For Richard Fariña with love

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.

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“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.”