The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions
| The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions | ||||
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| Studio album by John Fahey | ||||
| Released | 1966 | |||
| Recorded | 1962–1966 at Los Angeles, CA and Berkeley, CA | |||
| Genre | Folk, avant-garde, psychedelic folk | |||
| Length | 44:35 | |||
| Label | Takoma | |||
| Producer | ED Denson, John Fahey | |||
| John Fahey chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| All About Jazz | (not rated) |
| Allmusic |   |
The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions is an album by American fingerstyle guitarist and composer John Fahey, released in 1966. The cover simply labels the album Guitar Vol. 4 (it was his fourth release on his own Takoma label, but his fifth album) while the liner notes label it The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions. The title never appeared on the record labels themselves. It marked the beginning of Fahey's interest in his recording of experimental soundscapes and sound effects. Despite Fahey's distaste for the 1960s counterculture, it is his release most often referred to as psychedelic.
The album begins Fahey's interest in soundscapes and sound effects, using backward tapes and dissonance. Richie Unterberger, in his Allmusic review, stated: "Edited together from several pieces, the 19-minute "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party" anticipated elements of psychedelia with its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings." Fahey himself called it "a histrionic, disorganised outpouring of blather" although he had kind things to say of some of the other songs. Unterberger also states "Despite Fahey's curmudgeonly dismissal of the record several decades later, it's an important, if uneven, effort that ultimately endures as one of the highlights of his discography."
Fahey, ED Denson and Barry Hansen assembled the record shortly after the release of The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death from both new music and parts that had been on tape for years.
Alan Wilson, who appears on this recording and was a member of the band Canned Heat, had once assisted Fahey in his UCLA master's thesis on the music of Charley Patton. Fahey and Wilson duet on "Sail Away Ladies"; this version of the tune displays an eastern influence, with Wilson playing the South Indian veena. This track became a lifelong favourite of the British DJ John Peel, whose championing of Fahey's music on his influential BBC radio shows helped the guitarist gain an audience outside the United States. Peel included "Sail Away Ladies" in his 1999 Peelenium, a personal selection from 100 years of recorded music.
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