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Oct. 13, 1999 |
Richard was born in 1936 to an Irish mother and Cuban father. As a teen, he smuggled rifles for the IRA, then moved to Cuba and fought alongside Fidel Castro. By 1959, he was part of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene. He also went to Cornell University upstate in Ithaca, where he befriended misfit student Thomas Pynchon. Fariņa then married Carolyn Hester, a folk singer. In Eric Von Schmidt's memoir of his folkie days, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," Hester recalls an idyll with Fariņa on Martha's Vineyard during the summer of '61: "He was afraid the English were going to avenge themselves [on him] because he'd blown up a torpedo boat in Ireland. He was always carrying a .38 around. He thought the Protestants were going to bump him off. I couldn't believe it."
Mimi and Richard Fariña
The next year they drifted to Paris, where Fariņa fell in love with Mimi Baez, a lovely piece of 15-year-old jailbait. Fariņa would eventually divorce his wife. Von Schmidt says Richard and Mimi then had a "secret" marriage ceremony. Other accounts name Pynchon best man. (Neither item cancels out the other.) What is known is that the two Fariņas began singing as a duo and released two spectacular folk records, "Celebrations for a Grey Day" (1965) and "Reflections in a Crystal Wind" (1966). "Folk" music usually refers to limp white folks' music, but the Fariņas' music was not tedious strum-strum-strumming like famous sister Joan. The Fariņas played weird Appalachian dulcimer music as well as Dylanesque electric folk-rock. Fariņa certainly followed in Dylan's electric footsteps -- he even used Dylan guitarist Bruce "Bringing It All Back Home" Langhorne. As a songwriter, however, Fariņa was not sitting in anyone's back seat. The Vanguard collection contains some of his best songs, such as "Bold Marauder" -- a harrowing account of the malevolent "white destroyer" Klan. Be warned, however, that the record starts tame. Have patience. The songs get progressively more lyrical, electrical and sophisticated -- climaxing with "Morgan the Pirate," Fariņa's biting take on Dylan during the days when he was an amphetamine prick. (That's my term. The sanguine liner notes from the original '60s album sleeve says the song is Fariņa waving "farewell" to Dylan.) So what happened to Richard Fariņa? He died in California. On May 1, 1966, Fariņa crashed his motorcycle on the way to the autograph party for his first novel, "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" at the Discover Bookshop in San Francisco. A posthumous album called "Memories" was released a little later. Although "The Vanguard Years" contains two cuts from this album, a handful are missing (including a live version of "House Un-American Blues Activity Dream" recorded during a rainstorm at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a day before Dylan went famously electric). As for Fariņa's connection with Pynchon, the latter dedicated "Gravity's Rainbow" to his dead friend. Reportedly a double biography of Fariņa and Dylan is in the works that documents a romance between Pynchon and Fariņa's widow. As for Mimi herself, she's made several folk records over the past 30 years, but none is worth finding. Together, however, they had something that still reverberates, 33 years after his death.
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