Word: farina
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...things? Just heard a song on the radio by Richard Farina, who went here, called V. based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon, also Cornell Grad. So? See you around...
...half-hearted folkie back in 1965, when the first Richard and Mimi Farina album, Celebrations for a Grey Day, came out. Although it was later chosen by Robert Shelton of the New York Times as one of the ten best folk albums of the year, whatever that means, it didn't sell very widely. This is no surprise. Although it was a great record, it was in a basically acoustic idiom, mostly just guitar and dulcimer; Dylan had just issued Highway 61, and folk music, as we then knew it, was shot to hell...
...develops that not only was there such a song on Celebrations for a Grey Day, an Eastern sounding instrumental, but that Farina and Pynchon were roommates and best friends at Cornell. Pynchon turns up not only in the blurb to Farina's novel, but also as a character in a piece in the new Farina book, an article entitled "The Monterey Fair," one of the most interesting in the book. Written for Mademosielle, strangely enough, it is the story of a trip to Monterey the day before Dick's and Mimi's wedding, at which Pynchon was best...
...next time I heard of Richard Farina was the night after he died. I was listening to a folk show in Philadelphia, when the deejay read an announcement that Dick Farina had been killed in a motorcycle crash while leaving a party celebrating the publication of Been Down So Long...
...that point, despite the publication of the book and the appearance of a second record with a somewhat more timely electric backup, not too many people knew about him. And that was the end. Richard Farina was dead...