In one of the more unlikely double bills of the year, John

Fahey and Thurston Moore (who was joined by Phillip X. Milstein) brought their

brands of musical schizophrenia to the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA last night

(Tues., Dec. 3). While the billing was unique, it didn't match the conceptual

and subversive brilliance of the time when I saw Sun Ra and Sonic Youth play a

free concert in Central Park on the Forth of July, a venue and time usually

reserved for the likes of Paul Simon. Nor did it equal the surrealism of Conway

Twitty's performance with The Residents--in full eyeball costumes--dancing

behind him on NBC's sadly defunct "Night Music" show. Last Tuesday night proved

to be simply an odd double bill with quite a few contradictions. Playing

separate sets, and drawing completely different crowds, Fahey and Moore's Iron

Horse performances were riddled with confusion, disappointment, pleasure and

pain.

John Fahey, age 63, has been releasing records since 1959 and has

carved his own niche in American music history. Words completely fail to get

across the depth, texture and resonance of his music--the mark of a brilliant

artist--causing critics to resort to such descriptive, but still unsatisfactory

terms as "acoustic guitar-noir.

Most of Fahey's recorded works have been performed on

acoustic guitar using a delicate finger-picking method guitar that defies

convention, though if one didn't listen closely enough one might mistake some

of his songs as conventional. The man is a legend. A living piece of Americana.

And unfortunately, on Tuesday night he reminded me of another American legend

in his later years: the fat, drugged out Elvis Presley. I don't say that to

make fun of the man and believe me it breaks my heart to report the ugly truth,

but from the moment he was led to the stage by an Iron Horse employee he

mumbled, stumbled and fumbled his way through a 30 minute set that contained

little more than echoes of greatness.

Looking a bit chubby, he was dressed

in jeans, a t-shirt, and sunglasses and spent about five minutes sitting on

stage "tuning up," alternately mumbling such things as "Now there's a long

string" and "I don't know where that went.

Aside from the fact that it

seemed that Fahey was randomly wacking his custom made guitar to make strange

noises, the first 10 minute instrumental was perhaps the highlight of his set.

Pulling pages straight out of Thurston Moore's book (and Moore's experimental

predecessors) he created a quite interesting soundscape that was unfortunately

interrupted by his talking, which reminded us that perhaps this wasn't

necessarily a performance but some guy on stage aimlessly messing around with a

guitar. "This here is, uhhh...." Fahey said between his noodling, "This here is

an 8-string guitar made out of spare WWII airplane parts." Not knowing if he

was serious, joking or just plain out of his mind the audience laughed

nervously. "Only one time before did I play a B-52, but that's neither here nor

there.

After that he switched to acoustic guitar and began doing the same

thing, never once playing a recognizable song during the rest of the set. After

hearing his awe-inspiring recordings and waiting for quite a while to see him

perform live, I felt like an Elvis fan who had been listening to nothing but

the Sun Sessions and instead got the spaced-out, karate kicking Presley who

couldn't even remember the words to "Love Me Tender.

Thurston Moore and

cohort Phillip X. Milstein appeared on stage soon after and delivered what

we've come to expect from Moore... noise, noise, and more noise. In his

trademark pose, Moore lurched his long skinny frame over his guitar and

amplifier--hair draped over his face--and began the set with a prolonged low

frequency blast of feedback, causing many of Fahey's older fans to hastily

exit.

What ensued was music far removed from Sonic Youth's more

traditional song oriented approach that has characterized the group for the

past ten years. To give a frame of reference, it resembled Sonic Death more

than, say, "Teenage Riot." While Moore stood still and piloted his guitar,

Milstein scrambled around on hands and knees fiddling with tape loops,

twiddling knobs, occasionally grabbing a saw and horse hair bow, and once

holding a vibrating back massager to the microphone--creating an unearthly

noise. Milstein resembled that friend everyone has had that, at one time or

another, sat you down in his or her room, maniacally throwing on record after

record containing songs you just "have to hear.

Overall, the set was a

reminder of Moore's experimental roots that aren't very evident on last year's

excellent but more pop-oriented solo release. Unfortunately, the set was cut

relatively short leaving myself and everyone else wanting more (uhggg...BAD

PUN!).