Down the Funny Stairs Richard Farina

2000s:

Jac Holzman, Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture. First Media Books, 2000. 441 pages. Jac Holzman remembers Richard and Mimi thus: At Esalen on Big Sur, Nina and I would spend time with our friends Richard Fari�a and his wife Mimi, Joan Baez's siser. We had met at Newport, and when they visited New York they would often stay with us, bringing their dog Lush, ferociously large but mild-mannered due to his vegetarian diet, a true Sixties counter-culture canine. Mimi did not get loaded, but Richard was always going into small rooms by himself or with friends, and you knew what was up. [p. 125]
Paul Williams: The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: A Top 40 List. New York: Forge / Tom Doherty Associates, 2000. 304 pages. A delightfully idiosyncratic list of 40 literary, musical and artistic "hits" of the century by the famous founder of Crawdaddy magazine. Fari�a's novel is mentioned briefly in the section on Winnie the Pooh.
Liam Clancy: The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour. New York: Doubleday, 2002. 294 pages. A couple of very brief references to Richard are in this book: When Liam Clancy was working at Tradition Records in New York he and his wife would go the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. "Our close friend, Richard Farina, the poet/singer/revolutionary, was a regular." (p. 202). And elsewhere: For us, the White Horse Tavern was the poetic, singing center of the Village. In 1953, Dylan Thomas had taken his last drink there, or rather his last thirty-six drinks. Legend has it that the Welsh poet, overwhelmed by fame, took refuge in the longshoreman's bar on Hudson Street. The doctors told him that even one more whiskey would do in his liver, so he set up a pyramid of thirty-six shot glasses of whiskey on the counter of the White Horse bar. He looked a long time at the pyramid, contemplating. Then he took the top shot glass off the pile, downed it, and with suicidal certainty drank glass after glass until the pyramid was demolished. He was rushed to St. Vincent's Hospital a few blocks away but never recovered consciousness. In the end he did go gentle into that good night. Crowds of students would come on weekends to worship at the shrine. We, the locals, resented the invasion. This was our sanctuary: the back room was our singing place, the place where sea shanties, rebel songs, and raw love songs were exposed. This was where Theo Bikel could cry over the beauty of his Old Testament recitals, where Richard Farina could hold forth with snatches of his novel in progress, where Jimmy Baldwin could flaunt his homosexual intellectualism and snort scornfully at our ballsy shanties, and where the old bawd, sleeping at the next table, could rise from her stupor--tangle-haired and bleary-eyed--and demand, "What the fuck goes on here?" (p. 250-51) Richard mentions Dylan Thomas and the White Horse Tavern in the notes to the Singer Songwriter Project and implies that he met him. Richard would have been a high school junior when Thomas died on November 9, 1953. Richard had recently returned from a two-month trip to England and Ireland on September 15th, so it's possible, if not terribly probable, that the precocious Fari�a had learned that Thomas was in New York and, still excited by his ancestral voyages in the British Isles, went to see him before he died. The Clancy Brothers also talked about Richard in an interview in Telegraph magazine in 1984. Click here to read an excerpt.
Richie Unterberger, Turn! Turn! Turn! The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, May, 2002. 303 pages. A detailed history of the transition from folk to folk-rock, covering not only the "stars" who have garnered the lion's share of the credit but also dozens of lesser-known artists, as well as artists not usually classified as folk but who waded in its waters during the height of the folk boom. The book also considers the roles of behind-the-scenes people--managers, producers, studio session players and even coffee house and club owners--who lent a hand to the changing times. There are about six pages on the Fari�as, as well as a few very brief references scattered throughout. We find only a couple of completely new items on either Richard or Mimi, notably a comment by Bruce Langhorne, who reports that it was he and Richard who broke up the legendary fight between Alan Lomax and Al Grossman at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. There is, however, a goldmine of information on other artists. You'll find yourself scribbling frantic shopping lists as you read, and running to the record store and onto the Web in search of the many elusive songs, albums, and artists tantalizingly described here. The discussion of Dylan's electric set, already well covered in Positively 4th Street, is examined more thoroughly here, providing more eye-witness accounts than I've seen in any other book. Like Hajdu's book, this one ends with Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident, but fortunately there is a sequel on the way which will chronicle the further evolution of folk-rock in the later sixties. NOTE: Because of the depth of detail in this book, the index does not cover every single reference. Brief references to Richard and Mimi not included in the index are on pages 135, 163, 171, 191, 211, and 241. They're just minor mentions, listed here for the sake of completeness.
Ed Morales: The Latin Beat: The Rhythms and Roots of Latin Music from Bossa Nova to Salsa and Beyond. Da Capo Press, 2003. 372 pages. In a chapter titled "The Hidden History of Latinos and Latin Influence in Rock and Hip-hop," the author writes: One important branch of 1960s pop that wound up strongly influencing both psychedelia and folk-rock was the folk movement of Greenwich Village cafes in the early 1960s. The scene that produced singers like Bob Dylan was profoundly influenced by a married couple, Richard and Mimi Fari�a, both of whom had partial Hispanic roots. Richard was the son of a Cuban immigrant and an Irish woman, and Mimi, who was the sister of singer and one-time Dylan romantic partner Joan Baez, had Mexican and Scottish parents. While there may not be strongly apparent Latin influences in their music, their compositional style, which they developed together in 1964, was polyrhythmic and featured improvisation between guitar and dulcimer, characteristics that allude to the Hispano-Arabic roots of Latino cultures. A 1971 Rolling Stone article quoted Rolling Stone member Brian Jones as saying that his use of the dulcimer in the hit single Lady Jane was inspired by Fari�a.
Bob Coltman: Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival. Scarecrow Press, 2008. 296 pages. An excellent, in-depth biography of folksong collector and performer Paul Clayton, who recorded 17 albums from 1954 to 1965, including 1957's Dulcimer Songs and Solos. He was friends with Dave Van Ronk and an early mentor to Bob Dylan. Despite Clayton's early success, he was unable to adapt to the folk-rock transition, and was deeply upset by Dylan's theft of his song "Who'll Buy Your Ribbons" for his "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." Tormented by Dylan's betrayal and by his own homosexuality in the pre-Stonewall era, Paul Clayton committed suicide in March, 1967. Fari�a and Carolyn Hester met Paul at the Showboat Lounge in Washington, DC, when Carolyn was hosting the Sunday Folk Nite there, and they later visited Paul in his log cabin in the mountains outside Charlottesville, VA. Author Bob Coltman (a folksinger in his own right and contributor to various traditional music magazines) considers the possibility that Paul taught Fari�a some dulcimer, but Carolyn says, "I have no memory of Paul teaching him at all." (p. 177) He surmises that "At most, Richard may have been intrigued by Clayton's gigging with a dulcimer as he brainstormed how to use the instrument in the emerging folk-pop style." (177). He also writes that Richard "was far more like a scion of Paul than Paul would have realized: talented, cynical, funny, a bit of a con man, head blazing like a torch toward transcendence." (178) Unfortunately, their friendship is not well-documented outside these two passages, and there is no indication of whether they spent time together in New York City, where Paul lived on-and-off when not in Charlottesville. But if the answer were out there, Coltman would have included it. The book has loads of unique information on the early years of the folk revival before it exploded into the folk boom of the sixties. Highly recommended.
Paul Trynka: Brian Jones: The Making of a Rolling Stone. Viking, 2014. 370 pages. "Yet whenever there was a chance of picking up new information or new ideas, Brian was fearless, 'like a scout searching out new sources or new influences,' says Berman [Tosh Berman, son of the California artist Wallace Berman, a friend of Brian's]. Keith would sometimes tag along on such expeditions, Tosh remembers, but would remain quiet; Brian was the one making connections. One typical example was Richard and Mimi Farina, whom he met several times towards the end of 1965 - their explorations of stripped-down Appalachian music inspired Brian's purchase of a dulcimer." p. 184-185.