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Copyright 2006 Monterey County Herald 

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Monterey County Herald

April 30, 2006 Sunday

HEADLINE: FOREVER YOUNG;

Remembering folksinger Richard Fariña’s days in Carmel

BYLINE: By DENNIS MORAN

     No one ever doubted Dick Fariña’s sense of the dramatic. But it broke hearts in the way he died.

     April 30, 1966, wasn’t just a day to celebrate for Fariña — every day was that. But this one marked grand milestones: a book-signing at the Thunderbird Bookstore in Carmel Valley Village for his just-published debut novel and then a surprise party for his wife’s 21st birthday.

     Richard and Mimi Fariña, sister of sometime Carmel Highlands neighbor Joan Baez, were already an acclaimed folk music duo. Now the novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, cemented a literary reputation that was the envy of fellow folk singer Bob Dylan.

     The novel is still in print, gaining cult-classic status over the years, and the music still sounds remarkably fresh and inventive.

     And added to the promise of his dual careers was the glow of one of the great personalities of the 1960s: Richard Fariña was a rogue charmer, an impresario of everyday improv theater, a world-traveled raconteur.

     Had this son of an Irish mother and Cuban father really run guns for the IRA and fought with Fidel Castro in the revolution? Whatever the mix of truth, exaggeration and outright fantasy in the tales, it’s clear they had a mesmerizing teller.

     “What Fariña had was wit,” says longtime Carmel Highlands resident Alan Marcus, a friend of the Fariñas. “He had a lot of natural wit; it bubbled up out of him.”

     At the surprise party that April 30, the fun-loving Fariña spotted a guest with a motorcycle and suggested a ride together. The ride ended in tragedy — Fariña was thrown from the bike on a curve on Carmel Valley Road near Rancho Carmelo and was killed instantly, dead at 29, forty years ago today.

*********************

“I’ll tell you what he was in my eyes. He was my sister Mimi’s crazy husband, a mystical child of darkness — blatantly ambitious, lovable, impossible, charming, obnoxious, tirelessly active — a bright, talented, sheepish, tricky, curly-haired, man-child of darkness.”

• Joan Baez, opening an Esquire magazine article she wrote after Richard died

     Alan Marcus, 83, and his wife Lotte, 78, had been in Carmel Highlands about eight years by 1963, when Richard and Mimi moved in close by, and as accomplished elders the Marcuses quickly came to be friends and confidants of the young couple.

    Alan Marcus, a modestly successful screenwriter and ‘beat’ novelist, had literary accomplishments Richard envied. As a mentor, Alan saw a more subdued side of Fariña as he sometimes struggled with morose self-doubts during the writing of his novel.

     “He was a bloody crock in many ways,” Alan Marcus says. “he was a hopeless hypochondriac. He had all kinds of mysterious ailments.”

     There were plenty of high times, nights of music, feasts, improvised entertainments — Joan Baez and Richard Fariña particularly were gifted mimics and quick wits. Dylan was around now and then, too, but tended to be a more sullen presence, Alan Marcus says.

     But Richard Fariña “was irresistible,” Marcus says, someone who could turn the making of an elaborate paella into a show of its own. Marcus remembers impromptu singalongs with friends such as Judy Collins and a mock fashion show starring Mimi and Joan, narrated by Richard.

     “If you were privy to it you were blessed,” Alan Marcus says of those days. “If you weren’t, well, it’s hard to describe how good it was.”

     Lotte Marcus, a Carmel psychologist, adds, “It was very seductive. It was a constant dress-up and performance theater. With a lot of other dramas.”

     As a young couple, Richard and Mimi were “practicing being married,” Lotte says, and there were tensions playing out.

     Strikingly beautiful but shy, Mimi went from being the youngest in a Baez family of strong personalities to being married, at 17, to a dominant personality in Richard Fariña.

     “It was almost as if she had come from one spell in her family to his spell, and there was tension around it,” Lotte Marcus says.

     The Fariñas loved kids, and the Marcuses “lent” them their young children for outings, Alan says.

      “He was magical,” daughter Anina Marcus says now of Richard Fariña. “You just didn’t want it to end with Fariña.”

     Richard coaxed the reluctant Mimi into performing as a duo, in the Marcus’ home and later in Cannery Row venues, and then to breakthrough performances at the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1964 and the legendary Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

     Two Vanguard albums, “Celebrations for a Grey Day,” and “Reflections in a Crystal Wind” were released in 1965 to enthusiastic reviews. Vanguard in recent years has released two CD packages, one a best-of and the other complete. 

     After Richard’s death, Mimi Fariña was best known for founding Bread & Roses, an organization that brings live music to people confined in institutions. She died of cancer at age 56 in July 2001 at her home in Mill Valley.

     “One of my huge surprises, in the way life surprises you, is that she is the one who made an incredible career out of Bread and Roses,” Lotte Marcus says. “She was sort of the shy one in the family, Joan was the star, (but she) broke out on her own.”

*********************

“Oh, sweet mortality, I love to tease your scythe.”

from Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

     Cynthia Williams is pioneer stock, the daughter of Carmel Highlands settlers. Trim and strong at 90, she gardens and carries firewood at her sprawling rustic home overlooking Point Lobos and says what she has to say with crisp authority.

     She’s responsible for bringing the folksingers to town. She rented a cabin to Joan Baez and her then-lover Michael New in 1961. Baez at the time wanted a getaway from the fishbowl of her dramatic rise as queen of the folkies.

     Can we believe in this hip-hop age that folksinging was once the cutting edge of popular culture? Perhaps harder yet to swallow that its most celebrated performer could rent a small house in Carmel Highlands for $35 a month.

     The highlands wasn’t then the ultra-high-end real estate it is today. It was still the woodsy enclave of artists and writers envisioned by Franklin Devendorf when he laid it out in 1915 and recruited such people as Cynthia Williams’ artist father and intellectual mother. The idea was to be inspired by the bracing beauty and stimulated by each other.

     Baez fit in well.

     “She won all hearts,” Williams says. “She and Michael were both such engaging, charming people.”

     Williams was also quite fond of Mimi, who gave dance lessons to a daughter of hers, and perhaps a bit less fond of the Fariñas' popular German shepherd, Lush.

     Though "Lush was quite a good handsome dog," Williams says, "when they came calling, he jumped up on the couch. ... And Dick Fariña, who was quite unapologetic, said 'Oh yes, we have him on the couch because there’s no foot room at our house, so that’s why he’s on your couch.' Well, I didn’t invite him."

     Richard's charms, it seems, were all but lost on Williams.

     “He had his eye on the main chance, I think,” Williams says. “He was fairly boldly career minded, and if he saw somebody who could give him a step up he would cultivate that person.

     “... I’m afraid Joan’s family thought that he had latched on to Mimi because of her connections, so to speak, instead of sincere love.”

     When they met, in front of Chartres Cathedral in France, Richard was still married to another beautiful folksinger, Carolyn Hester, but immediately began courting the teenaged Mimi.

     Cynthia William’s daughter, Honey Williams, 60, who lives near her mother in her grandparents’ old Spanish-style house, says Fariña was “unabashedly unashamed” about being ambitious. But, she adds, “it was not offensive at all, somehow.”

     And if Mimi’s attractions were enhanced in Richard’s eyes by being a Baez, “it didn’t mean he didn’t love Mimi,” Honey Williams says.

     “He was very straightforward and he was very present,” Honey Williams says. “He wasn’t a snob. I think he made people he was speaking with feel good.”

     Honey Williams says that just before he died Fariña was about to get active with the anti-war movement as involvement in Vietnam was deepening. Honey Williams herself at the time was working with the national office of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Fariña was “ready to go out on a campus anti-war tour,” Honey Williams says.

     The Marcuses, too, speak of Fariña’s social and political concerns, and many of his best songs deal poetically with civil-rights and other issues.

****************************************

“Now when the light of reason fails

And fires burn on the sea

Oh, now in this age of confusion

I have need for your company.

For I am a wild and a lonely child

And the son of an angry man

And now with the high wars raging

I would offer you my hand

For we are the children of darkness

And the prey of a proud, proud land.”

Richard Fariña, “Children of Darkness”

     Richard Fariña is buried in Monterey Cemetery, with a simple flat stone engraved with a peace sign. Cemetery groundskeepers are adept and friendly at showing the occasional seeker where it is.

     Long a cult figure, interest in Fariña went a bit more mainstream with the publication five years ago of the bestselling Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, by David Hajdu.

     There are several fan Web sites, the best being www.richardandmimi.com.

     The best of the music they made together is mesmerizing. Mimi’s voice didn’t have the strength or purity of sister Joan’s — whose did? — but she knew how to harmonize with Richard in a way that enhanced his rather plain but spirited voice.

     And Mimi was an excellent guitar player — some of their best recorded tracks are instrumental jams with her on guitar and him on mountain dulcimer, weaving melodies and rhythms influenced by music from Appalachia, Ireland, India and other places.

     Though untrained on the dulcimer, Richard Fariña approached the old instrument with a drive and originality that still impresses experts.

     “I think one of the essential things to keep in mind about Richard is that he was a genius of the imagination,” says Jerry Rockwell, a professional dulcimer-maker, player, composer and teacher from Ohio. “When people heard Mimi and Richard at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, there was such a rhythmic drive and raw power coming off of the dulcimer and guitar. Sadly, I hear very little of the wild abandon, imagination-run-wild, and rhythmic drive of the Fariñas in contemporary players. I really, really miss it too.”

     And the novel? A picaresque tale of college life inspired by Fariña’s days at Cornell University in the late 1950s, Been Down So Long ... was lavishly praised by Cornell classmate and literary heavyweight Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity’s Rainbow, which he dedicated to Fariña.

     Though still read today, the novel’s main value may be in the genuine literary promise it showed.

     “I think it was vastly overpraised by Pynchon as a favor to an old friend,” Alan Marcus says. “On the whole it’s an adolescent performance.”

     But Fariña, who published poems in The Atlantic and other publications over several years, was the real thing as a writer, Marcus adds.

     “He was stretching his literary wings and he would have written some good things,” Alan Marcus says. “He wrote some good poems and he was just a good writer.

     “… I don’t know what would have happened to Fariña because he had so much going for him. I don’t know. What he needed was people like me around to tell him ‘you’re full shit, Dick.’ Or ‘cut the crap’ or ‘come down to earth.’”