Joey and Dee Dee, Joe Strummer... it's been a bleak stretch lately. My adolescent heroes are a vanishing breed, it seems, yet Pat Boone might as well be immortal-- where's the justice? It's a bum deal, really: you care enough about an artist's music, and somewhere down the line you end up caring about the person behind it, too. Artists give themselves up in their work, and we connect with that small part of them, though they're probably folks most of us have never even seen or known. But confronting the knowledge that suddenly there's no one on the receiving end of your myriad, tiny bonds leaves an emptiness. It's minor, sure, but to me at least, it's undeniable, and writing about it is even worse. There's little room in criticism for eulogy (and vice versa), leaving the underlying sentiment merely to seep in through the cracks. Still, the vague knowledge of loss remains.
John Fahey died following a sextuple bypass on February 22nd, 2001, six days before he would turn sixty-one, after co-authoring the emancipation of acoustic guitars everywhere, freeing them from the shackles of their American roots masters. With barely more than spare, deliberately picked acoustic finger patterns and the often eerie hollowness in between, "he was the first to demonstrate that the finger-picking techniques of traditional country and blues steel-string guitar could be used to express a world of non-traditional musical ideas-- harmonies and melodies you'd associate with Bartók, Charles Ives, or maybe the music of India," in the words of (of all people) his close friend and colleague, Dr. Demento. This omnipresent restlessness with his chosen medium even led him to disown much of his early work in favor of experimental drones and extended forays into free-form musique concrete. His output is vast, and owing to the constant flux of trends it contains, quite humbling.
Listening to the echoing ghosts of "Remember", Fahey's morose take on the Irving Berlin standard that opens Red Cross, it's hard not to absent-mindedly begin searching its haunting stillnesses and recesses for hidden goodbyes, or some tell-tale resolution. It casts the rest of the album in such heartbreaking shades that the need for closure (of a sort) is almost palpable. Through retrospective artifice, though, it's all too easy to see so much in little more than a title, and in the end this opening piece is more of an open question.
Much of the album nods to moments throughout Fahey's career, perhaps accidentally, but nonetheless offering thin glimpses of his stylistic diversity, with "Remember" poised to prepare the listener. Although the delicate acoustic works of Red Cross are powerful, they only mimic things Fahey has accomplished a dozen times before, and better. He's been rightly accused of a lingering redundancy in his recent work, but this album seems more readily taken as a conscious overview. The memories stirred up by these compositions are very purposeful, if only half-formed.
The unsettling but still beautiful hollows can't help but invite nostalgia. Fahey began to accept his more traditional material late in life, reassessing the worth of the blues and standards he had once disavowed, and Red Cross certainly shows hints of his own coming to terms. Allusions to the amorphous compositions of his later years are kept side-by-side with a minor helping of refreshingly straightforward arrangements. He approaches the classic George Gershwin tune "Summertime" in his typically painstaking fashion, realizing it as less of a warm weather romp than a ballad of bittersweet solitude. Where there was once ye olde swimmin' hole and children playing stickball in the street, the kids aren't allowed to go to the lake since some hapless child drowned last summer, and the streets and playgrounds are all disquietingly barren. Only the vague peace that comes from memories of simpler times remains.
Similarly, the original composition "Charlie Bradley's Ten-Sixty-Six Blues", is also reminiscent of vintage material, not as impressive as his most concerted efforts toward country-blues form, but still breathtaking in its remarkable quietism. And it fares better than the dry, Arabian "Ananaias" or "Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today" with its uncomfortably spare string-bending; respectively, they evoke the exotic promise of Fahey's seminal acoustic ragas and his bold forays into noise, but ultimately fail to develop fully. In a way, these meandering explorations are a hallmark of his own, and (particularly in the seven-minute expanse of "Ananaias") contain more than a few enlightening passages without necessarily forming a cohesive whole.
The only real misstep is "Untitled with Rain". For six minutes, the song flows leisurely across faintly ringing organ tones and chimes, with just a few scattered notes recalling some of Fahey's concrete leanings. At that moment, the music dissipates into eighteen minutes of thoroughly impenetrable silence while the ambient noise of a deserted studio is mic'd up for, presumably, listening pleasure. Sadly, his generally keen abstract edge is at its dullest-- any similar track from City of Refuge makes this seem like a cheap gimmick. And worse, if it weren't for the (almost fittingly) unnamed tonal reverb of the track's final two minutes, the closing seconds of his final album would conclude in a vacuum. Even if Red Cross is less of a striking conclusion than a broad summation, it's a tragedy to allow the vague recognitions elicited here to evaporate into nothing. It's silence in remembrance of a talented, haunted man, but he deserves a eulogy, and his guitar speaks better than anyone ever could.
