Tombstone Blues

Richard Farina died in a motorcycle accident near Carmel on April 30, 1966, just following a party celebrating the publication of his first novel, "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me." A musician, songwriter, singer, and fabulist as well as a novelist, he seduced many people in life, and many in death. David Hajdu, author of the well-received biography of Billy Strayhorn, the Duke Ellington collaborator, is one of the latter.

"Who reveled in the act of living more than this man who tried to make every meal a banquet, every task a mission, every conversation a play, every gathering a party?" Hajdu asks. "Being with Dick was a feeling,' a Carmel friend said. "It wasn't something outside of you that you looked at or saw. It was something that went through you." Thomas Pynchon, friend from college and ever after, worshiped him. Women could not resist. Did Farina truly carry out secret missions for the IRA, as he claimed? We will never know.

A little of this goes a long way. Hajdu bets that a life unlived--cut short--a life unsullied by failure, decline or betrayal, can overshadow lives that were lived, that went on past the golden moment when all things seemed possible, i.e., the world of American folk music from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s.

In this story, the Cambridge folk singer Joan Baez, who from the time of the release of her first album in 1960 was for many the embodiment of a moral purity that could not be found in American society as it advertised itself, and her younger sister, guitarist Mimi Baez, Farina's second wife, function as confused, manipulated, lovesick women caught between two powerful men.

On the side of life there is Farina, from Brooklyn, handsome, exotic (his father Cuban, his mother Irish), a deep male friend, a capricious lover, dedicated to laughter and to his art. On the side of death there is singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, "a Jewish kid from the suburbs."