Telegraph:
I remember you saying about Richard Farina, earlier,
now to someone like me, Farina is this legendary
figure, who wrote a book and died the night it was
published, and you sometimes forget that he lived, and
drank...
Pat Clancy:
Dick Farina and I went to the White Horse
one night, and no singers turned up except Farina and
I. Now Farina could play a fairly good mouth organ.
Now we held forth that night, and we had a ball! And
when our mouths were sore from playing mouth organs,
we sang our fucking hearts out! He was an amazing guy,
and it was typical of him, if you knew him, that he
would be killed on a motorcycle...
Liam Clancy:
I always thought he was a bit of a loser.
I was very fond of him, but I never sensed that he
would accomplish the completion of a book. I remember
my wife Kim and I, and Dick and Mimi, went up to
Woodstock, to Al Grossman's house for Thanksgiving.
Beautiful house, haunted, very strange. Bob Dylan had
been living there. I don't know if you remember an
album of his -- Bringing It All Back Home? He was
sitting there with a cat, and there was a kind of
frame around it. Well, as soon as I walked into the
house, I realised this is where the picture was. The
cat was there, and rolls of coloured cellophane that
the photographer had used to get the tunnel effect.
Dylan had just had the motorcycle accident [SIC --
WITH ALL THE TALK ABOUT RICHARD FARINA'S MOTORCYCLE
ACCIDENT, LIAM SEEMS TO CONFUSE THIS WITH ANOTHER
VISIT TO AL GROSSMAN'S] and Farina said all of Dylan's
stuff was locked in a room downstairs, we had to nail
it shut, because so many visitors were visiting Al
Grossman, and Dylan was very protective of his stuff;
there might have been manuscripts in there that he
wouldn't want anyone to get their hands on. But we
spent a couple of lovely evenings up there, and coming
home in the evenings and lighting a big fire, and
Farina started telling us about a book he was writing,
and when I read the book [Been Down So Long It Looks
Like Up To Me] later, I could find absolutely no
similarity whatsoever in what he was telling. It was
all based upon those recurring dreams he had about
this monkey figure, and it was involved with his
father, who was Cuban, and his mother, who was a real
Irish biddy. The day the book was published, it got a
whole page in the literary section of the New York
Times, and I came into the Lion's Head with this under
my arm, and Pat was there, with Tom, and Tommy was up
at the top of the bar, and I went over to him and said
"Jesus Christ, did you see this? Did you see Farina's
write-up?" And he had this very sombre look on his
face, and he said "Farina was killed last night." We
were all very young, and this was the first time that
a contemporary had died. At that time I thought we
were all immortal.
Pat Clancy:
Who was out there was Judy Collins, who
was with Mimi after he'd died, and two days later she
came back, and we went for a drink on McDougal Street,
and she was high. I was asking "How's Mimi?" and she
was saying "not here, not there." Jesus, two hours
went by; she called me into a doorway: "The word from
Mimi is... love!" She was high as a kite...
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