Richard Leo Johnson Legend Of Vernon Mcalister CD

Personnel: Richard Leo Johnson (guitar).
Recording information: Attic Studio, Savannah, GA (2005).
On this album of instrumental guitar music, the self-taught Arkansas musician Richard Leo Johnson plays a 1930s National steel-bodied guitar (once owned by the eponymous Vernon McAlister), whose sound he twists and distorts, Jimi Hendrix-style. His eccentric technique produces idiosyncratic fingerpicking and strange, electronic-sounding drones (though the entire album is acoustic); sometimes the guitar sounds like it's being played backwards. Like his fellow experimenter, the late John Fahey, Johnson is constantly in pursuit of the unexpected. Highlights include folk-influenced tunes like "Uncertain Weather," brief musique concrete pieces like "Quarter Tone Soldiers Marching on the Mill," disturbing blues like "First Night Alone," and the dark, mysterious "Eaten by Wolves at Midnight."
Although he has been most often compared to guitarists like Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges, the guitarist Richard Leo Johnson most resembles on The Legend of Vernon McAlister, his second album for Cuneiform Records, is John Fahey, and like Fahey, he takes on a persona here in crafting this tightly knit cycle of guitar pieces. The entire sequence was recorded in Johnson's attic studio in Savannah, GA, on a 1930s single resonator National Steel guitar. The guitar had been the gift from a friend, and when Johnson examined it, he found the name Vernon McAlister etched into the steel. Failing to find out any real information about Vernon McAlister, Johnson created his own mythic biography for the man, then adopted that imagined persona (much as Fahey became Blind Joe Death) and began writing the cycle presented here. The result is a wonderfully hushed and delicate universe that manages to be beautiful, eerie, ominous, soothing, and startling by turns, as Johnson overdubs light percussive taps and chiming notes into the mix, along with weeping, whining tonal washes of E-Bow and gently applied tape effects. Everything here is of a piece, forming an insular and unified suite, but tracks like the opener, "Morning Glory," with its quietly joyful tone, the extremely brief and ominous "Quarter-Tone Soldiers Marching on the Mill," the dark, gliding "Side Road to Splendor," and the gently expanding (and then shrinking) "More Than All the Stars in the Sky" all generate their own micro-moments while still working within the overall framework of the whole. Imagine sitting at the bottom of a deep and tree-lined Appalachian hollow, a place where the sunlight just barely reaches, and then imagine hearing a strange yet oddly familiar music drifting down to you from the next hollow over, slightly muffled and distorted into echoing fragments and harmonics, and all of it sounding like the work of new age angels (or maybe the ghost of John Fahey). That's what listeners have here. Joe Death would no doubt approve. ~ Steve LeggettDown Beat (p.66) - 4.5 stars out of 5 -- "The blues-colored mix of delight and anxiety in the guitar pattern hurrying along 'Roundhouse Right' leads into the stark emotional dislocation of 'Skin and Bones'."
JazzTimes (p.116) - "You can hear jazz, blues, folk and classical at times, but the lasting impression is how meaningful and heartfelt every note sounds; this is endless invention in the service of a private yet compelling beauty."