1960
On their first date, her would-be Svengali told her she ate too much and would lose her nice figure if she kept it up. After an intense 17 day courtship the two married. After the marriage, he got mad at her for practicing while he was trying to write. Worst of all, he was determined to insert himself into her career. He learned to play a dulcimer she'd given him and started to join her onstage when he could. Eventually he headed for London, where he wasn't known as Carolyn Hester's husband and where he started to have some success.
"He had his work, his writing, and I got to type the manuscripts," she told Hajdu. "I had my music, and he had to have that, too."
To this day, she's irked by one small but symptomatic encroachment: Farina claiming credit for Bob Dylan's big break.
Without a job Fariña became more controlling and tried to capitalize on his connection to her to make his own fam. He appointed himself Hester’s manager. What many saw as a loving collaboration, others viewed as his crude cashing in on a meal ticket. Although not previously a performer, he soon put himself of stage between her sets reading his poetry with a brooding intensity. He was present in the studio when Hester recorded her third album with the then virtually unknown Bob Dylan sitting in on mouth harp. It was the beginning of a close personal relationship with Dylan and his set.
After Dylan showed up that time in Cambridge, looking for work, she invited him to share the stage at Club 47. She also asked him to play harmonica on her first major-label album, on Columbia. The contact helped Dylan get his own Columbia deal.
There's one other thing she wants to correct for the record.
There's one other thing she wants to correct for the record.
Yes, it's true that she pointed Farina's pistol at him in a Paris hotel room and told him to stay away from her, to pack up and leave while pointing his gun at him. This was after he had become infatuated with Mimi Baez, who was 16 at the time and living with her parents in France. Yes, it was the same pistol he had insisted Carolyn smuggle across the French border strapped to her back -- at the risk of 20 years in prison -- because, he claimed, he was afraid an Irish Republican Army connection might come back to haunt him.
But hey: She never took the safety off.
Legendary Appalachian traditional folk artist Jean Ritchie introduced Richard to the simplest of all folk instruments, the three string mountain dulcimer. When he and Hester briefly took up residence in Charlottesville, Virginia to study traditional music, Ritchie gave him a dulcimer of his own. Soon he was sitting up on stage with Hester accompanying her on the instrument and occasionally singing harmonies.
The couple toured widely in the United States and then in Europe, particularly Scotland and the British Isles. He got himself co-billed with Hester at the Edinburgh Folk Festival and separately recorded a four song EP with the popular Scottish duo Rory and Alex McEwen despite having barely mastered his new instrument. Hester grew increasingly resentful of his relentless self-promotion and intrusion into her career.
Carolyn Hester: Texas Songbird
Source
The affair between Fariña and Mimi blossomed despite an eight year age difference. Mimi’s stunning beauty and the Latin/Celtic heritage they shared—her father was Mexican and mother Scottish—had him hooked on her. His charm, intensity, and way with words won her heart. The couple was secretly married in Paris, without the knowledge of her family because of her youth.
1962
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| Dick Farina and Carolyn Hester, Pamplona, Spain, July 1962, photo by John Byrne Cooke, Souce |
they spent a good deal of time in Europe. In July, Dick took them on a writer's pilgrimage, following in Hemingway's footsteps, to the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
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| Pamplona, Spain, 1962, photo by John Byrne Cook, Source |
Pamplona, Spain, 1962
The bulls that run through the streets of Pamplona each morning during the Fiesta de San Fermin are on their way to the bullring, where, in the afternoon, they face their death. Dick and Carolyn have different reactions to the ritualistic spectacle of the bullfight.
1963
They publicly married in April of 1963 with Pynchon as Fariña’s best man and Joan and the Baez family in attendance. By that time Mimi was just 17. They set-up housekeeping in California’s Big Sur in picturesque Carmel near Joan and began on collaborating on new songs for a stage act and recordings. Mimi wrote the melodies, sometimes with her sister, and he wrote the words, some of them adapted from previous poems.
This time spent in California, along with frequent trips back to New York where the couple immersed themselves in the circle around Dylan and Joan, was filled with hours of music. Jamming regularly with friends and honing his craft. Fariña was becoming the musician he only pretended to be with Carolyn Hester.
All this time he had also been working his novel and getting his stories published in increasingly prestigious magazines.
Fariña was at heart a gifted and versatile artist. He and Mimi moved into a cabin in Carmel and made beautiful music together – quite literally, his talent as a songwriter blossomed in partnership with Mimi. They were writing songs on guitar and dulcimer and releasing two albums in 1965, Celebrations for a Grey Day and Reflections in a Crystal Wind. These are pioneering examples of folk rock, at a time when Dylan was taking similar steps. Fariña's distinctive playing of the dulcimer, a simple three-stringed instrument, adds an otherworldly feel.
If you know any of their songs, it’s likely to be Pack Up Your Sorrows, recorded since by the likes of Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Loudon Wainwright III.
Neal Hellman compiled and wrote of a book of arrangements based on his hero, Richard Farina (The Richard Fariña Dulcimer Book). Neal states in his blog called “Neal’s Tales” Liberating Richard:
“Mimi and Richard composed music together on guitar and dulcimer, and by 1964 they were becoming a well-known folk duo. They recorded two wonderfully inspired and well-produced recordings for Vanguard Records—Celebrations for A Gray Day (April 1965) and Reflections in a Crystal Wind (December 1965). Their music consisted of Richard’s songs of political and social commentary as well as instrumentals he created for the mountain dulcimer. Mimi added her soprano harmony and played guitar and autoharp. They reached their peak at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where even a massive thunderstorm could not keep the crowds from dancing to their music, all in various forms of undress. He took the dulcimer out of the Appalachians and made it accessible to city kids like me. To anyone over forty who plays the dulcimer, Richard Fariña has earned patriarchal status.”
Source
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Richard Fariña plays harmonica with Eric von Schmidt in 1963. Photograph: Redferns/Getty | Source |
Neal Hellman compiled and wrote of a book of arrangements based on his hero, Richard Farina (The Richard Fariña Dulcimer Book). Neal states in his blog called “Neal’s Tales” Liberating Richard:
1964 / 1965
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| 1964 | Richard Fariña's carefully posed photo, used to illustrate the table-of-contents rogues' gallery of contributors to the March, 1964 issue of Mademoiselle. Fariña's contribution that month was "Monterey Fair". Source |
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| DICK FARINA and BYRON LINARDOS at the Club 47 (1964). Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Eric von Schmidt | Source: Baby, let me follow you down : the illustrated story of the Cambridge folk years, by Eric Von Schmidt |
“Mimi and Richard composed music together on guitar and dulcimer, and by 1964 they were becoming a well-known folk duo. They recorded two wonderfully inspired and well-produced recordings for Vanguard Records—Celebrations for A Gray Day (April 1965) and Reflections in a Crystal Wind (December 1965). Their music consisted of Richard’s songs of political and social commentary as well as instrumentals he created for the mountain dulcimer. Mimi added her soprano harmony and played guitar and autoharp. They reached their peak at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where even a massive thunderstorm could not keep the crowds from dancing to their music, all in various forms of undress. He took the dulcimer out of the Appalachians and made it accessible to city kids like me. To anyone over forty who plays the dulcimer, Richard Fariña has earned patriarchal status.”
Source
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| Troubador, New York City, 1964, Photo by (?), Source |
Troubador, New York City, 1964, Photo by (?), Source
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Richard Fariña with head in Mimi's lap, Carmel Highlands, California, April 1966, photo by John Byrne Cooke | Source
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| Dick Fariña, Donovan, and David Blue backstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, photo by John Byrne Cooke | Source |
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Dick and Mimi on ice Massachusetts, January 1965, photo by John Byrne Cooke | Source |
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| Dick Fariña and Debbie Green, Woodstock, N.Y., May 1965, photo by John Byrne Cooke | Source |
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| Dick and Mimi Fariña, Pauline Marden, King's Rook Coffeehouse, Massachusetts, 1965, photo by John Byrne Cook | Source |
"Pauline Baez Marden, the eldest of the three Baez sisters, is blessed with the same musical genes that her sisters Joan and Mimi share, but she chose a quieter, less public life than they did. Her appearance with Dick and Mimi at the Kings Rook in the winter of 1965 gave me a rare opportunity to photograph Mimi and Pauline performing together." John Byrne Cook
1966
Alongside this Fariña's literary career finally gained momentum. After years of writing stories and poems, 1966 saw the publication of his first novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Although its hallucinatory imagery and beat-inflected prose haven't aged especially well, its story about a maverick student chimed with an era of campus protest and social upheaval.
Fariña announced a reduction of public performance to concentrate on writing, both music and finally finishing the manuscript of Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me with which he had been struggling intermittently since 1961. But he had new-found confidence in himself as a writer, not just a character in the role of a writer. His new fame also assured that major publishers would be interested in the manuscript. He completed a final draft in six intense months of work and Random House picked it up. |
| Richard & Mimi with Bruce Langhorne and Al Kooper! |
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| Dick Fariña at the San Francisco State College Folk Music Festival, April 15-17, 1966. Digital image scanned from black and white negative. | Source |
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| Dick Fariña at the San Francisco State College Folk Music Festival, April 15-17, 1966. Digital image scanned from black and white negative. | Source |
They flew back to California for a triumphant appearance at the San Francisco Folk Festival and then returned to Carmel. April 30 the day started off with a laid back book signing at a local bookstore and continued at the combination book and birthday party for Mimi at their home that afternoon.
Then, in the midst of the celebrations, he was dead in a motorcycle crash. Mimi, just turned 21, was devastated. Sister Joan, who had grown very fond of Richard and with whom she had collaborated in the establishment of her Institute for the Study of Non-Violent Action was also shaken, but felt the need to be strong for her sister.
With the author young and dead, his book became a success, especially on the college campuses where some regarded it as sort of a manual. Pynchon thought it was a work of genius which spoke for a generation, “coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful, and outrageous all at the same time.”
Today many academic dismiss the book as little more than a cultural artifact of its era. Others believe it stands with the work of Terry Southern, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, and Pynchon himself as the literary legacy of a generation.
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