Album with John Fahey

A lost 1967 recording session with The Red Crayola and John Fahey.

Retrospectives

Steve Cunningham, 2011

When we were in CA for the 1967 [Berkeley Folk] festival, Ed Denson who was Country Joe & The Fish's manager and also John Fahey's, set up a recording session for John and us at Ed's studio (on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley) a day or so before we were to leave town. I remember Barry Melton of the Fish being there too. A few hours of tape were rolled as the Crayola did free-form stuff and the others joined in with whatever struck their fancy (our standard modus operandi). After the session we told IA [International Artists] about it, but instead of being pleased they focused on the legalisms around out being under contract to IA. They demanded the tapes from Denson, who surrendered them as requested. The tapes have sat idle for decades.

[...] IA had already experienced a problem with the 13th Floor Elevators, who had previously recorded an entire album for another label, so when they heard about the new Red Crayola recordings they went ballistic... To avoid any possible legal implications Mayo was dispatched to collect the tapes and deliver them to IA. Despite searching through the stash of surviving IA tapes nothing remains of the Crayola/Fahey collaboration but hopefully someone has kept a safety copy which might surface one day.

Mayo Thompson, 1996

We played the Berkeley Folk Festival in '67, and we recorded some material with John Fahey. And our record company went through the ceiling over this. They threatened not to bring us back from California, even though they had used our publishing royalties to fly us out here in the first place, which is illegal, I have subsequently found out. But they threatened not to bring us back. So Rick and Steve said, "You go to Frisco and get the tapes, and we're going back to Texas." So it became my job to do this, because I had started the band. So I came back up here and picked up the tapes, which were reluctantly handed over. We intended to try to do something with them. And then I had to take these tapes back to Texas, give them to the record company, and then bust up, that was the end of that.

2015

The only act I really liked in those days was John Fahey. [...] We met John at the Berkeley Folk Festival in ’67. We asked him if he wanted to sit in with us, and he did. There was some sort of understanding there. We were doing something related to what he was doing, but the opposite end of a rainbow. We recorded some. International Artists freaked out. I had to bring the tapes back to Texas to avoid legal problems.