In loving memory

 

Richard Fariña tombstone | Source




Judy Collins wrote songs with Fariña and Mimi – “They were spellbinding together,” she says of the couple – and had her last recording session with them in the month that he died. It was that impetuousness, that sense of the dramatic, that led him to get on the back of a red Harley-Davidson Sportster owned by Willie Hinds, a friend of a friend who Fariña barely knew but who was persuaded by the exuberant writer to take him for a spin.

For his book, David Hajdu took Mimi – she died of cancer in 2001 – back to the winding roads where Hinds lost control of the bike when Fariña, unused to riding, failed to lean properly into the corners and unbalanced the Harley, throwing it into a barbed wire fence post. Hinds survived, though was badly injured; Fariña died outright.

Collins says: “I was in Colorado when I heard. His death had a huge impact on me. I dreamed about him for years after that. I flew into Carmel on the next plane to see Mimi, Joan was on tour in England, other friends came in and we spent a few days before the funeral holding each other, trying not to fall apart. Dick was very special. Those kind of friendships don’t come along very often. He was irreplaceable.”

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Unlike other young talents who met similarly tragic ends, Fariña has enjoyed little posthumous fame.

“It’s probably an accurate description of how Fariña is perceived today to say that if he’s known at all it’s because of who he knew,” says Hajdu. “But it’s not a fair assessment of his value.”

Fariña’s old friend Judy Collins is more succinct. “He just wasn’t around long enough to establish that legend. We have to remember it.”

Aside from a few pieces of journalism and some short stories, all we have of Richard Fariña is his music and his lone novel, published just two days before he died. Hajdu says: “If we look at any important writer, their first book is sometimes their best. But with Fariña’s promise, we can assume quite reasonably that he would just have got better and better.”

Despite knowing that Thomas Pynchon hasn’t given interviews for years – hasn’t even been photographed – I approached him through his wife and literary agent, Melanie Jackson. After some deliberation he returned a message saying he’d “said all he had to say in that introduction” – the foreword to my battered copy of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

In it, after recounting his time with Fariña at Cornell, Pynchon talks of how he heard the news about the crash, on the news on a radio rock station. He called up a mutual Cornell friend and they talked late into the night. And even then, fabulist that he was, Richard Fariña had thrown doubt into the minds of his friends, even as they knew it must be true, that he had died at all.

“If that fucking Fariña has only been seriously hurt,” the friend told Pynchon, “if he goes up to the edge of It and then comes back – you realise we’re never going to hear the end of it.”

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Meanwhile, there are ripples of revived interest in his work. The veteran English folk-rock act Plainsong, long time fans of Fariña, have released Reinventing Richard, an arresting and inventive album of cover versions of his songs. "I just hope our record will lead a younger generation to his records," says Plainsong's Andy Roberts, "because they're wonderful."

Fariña’s Irish connections, evident in his tales, his letters and his renditions of Irish songs, remain strong today: his uncle Owenie Crozier still lives in Ardboe.

And if his yarns about Cuban exploits and IRA missions weren’t strictly true, they fuelled an imaginative mind whose works can still entertain readers and listeners. Fariña may not have gained the fame he deserved, but he retains his magnetism.

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