1965 - Celebrations for a Grey Day

The album, Celebrations for a Grey Day, was released in April of 1965. Surprisingly, almost half the songs on the album were instrumentals which showed off how he had advanced on his simple instrument and learned to weave it with Mimi’s supple guitar work with unique rhythms. Songs on the album include their most familiar tune, Pack Up Your Sorrows, the more complex Reno, Nevada, Richard’s ballad of Civil Rights martyrs Michael, Andrew, and James, and the title song.


Although folk music was being eclipsed on the radio and in many college dormitories by the British Invasion and rise of a new, sophisticated form of rock and roll, Celebrations for a Grey Day was a solid hit among folk fans. I owned a copy and it was among half a dozen albums that I nearly wore out.

The Falcon

Sounds at first hearing like na agcless, doleful folk ballad. It gains new poignancy, however, when – as Richard explains in his always elaborate liner notes (themselves indicative of his energetic stream-of-consciousness prose tyle) – it’s realized that the falcon symbolizes the birds in Point Lobos, California, whose habitual calm vanished when members of the John Birch Society practiced armed maneuvers underneath on weekends. Heard in this light, “The Falcon” becomes a possible allegory for how otherwise rational, peaceful people can become riled into senseless violence.

One-Way Ticket

Sounds on the surfasse like a good-time travelling road tune, the twist being that the singers are merrily escaping the California sunshine for the snow and rain of the East, its satirical jibes at Californian culture hidden in the lines about oceans where swimming is nearly obsolete and you wake up to fing your hair’s turned blond overnight. There was a dark side to the composer’s frequent good-humored, compassionate outlook as well, best heard in the compelling “Reno Nevada”.

Reno Nevada

It’s lyrics using the gambling town as a setting for a life in which there’s little left to lose . The grinding guitar riffs and Mimi’s winding, wordless backup vocal added to eht majestically foreboding airo f a song that might be Richard’s Fariña’s best. Mimi reveals, surprisingly, that beloved jazz hipster Mose Allison “was gonna record that. I’m a Mose Allison fan, and so was Dick, but he never recorded it. I was so hopeful he would.”.