On the face of things guitarists John Fahey and Loren MazzaCane Connors would seem to have little in common.
Fahey, a resident of Salem, Ore., is an acknowledged master of the steel-stringed acoustic guitar whose music has inspired musicians as disparate as New Age pianist George Winston and Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Fahey’s most popular album, a collection of Christmas songs entitled “The New Possibility,” has sold more than 200,000 copies.
“I love him to death,” says Ranaldo, “and people like him and Leo Kottke have had a far greater influence on my playing than anyone might expect.”
Connors, a slim and retiring man, lives in New York City with his wife and son, has recorded his abstract miniatures for electric guitar in almost complete obscurity. His records have all been released in pressings of between 50 and 1,000.
But the musicians share some striking similarities. Both have wedded the sound of the blues to harmonic and compositional ideas drawn from European classical music, and each man has had to start his own record label to release his music.
And Fahey and Connors have also overcome career-threatening adversity in recent years to release some the most challenging music of their careers.
Both will perform on Friday at the Empty Bottle, 935 N. Western Ave.
Born in 1939, John Fahey grew up in Takoma Park, Md., and took up the guitar in his teens as a way to meet girls. But the girls stayed away long enough for him to become a distinguished student of country, bluegrass, and country blues styles, as well as an avid record collector.
By 1959 he was a philosophy major by day and a gas station attendant by night, whiling away his evenings perfecting a style of guitar playing that combined the drones and syncopations of the blues with the dissonance of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok. That year he recorded and released “John Fahey/Blind Joe Death” on his own Takoma label because he was certain that no established record company would put out his music.
Fahey’s career mushroomed in the late ’60s and early ’70s and he enjoyed considerable success at the same time that his music became more challenging. 1969’s “The Voice of the Turtle” (recently reissued by Fantasy Records) juxtaposed field recordings employing old-time musicians with disorienting sound-collage experiments.
But during the ’80s, the same decade when a legion of his admirers cashed in with sanitized New Age variations on his style, a series of woes unraveled Fahey’s career.
“My health fell apart,” he says. “First thing that happened is that I came down with Epstein-Barr virus, the chronic fatigue syndrome, and I had that for five years. While I had it I was so weak that when I got up on stage I would drink beer for the energy. Then it finally went away, but it turned out that I also had diabetes.
“I got fewer and fewer jobs for a long time, and then I divorced my wife and she got everything. Suddenly I found myself with no money at all, so I went over to the Union Gospel Mission and stayed there for a year.”
When Rhino Records released a career-spanning Fahey anthology, “Return of the Repressed,” in 1994, rock critic Byron Coley sought him out for an interview and found him supporting himself by reselling used records and pawning his guitar.
But quitting drinking, a turnaround in the treatment of his diabetes, and a cash inheritance have set Fahey back on track. “Now I have so much energy that I can’t even be lazy and lie around all day.” he says with a laugh. “I have too much energy.”
Fahey has directed that energy into several projects. He’s made several new records and started another label, Revenant, that will release new and archival recordings.
“City of Refuge,” Fahey’s first new release in five years, will be out in January. It’s split between acerbic explorations on acoustic guitar and more experimental material that reflects his interest in industrial music.
“People have been imitating factories and machines for a long time. My trick is to do that and have a hidden melody in there someplace.
Loren MazzaCane Connors was born in 1949 and was immersed in music from an early age. His mother, a professional singer who performed opera and sacred music, could not afford a babysitter, so she took him with her when she sang.
He began playing guitar in the ’60s and discovered the blues through Eric Clapton’s group Cream. He was drawn to the blues’ “purity and innocence” but never felt bound by the music’s formal convention.
Connors first recorded his improvisations for guitar in the late ’70s, and like Fahey he released his music through his own company (which has gone by several names, most recently as Black Label). He pressed his earliest records in editions of 50 or 100, and gave many of them away in hopes of attracting attention to his playing, but that attention would not come for 12 more years.
During the ’80s he released several albums under the name Guitar Roberts. One of those, in Pittsburgh, has just been re-released by Chicago’s Dexter’s Cigar imprint; it is the only one of his early records that is currently available.
The pseudonym reflects both the blues aspects on his playing, which tends towards sparse, brief pieces adorned with bent notes and disconsolate melodies, but also his discomfort with his surname.
“My ancestors were involved in some kind of scandal in Venice a couple centuries ago and ended up with this name MazzaCane, which means `kills dogs with a club and collects money for it.’ Dogs seem to know what was going on with my ancestors, they don’t like me. I’ve been bitten by dogs all my life.”
Following his last canine encounter he adopted his grandmother’s surname, Connors.
But the biggest threat to his playing came not from a hound but from his own nervous system when he contracted Parkinson’s disease in 1992.
“All of a sudden my right arm just started getting slower and slower. I couldn’t turn the pages of a book (at) normal speed, my face started getting deadpanny and not expressive, and my voice dropped real low.”
Connors’ disease is currently stabilized by medication. “The illness hasn’t affected the way that I play, it’s just affected the speed that I have in my right hand. But if it hits my left hand then I’ll be finished. I won’t be able to play the strings.”
Since developing his ailment, Connors’ playing sounds different. His earlier melancholy tone has taken on an anguished, sometimes screaming air, enhanced by fuzztone and distortion.
Connors’ newer music is usually arranged in suites of brief pieces that feature two overdubbed guitar voices. Some have themes drawn from Irish and Irish-American history; “Revolt” concerns sectarian violence in Belfast, while “Hell’s Kitchen Park” recalls the living conditions endured by early immigrants to New York.
But in concert Connors abandons themes and shorter forms to improvise in lengthy duets. His newest CDs illustrate different aspects of this method; on “Two Nights” he and guitarist Alan Licht improvise two hushed, spacious pieces that last over 30 minutes each, while on the louder, more lyrical “Long Nights” he’s accompanied by a tape of himself playing stark, rumbly chords.
The latter disc has just been released by the Table of the Elements label, which is bringing both guitarists to town as part of a three-day festival showcasing the label’s performers.
