John Fahey :: The Zabriskie Point Tapes

For his 1970 counterculture headtrip epic, Zabriskie Point, Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni had an inspired idea. He’d hire American Primitive pioneer John Fahey to supply (at least part of) the soundtrack. Things didn’t quite work out according to plan, however.

Here’s the scoop from Fahey himself, from an interview with Byron Coley at Perfect Sound Forever.

“Antonioni says, ‘What I want you to do is to compose some music that will go along with the porno scene.’ I kept saying, ‘Yes, sir.’ Then he starts this, ‘Now, John. This is young love. Young love.’ I mean, that’s young love? All these bodies? ‘Young love. But John, it’s in the desert, where’s there’s death. But it’s young love.’ He kept going, ‘Young Love/Death’ faster and faster. I was sure I was talking to a madman. I’m still sure I was.

“So I experimented. I had instrumentalists come in and told them just to play whatever they felt like. They had to pretend to understand what I was talking about, especially if Antonioni came in the room. That was fun. They were very cooperative. I came up with some sections of music that sounded more like death than young love. It was actually pretty ominous. I played it for Michelangelo and he thought it was great. So he took me out to dinner at this really fancy restaurant and started telling me how horrible the United States was. We were drinking a lot of wine and I don’t remember which one of us started cussing. It started real fast and ended in a fistfight. You have no idea how much that guy hates the United States. What a jerk.”

Fahey was known to never let the truth get in the way of a good story, so his tale of drunken fisticuffs with Antonioni may not be entirely factual. But it is a good story! In the end, Jerry Garcia ended up supplying the (quite lovely) music for Zabriskie Point‘s famous desert orgy sequence. Meanwhile, some of the recordings Fahey made for the film found their way into the hands of collectors, and you can head over to the estimable Delta-Slider blog to check those out. It’s very interesting stuff, with Fahey conjuring up a desolate landscape with his solo acoustic wanderings. Not sure if there’s a lot of young love in there, but there’s plenty of death. | t wilcox

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