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.

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