Richard Fariña

Imagine what might have been. (The Bus 5.21)

Welcome aboard The Bus!

The Stop

Richard Fariña (1937-1966) was an American folk singer and novelist who, along with his wife, played a short but significant role in the revival of folk music in the mid-1960s. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Fariña studied engineering and English at Cornell University where he met and shared a room with the person who would become his best friend, the novelist Thomas Pynchon. After leaving Cornell in 1959, he became a ‘fixture of the nascent folk scene in Greenwich Village.’ It was through the connections in this environment that he became friends with Bob Dylan and, through him met the folk singer Joan Baez and his future wife - her sister, Mimi.¹

A natural rebel against authority from a young age, Fariña attended Brooklyn Technical High School and earned an academic scholarship to Cornell where he majored in engineering before changing to English. He published several short stories for local literary magazines and national publications including the Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle before being suspended for participating in a student demonstration against draconian campus regulations. Though he was readmitted to the university, Fariña dropped out in 1959 just prior to his graduation.

After leaving Cornell, Fariña moved to Greenwich Village where he became a regular patron of the White Horse Tavern, the bar that by the mid-50s was a frequent haunt of bohemian poets, artists and singers. It was here that he met and fell instantly in love with Carolyn Hester, a well-known folk singer.² Marrying her only 18 days later, Fariña became her agent and worked on his novel while accompanying her on a world tour. In September 1961, during the recording of her third album, Fariña struck up a friendship with a little-known harmonica player named Bob Dylan who in turn introduced him to Joan Baez and her teenaged sister, Mimi.

Hester divorced Fariña in early 1962, and with Pynchon as best man Fariña married 17-year-old Mimi in April 1963 at a small ceremony. They moved to a cabin in Carmel, California, where they composed songs with a guitar and Appalachian dulcimer and hung out with members of the burgeoning California folk/singer-songwriter scene. One of these was Judy Collins,³ who wrote songs with the couple and found them ‘spellbinding together.’ She also remembers Fariña as ‘very dramatic, very impetuous’ - the combination of which would lead to his early death.

Two days after his debut novel (and today’s Recommendation) Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me was published, Fariña spent several hours at a book-signing ceremony at Carmel’s Thunderbird bookstore before attending a surprise 21st birthday party he’d organised for his wife. By all accounts it was a ‘blue and California-cloudless’ day, and at some point in the early evening he persuaded a friend of a friend to take him on a ride on the back of a red Harley-Davidson Sportster. Unused to riding, as the bike sped along the windy Carmel Valley Road Fariña ‘failed to lean properly into the corners and unbalanced the Harley, throwing it into a barbed wire fence post.’ Though the driver survived, Fariña died at the scene - the accident claiming the ‘life of an artist bursting with potential, at the very beginning of his career’.

In Pynchon’s introduction to a later reprint of Fariña’s novel, he recounts how he learned about the crash and the death of his best friend on the news segment of a radio rock station. In shock, he rang a mutual friend from Cornell and they talked late into the night where they found that - even though they knew the news must be true - Fariña’s penchant for fabulism had ‘thrown doubt’ into their minds. According to Pynchon’s account, the friend told him that if ‘Fariña has only been seriously hurt … 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.’

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to Sankota, a short (4:08) video in which a store cashier has deeply personal conversations with customers about what clothing means to them. The interviews are real, though the interviewees have been animated. It’s a fascinating snapshot of a multiplicity of viewpoints on something I barely think about: the clothes I choose to wear every morning.

Sankota

The Recommendation

Today’s Recommendation is Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966). Published two days before his death, it is ostensibly a campus novel, though (in the words of The Guardian) referring to it as ‘perhaps the finest example of the American campus novel ever written does it a huge disservice’. Based on Fariña’s college experiences, it is a picaresque tale set in 1958 in the American West, Cuba during the Revolution and a thinly disguised Cornell. The book quickly became a cult classic, an accolade enhanced by Pynchon’s description of it as ‘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.’ If - like me - you’re of the persuasion that finds this description intriguing, it’s highly recommended!

From the back: In an unerring, corrosively comic depiction of a campus in revolt, Richard Fariña evokes the 1960s as surely as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the 1920s. A landlocked, college-age hipster called Gnossos Pappadopoulis weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering - among other things - mescaline, women, demonology, hunting, truth, smuggling, falsehood, gluttony, prayer, science, fetishes, and occasional art. This is a classic novel of an explosive, expansive decade, a book that resonates as social history, sparkles with novelistic inventiveness, and embodies the attitudes of an entire generation.

The Sounds

Today’s playlist is a selection of five tracks by Fariña:⁴ ‘Pack Up Your Sorrows’ (Celebrations for a Grey Day, 1965), ‘Leaving California (One-Way Ticket)’ (Live - Newport Folk Festival, 1965), ‘Cocaine’ (Dick Fariña and Eric Von Schmidt, 1963), ‘House Un-American Blues Activity Dream’ (Live - Newport Folk Festival, 1965) and ‘Birmingham Sunday’ (Joan Baez/5, 1964). Enjoy!

The Thought

Today’s Thought is from Fariña’s song ‘Sell-out Agitation Waltz’ (1965) - a sentiment as apt today as it was almost 60 years ago:

‘Society is never geared/To people who grow a beard/Or little girls with holes in their ears/They’re liable to hunt you down/And dress you in a wedding gown/And offer substantial careers’.

You can listen to the track here:

If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:

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Until the next Stop …

1. It was as a Pynchon fan that I discovered Fariña, the former’s dedication of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to Fariña piquing my interest years ago. For more about Pynchon, see: The Bus 2.30 (‘Thomas Pynchon’ - 12 January 2023) and The Bus 3.38 (‘Vineland’ - 7 August 2023). Sources for today’s Stop include: Richard Fariña (Britannica), Lost Genius (The Guardian) and eponymous Wikipedia entries.

2. For more about Hester, who is still touring with her daughters, see: Carolyn Hester.

3. For more information about Collins, see: Judy Collins.

4. Fariña performs and sings the first four tracks; the fifth is a cover by his sister-in-law, Joan Baez. As a snapshot of what was going on culturally at this time, these songs are invaluable - I just can’t believe I’ve not been as aware of them before now. Great tunes, all.