John Fahey’s Blues Rally
He discovered ‘Blind Joe Death’ after the Sligo River flood of 1927 and picked on a guitar made from a baby’s coffin. Or so the legend goes.
White boy music answers to the pathos of the suburbs and the weird monomania of record collectors.
Still, his myth lives on, as does his unique feel for the guitar.
John Fahey’s best-known composition is a deceptively simple one. It’s in standard tuning, modulating between C, F, and G, the first chords someone learns when playing guitar. “Sligo River Blues” starts at a slow clip, no faster than a train rolling out of the station. Fahey probes at the fretboard relentlessly, alternating his thumb between the upper strings to provide a sense of propulsion, while the melody unfolds underneath.
“It’s the most basic chords,” fingerstyle guitar torchbearer Hayden Pedigo tells me, “but he’s able to make the most basic chords sound brand new.” With a droning syncopation, the song captures an intense form of suburban melancholy. His compositions, a style he coined “American primitive,” are shrouded in otherworldliness. There’s no other player that sounds like Fahey, though many have tried.
“It appears a lot easier than it is,” collaborator Glenn Jones says …
Hippie Hell Week
Welcoming the Great White Buffalo has been an American tradition since 1972.
I lose my ladylove to a mescaline-laced cake, but am kept calm by Orthodox Jews who serve me vegan pizza.
Masturbating in front of little kids is uncool.
As I do most mornings, I awoke to the sight of a girthy, well-proportioned member. But on this particular morning, July 3rd, 2026, it wasn’t mine. The appendage in question belonged to a long-haired, bald-crowned hippie in his thirties named David, who was squatting a few feet from my tent with a diabolical grin, entirely nude. He’d evidently been holding that position for a while, waiting for me to unzip my tent fly.
“Heard you stirring in there.” David said. “Mind doing a tick check?”
Considering the circumstances, a tick check wasn’t unreasonable. Last night, David, another hippie woman named Krystyna, and I had hauled our suitcases, tents, sleeping bags, and other camping gear through several miles of Pennsylvania’s tick-ridden swamps and thickets in total darkness. Eventually David and I, abandoning all hope of finding our destination, set down our bags in some horrid bog and declared …
Snakes on a Plaque
Amazonian refugees abandoned on the Walk of Fame.
Meanwhile, scaly serpents slither through Hollywood.
Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs all have a place here. But woe to the golden boa constrictor.
Beginning in the late 1950s and early ’60s, a group of entertainment industry boosters seeking to increase tourism in a less-than-glorious section of downtown Hollywood concocted a psychologically brilliant scheme, inducing well-known figures from film, TV, music, radio, and sports to pay for their own symbolic entombment in a kind of living mausoleum. Name by name, colossal ego by colossal ego, the infernal, ingenious scheme paid off, and the result was the Hollywood Walk of Fame — an unparalleled monument to human narcissism consisting of almost three thousand plaque-like “stars” (with more to come!) fashioned from bronze inlaid in pink terrazzo.
As countless visitors to the Walk well know, it is not a particularly peaceful place. The nearly two-mile long stretch of sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard and part of Vine is a decrepit hub for hawkers, peddlers, hustlers, touts, and noisome …
