John Fahey at the Record Plant, 1973

One man walked into the Record Plant with an acoustic guitar and no band. He played solo for fifty-eight minutes, including a single twenty-eight-minute medley, and KSAN aired all of it.

Fahey had invented a style he called American Primitive guitar. He built it from steel-string fingerpicking, Delta blues, and classical structure. He'd been developing it since the late 1950s with relentless focus. His own label, Takoma Records, had already released twelve albums of it. None of it sounded anything like the rock the Record Plant served. That mismatch is exactly why this broadcast still matters today.

The set drew mostly from Fare Forward Voyagers, his newest LP. Takoma had released it earlier that same year of 1973. Fahey took the album title from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. He reached back too, to material from his 1964 Death Chants album. He played Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain. The title is gloriously absurd, since Spain never crowned a fourteenth Philip.

The centerpiece was a single medley that ran twenty-eight minutes without a pause. He moved from Thus Krishna on the Battlefield into Fare Forward Voyagers. Aquarium Drunkard's Tyler Wilcox later ranked it among Fahey's best live work. Twenty-eight minutes isn't a song but an act of patience and trust. Donahue gave him the airtime and Fahey filled every second of it.

Think about what that took on live rock radio in 1973. No vocals broke the spell and no rhythm section carried him. One man and six strings held a radio audience for nearly an hour. Fahey trusted the music to do that, and the music did.

The broadcast survived and reached new listeners decades after the night itself. Keyhole issued it on CD in 2015 as a proper release. The disc came with an eight-page booklet of photos and history. It reprinted a 1979 NME article that framed Fahey for European readers. A semi-legit LP and download also circulated as Live in Sausalito 1973. Discogs eventually blocked that edition from sale over rights questions.

The Keyhole CD came from a home-taped mono broadcast, not the master. Someone recorded it off the radio in mono and the tape traveled. But the original KSAN stereo master reportedly still survives in the archive. That makes this Fahey broadcast a real archival recovery candidate. A clean stereo transfer would give the performance the fidelity it deserves.

Fahey died on February 22, 2001, after heart surgery in Oregon. His influence on American guitar has only grown since then. Players from Leo Kottke to modern fingerstylists trace their roots to him. For one night in Sausalito, the wrong man played the right room. And KSAN had the sense to broadcast every minute of it.