"Richard’s funeral had a life of its own. May, 1966, three years ago... Carmel Valley . . . Richard’s parents, his mother sitting on a foam rubber donut because she was having trouble with her back. Someone had to carry the donut around behind her, she had to put it on the chair beside the coffin before she could sit down—Richie would have laughed—to weep over her boy’s body. The rain, the clouds hanging over the beach where Mimi and her older sister Pauline and | went in our black veiled dresses to run the dog on the beach, the big honey-colored animal who couldn’t understand why the girls took him to run in the morning fog and cloud, ona strange beach far from the Big Sur highlands. Cutting bangs on Pauline’s long hair the night before the funeral, sleeping-no-sleep in a big bunch, finding no sleep, no reason for the premonitions that Mimi had had and others. Dreams, messages, thoughts, messages. Why did he give me his keys, she said, when he left drunken, happy, late-night-reveler at his own party, the party for the release of his book. Why did he give her his keys when she doesn’t drive, never has driven. Why in the rain, on a motorcycle, why so fast, with a stranger, with the fulfilled promise lying like a bunch of flowers in his hands, printed and posted and parcelled—one of the best books | ever read, before his death, thank God. No music for two days, could not bear, could not have borne to hear one slipping-slinging, yankingyour-pain-from-you note. Before his book was finished, about near the last chapter, his hand became paralyzed, couldn’t move, it couldn’t write a word, not until he realized he didn’t want to, didn’t want to finish it because maybe he couldn’t accept Dick Farifia succeeding, being whole, being on his own two feet having succeeded at something only he could have done in the"

The Judy Collins Song Book: by Herbert Haufrecth, p.185

Weedless Berkeley was a highly contrasted place in the early 1960’s. Dick and Mimi Fariña would play at the Cabal, a night club, and Joan Baez was around . . . short black hair and the guitar case, not really too radical, not really too political, but funky and free and careless and hopeful. Musically speaking, a real folk singer. Big Sur hot baths and concerts at Dietjen’s Inn.

Joan, Kim and Mimi helped alleviate my fears. They sowed the seeds of euphoria to come. It was not so much their state of mind, as beset by the symptoms of national decay as my own, but their ability to satirize the superpatriots, who were in all likelihood our common foe-men. Each of them possessed an accomplished actress’s ear for the commonplace, an ability to affect manner and inflection, which rendered the objective source ridiculous. Going out to dinner became less a method of satisfying hunger than an opportunity for the public assumption of middle-class roles. To ease our mortal anxiety over atrocities in Birmingham, Strontium 90 in baby teeth, Barry Goldwater’s photoelectric flagpole (Stars and Stripes triggered by the light of a rising Arizona sun), we could not put aside the vaguely hysterical need to change personality gears. Joan became Lois Faceless, wife and mother; Kim became Harriet Paralysis, cafeteria hostess; Mimi was Midge Motionless, Parcheesi queen of Kansas City; I was Fred Hodaddy, amateur golf champion; and so on.

The Grateful Deadby Harrison, Hank - page 70 - 71

Mimi's recollections are a bit less frantic. She says "he left home at 18... he went away to fulfill a dream about being a romantic... and he succeeded, I guess." Mimi adds an observation to the writer's habit of turning what they see, feel or know into literature - Dick, she says, was always making up stories "out of something that happened in his life... if some really far-out event took place, I could usually count on hearing it later in a song or story." She says that when they met on a picnic at Chartres, in France in 1963, she found the still-married-to-Carolyn-Hester unemployed writer trying to catch her eye to be " extremely funny... and I really dug him...", and joins the chorus of his friends when she notes "He was sort of the life of the party, as he always was."

Side two abandons the readings temporarily in favor of further interviews and songs. It opens with a Mimi memory about Dick's plans for the future : "I remember Dick telling me as we walked... he wanted to be known as an artist - because that included a writer, singer, and a painter - as an artist." The narrator then rings in with a plug for the book, as "V.", an instrumental from their first album plays in the background. Mimi returns with further comments on Dick's fascination with "making it" and the fame he hoped to find : "He very much wanted fame... It didn't concern him much at first - Joannie used to tell him it wasn't so much...", and Joan had explained to him that fame was fun and he could glory in it and enjoy it, but shouldn't get caught up in it. Dick, she said "... always wanted people to know his name." Absent from these recollections, and possibly just as interesting, are Mimi's feelings about "making it" and the measure of fame performing was to bring her as well as Dick. I gather interviewers at the time rarely asked Mimi about Mimi. I saw her play in Philadelphia at the Bijou in April of 1982, and was backstage when a stranger, unfamiliar with her beyond her just-finished performance, complemented her spontaneously and abundantly and was rewarded in kind with a joyous hug. I gathered that compliments like this didn't happen often enough.

Source

"The private terrors you speak of, Judy, stalk us all. I can think of no one in our limited acquaintance who has not been tempted to cup his fingers over his ears and run moaning into the nigh. [But] when you've 
walked a little with death, you learn to court it, play with it, defy it if you choose."

Richard Farina in Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music - Judy Collins 

 

He was born of an Irish mother and Cuban father in March 8, 1937.

Baby Richard

Pauline, Nick, Joan Sr., Albert, Joanie, Mimi, Dick and a doggie in Carmel, Calif., 1965. From the Betsey Siggins Papers | Photo by Mrs. Betsy Siggins

Mimi and Richard Fariña: the couple released two albums together in 1965, a year before his death.

On 30 April 1966, at around lunchtime, Richard Fariña sat down at a table at the Thunderbird bookstore and cafe in Carmel, California, to sign copies of his freshly minted first novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, published just two days before.

The sky was blue and California-cloudless, and Fariña, 29, had organised a surprise 21st birthday party for his wife Mimi, the sister of Joan Baez. Fariña signed copy after copy of his novel, the dedication page of which read: “This one is for Mimi.”


A little after seven that evening, Richard Fariña was dead, a motorcycle accident on the winding Carmel Valley Road had claimed the life of an artist bursting with potential, at the very beginning of his career.

Source


“Fariña had what you might call that James Dean mystique,” says Hajdu. “He had an acute sense of cool, and that isn’t to be belittled. That’s why he gravitated to music … he could tell that’s where the action was. And through sheer force of will he became a damn good songwriter. Take Hard Lovin’ Loser … you can take that as a manifesto for the quality of postwar songwriters. He was every bit as good as Gershwin, Cole Porter, you name it.”

Fariña, says Hajdu, had a determination to succeed and a desire to be famous. Which is why he created a carefully crafted mythology around himself, just as he had Gnossos do in the novel. “He was a serial fabulist,” says Hajdu. “He made up wild stories about his life. He created a persona, and in him you can see the mercurial identity we know so well in artists from David Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga.”

And, according to Hajdu, the stories about the IRA and Castro were just part of the persona. “I interviewed the family he stayed with in Ireland. He was just a quiet kid, didn’t do anything like that. And he just couldn’t have been even old enough to fight in the mountains with Castro.”