to exist? For O’Rourke, and especially for his solo albums on Drag City, he justifies their release by lavishing care on every detail, and embracing the music of the past in all its complexity. O’Rourke has always been very careful about how his music is packaged and presented. He only allowed it to be released digitally in the last couple of years, and the downloads on Drag City’s newly created Bandcamp pages urge the listener to “please download the best possible quality.” He’s fighting against his music being reduced, whether that means shrinking the artwork, compressing the digital files, or removing individual tracks from the context of the whole. He’s asking for a lot from the listener, but giving even more in return. Bad Timing was where so many of these ideas came together for the first time, a glorious imaginary world that becomes real every time it plays.
