Unterberger,2005

"Liner Notes for Richard Brautigan's Listening to Richard Brautigan (2005 CD reissue)"
Richie Unterberger
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

As the author of droll novels of counterculture Americana like Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, and The Hawkline Monster, Richard Brautigan was one of the major writers of the 1960s and 1970s. It's not as well known that he was also a recording artist, reading excerpts from his novels, short stories, and poems on his sole album, 1970's Listening to Richard Brautigan. How that album came out is a story in itself, and directly traceable to the power of the biggest '60s icons of them all, the Beatles.

In late 1968 Paul McCartney and his friend Barry Miles—himself a major player in the London '60s underground, as co-founder of the Indica Bookshop and publisher of International Times—discussed recording a series of spoken word albums. That helped instigate the formation of a short-lived experimental subsidiary of Apple Records, dubbed Zapple by John Lennon, which would give Miles the chance to record important literary figures in the United States. Miles became Zapple's label manager, and one of projects he worked on (as producer) was an LP of recordings by Brautigan.

Discussions of the album had begun some months before the sessions. In a letter from Brautigan to Miles dated October 14, 1968, Richard mentioned he was airmailing Barry a tape of him reading poems from his book The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. Miles, however, doesn't remember receiving it: "Maybe it didn't reach me. Apple was terrible for stealing and anything just left in your mailbox was likely to walk. I would have kept it and/or remembered it, I'm sure." Ultimately the album would be recorded in early 1969 in San Francisco, where Brautigan was living at the time.

"Richard's ideas and mine were pretty similar about what kind of album to do," remembers Miles. "I did have specific selections that I wanted him to read, and I wanted to use sound effects on all the albums I did because the idea was for the poetry records to reach Beatles fans, and therefore they had to be very accessible and have a very public face. I do have a memory of a long discussion with him about what was possible and what was not. He had no knowledge of recording techniques, either the possibilities or the limitations—why would he?—and I seem to remember that some of his ideas were impossible given the technology of the time."

As a result the LP was not a mere plain spoken word recording, with some of the tracks incorporating sounds such as ringing phones (as well as Brautigan's explanation of why he won't answer); Brautigan discussing coffee preparation, brushing his teeth, shaving, and taking off his clothes (in "Here Are the Sounds of My Life in San Francisco" and "Here Are Some More Sounds of My Life," which according to Miles were "edited by Richard and the engineer after I left from the rough selection that Richard and I made"); and, in the background of the excerpt from Trout Fishing in America, the actual stream that Richard wrote about in the book. "He was very keen on the idea of wiring his kitchen for sound, and recording the stream, and so on," continues Miles. "These were the type of things that I wanted to do before I even got to San Francisco. I have a memory of discussing the idea of recording the actual stream that Trout Fishing in America was about—or that sort of relevant sound effect—with Paul McCartney, who thought it was a great idea. I was very pleased with the results.

"The specifics of who thought of what, I don't remember. I'm sure it was Richard who came up with brushing his teeth and undressing. The stereo stream and the phone calls were, as far as I remember, my ideas. Or maybe all the ideas came from planning sessions in his kitchen. I don't recall." Though some of the album was indeed recorded in Brautigan's kitchen, all the actual tracks were done at Golden State Recorders studio in San Francisco (where Miles was recording albums by Brautigan, and beat literary giants Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, simultaneously). "We recorded hours of material in Richard's kitchen and only used a few minutes of it," notes Miles. "Only the special effects—the telephone conversations, kitchen recording of him talking with friends, and remote sound effects—were done at his house. At the stream, those were done on a Nagra [tape machine]. We did discuss the idea of recording a live reading, but rejected it."

One of the most unusual pieces was "Love Poem," a one-line work read, in different intonations, 18 consecutive times by 18 different readers, including Michael McClure, avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner, photographer Imogen Cunningham, San Francisco Chronicle newspaper columnist Herb Caen, Brautigan's girlfriend Valerie Estes, and Brautigan's daughter Ianthe Brautigan. "The people were chosen by Richard, they were friends of his," explains Miles. "I think Valerie Estes had a hand in choosing some people. I'm pretty sure she came up with Don Allen [a renowned literary editor who edited Brautigan's first four books], for instance. The poem was so short that I originally asked him to read it twice. Where the idea of using different people came from, I don't remember."

Still, much of the album was devoted to relatively straightforward author readings (insomuch as any piece containing the line "I cannot look at the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company building without thinking of her breasts" can be said to be straightforward). As for what material from Brautigan's writings would be featured, says Miles, "it was decided at a planning meeting with him. I think I had a list of things I wanted to record and in the end we used about half. It was pretty loose. All along I wanted it to be Richard's album, and I usually went along with any suggestion that he made."

In May 1969, the Zapple label was inaugurated by two avant-garde solo Beatles releases, the first of those being John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, the second George Harrison's Electronic Sound. Brautigan's album was next in line. Miles: "It was given the Zapple 3 catalog number, simply because it was the most advanced in the production schedule. We had designed a sleeve for it, and I had a finished mix and edit, so it was ready to go. I had edited the Ferlinghetti but we didn't have a sleeve yet, that would probably have been number 4."

But then the Blue Meanies struck, and the album never would come out on Zapple, as "the Zapple label was folded by Allen Klein before the record could be released. The first two Zapple records did come out. We just didn't have it ready in time before Klein closed it down. None of the Beatles ever heard it. Peter Asher did (head of A&R) and Ron Kass (head of Apple Records). I think we only made two test acetates, one for me and one for Peter." Making matters worse, relations between Brautigan and Miles became strained, owing to Miles and Valerie Estes having conducted an affair while Barry was in California. Miles, however, did want the material he had recorded with Richard and other authors to come out somehow, even if Zapple was now defunct. Listening to Richard Brautigan would eventually be issued in 1970 on Harvest, though only in the United States.

"EMI Harvest was the US arm of the Beatles' record label," summarizes Miles when asked how the record found its way to release. "Apple was distributed by EMI and the Beatles were actually signed to EMI, even though their records were released on Apple. The people at EMI had been following the Zapple project closely. I actually had been assigned an office and two secretaries in the Capitol Tower in L.A., and that's where all the studio bills, Nagra hire, and so on were paid from. I don't have specific memory of advising Richard to simply switch his contract from Zapple to EMI, but that is what happened. Maybe his lawyer did it, or someone at the Capitol Tower. I wanted the records to come out. Most of the other records were also released on other labels. The Ferlinghetti tapes came out on several Fantasy records, the Charles Olson appeared on Folkways, the [Charles] Bukowski eventually on Blast First as a double CD, the re-recorded Allen Ginsberg album for MGM.

"There was only ever one pressing of the [Brautigan] album, and in the bottom right-hand corner of the back cover it says, 'Produced by Miles Associates and Richard Brautigan.' The 'and Richard Brautigan' was added after I left San Francisco when we had a bit of a problem over me getting together with his girlfriend. It was Richard's album, and he read beautifully on it, but he didn't produce it." And unfortunately, much less people heard the record than read Brautigan's books, as according to Miles, "I imagine it sold very badly. There were very few reviews"—albeit one of them being a fairly substantial four-paragraph critique in Rolling Stone.

Brautigan would go on to publish quite a bit more material before his death in 1984. But Listening to Richard Brautigan would be his only album, although he did read his poem "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend" on the 1969 album by San Francisco Bay Area rock band Mad River, Paradise Bar and Grill. Miles has since written numerous books, including biographies of Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and most recently Frank Zappa, as well as the autobiographical memoir In the Sixties, part of which recounts his Zapple adventures in some detail. In spite of the complications surrounding its release, he remains fond of Listening to Richard Brautigan. "I am very glad that I made the album because, as far as I know, it is the only professional studio recording of his work in existence," he concludes. "I like his work and I'm proud to have been able to make the record for him."

Biasotti,1970

"Just Like a Poem: Richard Brautigan and Mad River"
David Biasotti
Unpublished manuscript.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Though they recorded two albums for Capitol Records, Mad River remains one of the least-documented and enigmatic Bay Area bands of the late Sixties. That so much of their music is strange—emotional, edgy, meticulously orchestrated and quite unlike anything their peers were doing at the time—adds to the air of mystery that has long surrounded them. Their demanding music ensured that Mad River would never rise beyond cult status, but they did have their admirers, some of them well-known and influential. "Big Daddy" Tom Donahue at radio station KMPX championed the band; music critic Ralph J. Gleason liked them as well. Another fan was Richard Brautigan, who, though neither particularly well-known nor influential when Mad River first met him, would soon become both, when Trout Fishing in America hit it big. Brautigan not only befriended the young band, he helped feed them and introduce them to the local scene. As a gesture of thanks, Mad River dedicated their first album to him, and Brautigan would appear on their second album, performing his poem, "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend." While providing an interesting glimpse of Brautigan's life in those days, the story of his friendship with Mad River also offers, in its way, a reminder of how, in that unique period on the West Coast, poets, musicians, political activists, bikers and freaks all swam together in the same countercultural soup.

Mad River, or the Mad River Blues Band as they first called themselves, came together around the spring of 1966 at the famously progressive Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Says Tom Manning, who played bass, then rhythm guitar for the group, "What Antioch did was to have three months on campus to study. The college would get you a job with a company or an organization, and you'd work for three months off campus, come back, and write papers about it. So you were in school all the time, but you were six months on a job during the year, and six months on campus during the year. It was amazing." Guitarists Dave Robinson and Tom Manning, folkies both, were the first to start playing together. Folkies everywhere were succumbing to the allure of electric music, and Robinson and Manning soon decided to start a band of their own. They brought in Greg Druian on guitar and Lawrence Hammond, who, though classically trained and proficient on a number of instruments, initially played blues harp with the band. When a drummer was found, a younger local kid named Greg Dewey, the first lineup was in place.

It was during their off-campus work stint in Washington, D.C. that the band began to truly jell. (Manning had gone west to do his work-study at the University of Washington's Department of Oceanography, so Hammond moved over to bass.) Sharing a flat, they worked at their various day jobs, while non-Antiochian Greg Dewey kicked around town, visiting museums and killing time. In the evenings they would either rehearse or play any club gigs they could scrape up. By the time they returned to Antioch, they had become a very tight band. More than that, they'd become serious.

At first, their play list had consisted mostly of blues and R&B covers, though they would occasionally work in an original or two. (One of their first originals was William Blake's "The Fly," for which Lawrence Hammond composed a musical setting.) Increasingly, though, Hammond was coming up with songs, many of them quite dark, and all of them musically demanding. Says Greg Dewey, "Some of the intros took four weeks to figure out. Just the intros! We literally had to memorize every measure. When I think back on it, it was intense, intense work. We would get into enormous arguments and have huge fights."

The Bay Area was where it was happening, and that is where Mad River decided to go. "Putting the move together was an act of faith," says Dave Robinson, "a leap of desperation and a process that bonded us together. Essentially, we all said, 'Hey, we're out of here, and we'll meet in two weeks. Here's the address and the phone number. We're going to go where the action is.'" Tom Manning had rejoined them on rhythm guitar. As Greg Druian had opted out to continue work towards his degree, guitarist and fellow Antiochian Rick Bockner was asked to join the band on this venture, which he happily did. Says Bockner, "Because I'd been out there once and seen the sort of embryonic beginnings of the scene there, I was interested to go back and see it. And we were getting credit for doing it—it was part of our college education, to go to the Bay Area and be a rock band!" And so, in the spring of 1967 they made their various ways to the West Coast and rendezvoused in Berkeley, first at the flat of Greg Dewey's sister. Soon, they got their own place and started finding their way around.

There was an undeniably bucolic side to the Bay Area scene of 1967, but it is sometimes forgotten that it was a dark and scary time as well. The music of Mad River certainly reflected that darker side of things. Says Dave Robinson, "We kind of fled to sunny California and San Francisco, and that beautiful blue sky and that wonderful air and the sunshine, and eight months later there were tanks rolling down the street and people shooting at us. And why? Because we were speaking up against something that we knew to be wrong. People are not aware of the intensity of feeling and the storm clouds that were there. That terrible angst that you lived with from day to day. And, you know, it was more than the war. It was the oppression, the non-acceptance of who we were and the lifestyle we had chosen. It was the Blue Meanies, it was the drug busts, it was being roughed up and told to move along, the traffic stops, the harassment. I've mellowed out a lot, but I used to be a punk, a real wiseass. I don't regret that. There was a community there that you were either true to or not true to."

While no one in the band can recall with exactitude when Richard Brautigan entered their lives, it was sometime in the late summer of that year. Lawrence Hammond remembers this: "There was a guy who lived in our house when we lived in Berkeley. His name was Hal. He'd been with us at Antioch and he always wound up sleeping in the closet with his feet sticking out. Sleeping space was at a premium; there were about thirteen people who crashed there on and off. Hal found himself working at the Free Store, and I think that he ran into Brautigan and brought him home. I'm pretty sure that's the way it happened."

The Diggers were the initial connection. As Rick Bockner remembers it, "We got on to Richard or him on to us through the Diggers, Emmett Grogan and the Diggers. The Free Store in Haight-Ashbury was the first free store I'd ever seen. He was hanging around there." Says Dave Robinson, "Our getting together may have been totally serendipitous. Richard was one of a group of poets and performers that kind of floated around the Diggers. The Diggers and the Hells Angels were very much from the same mold: up the Establishment, and to a large extent, from my experience, very straightforward, practical people. Straight shooters, kind of 'Get it done' attitude, both allied against the Establishment. Meeting Richard could have been as simple as him driving a car down to one of these gigs that we played at. It may have been something as simple as travel arrangements that led to the introduction."

Tom Manning and Greg Dewey are fairly certain that Brautigan had first seen them play at an event in Berkeley's Provo Park. (Though officially named Constitution Park at the time, local counterculturalists had rechristened the tribal gathering spot in honor of Amsterdam's "playful anarchist" Provo movement. It is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Park.) Says Dewey, "He wanted to meet us. He always was a shy guy; the fact that he even ever approached us and talked to us at all was pretty bizarre, actually."

Whatever the circumstances that led to the initial meeting, it is generally acknowledged that, when Brautigan first visited their place, he suggested Mad River play at a free concert that was happening the following day in San Francisco's the Panhandle. "I think Quicksilver Messenger Service played," says Hammond, "and the Airplane played after them. There may have been three or four groups. I remember we played and Richard standing up on stage. I remember candles being handed around in the crowd and candles all over this flatbed truck. It was a kind of cold and misty night. I remember getting little twinges of shock, 'coz nothing was probably grounded very well!" Dewey adds, "We were getting shocked and it was really cold. That's the coldest I think I've ever tried to play. I remember Lawrence saying, 'Wear gloves!'"

Despite the fact Brautigan was more than ten years older and vastly more experienced in worldly matters than anyone in the band, he and Mad River seemed to click immediately. "He was older," says Dave Robinson, "We were kids. We clung to each other out of necessity. That's how we got fed, that's how we made music, that's how we lived. And here was this very independent older guy, who kind of had it together and knew the San Francisco scene and was connected and knew how to get things done. We were hippies, he was a Digger. He was part Beatnik; we didn't have any Beatnik blood. He was very much into that North Beach intellectual thing. He used to hang a lot at that place where you could sit outside, Enrico's. He would hang there with the literati and the glitterati and hold forth and see and be seen."

Brautigan was fond of all the guys in Mad River, but became especially friendly with Lawrence Hammond. That Hammond was the group's chief lyricist, and one who took his craft seriously, no doubt had something to do with the attraction. "He loved talking to Lawrence," Greg Dewey remembers, "and he was fascinated with Lawrence's writing. Here's this kid writing these wacky songs. Richard's writing from experience, and here's this 20-year-old kid writing these songs that were like heavy stuff." While Brautigan and Hammond dug talking to each other, apparently their conversations were not centered on writing, particularly. Says Hammond, "We didn't talk about art too much, he and I. I don't think he liked to talk about it. If you talked about what you were working on before it was finished, it became very difficult to finish it, for some reason. I seem to remember him commenting on that. I never asked him what he was working on at a particular time."

After the six-month lease on their place in Berkeley expired, the band shifted its base of operations to a flat on Oak Street in the Haight, across the street from the Panhandle. "Once we got to the City," says Greg Dewey, "Richard became a regular visitor, almost daily. He really took care of Mad River. Actually, the Diggers in general, probably because of him, took a liking to Mad River and sheltered us. We were very young and we didn't know what the hell we were doing, and they were guys who were out there and had been around. They were very kind to us, and took care of us. It was a major gift to us, that we had them in our corner, so to speak. Without a doubt, it was Brautigan who put us in that corner."

As Lawrence Hammond remembers, "Brautigan started appearing in our flat there on the Panhandle with Emmett Grogan and Bill Fritsch and Lenore Kandel, who were biker poets, and all involved with the Diggers. Brautigan would come and sort of regale us. When he was really wound up, he would pace back and forth with that funny floppy hat, and his hands behind his back, and just deliver all these lines." Adds Rick Bockner: "He had posture like a question mark, you know. Just this big, curvy, long guy. His head down and his hand on his chin, and his shoulders kind of curled." Hammond continues: "I always thought he'd sit down down and write in the morning, and then he'd try out what he'd written in conversational riffs on whoever happened to be in his line of fire. Anyway, he would do this and we'd all be laughing and wander off into some other room. When we'd come back and open the refrigerator, there'd be all this food in it, and we were starving. That was the Diggers' thing, free food. Well, years later it came out they were hijacking Safeway trucks. We all thought that they'd conned these people into giving away free food!"

Often as not, Brautigan would show up at the Oak Street flat toting a gallon of white wine, Gallo Chablis or the like. "It was always a delight when Richard came," says Greg Dewey. "It was like the circus came. Everybody would show up, 'coz we'd get some wine and everybody would sit around and have fun all night, talking and joking around and drinking." Tom Manning: "Richard was a great guy. He was a spacey guy, in the sense that he was the kind of guy who you think is there and he's looking at you and he's seeing you, but he's seeing through you and behind you and above you at the same time. He was always like that. He was the neatest guy, one of the sweetest guys I've ever met in my life."

Brautigan would sometimes come by with poet Bill Fritsch, or "Sweet William" as he was known to some. Rick Bockner: "Fritsch was in the Hells Angels. He was head of the San Francisco chapter at one time. He was real Kerouac material. He had a heart, he had an interesting soul. The Hells Angels kind of went downhill from him, far as I'm concerned." As Lawrence Hammond remembers, "Bill had black hair. Kind of a handsome guy, and he rode with the Angels. I can remember coming home once and walking into the living room, and there were two Hells Angels there. I was kind of intimidated, and Richard and Bill were just sitting there grinning. And these Angels were just riffing about guns and shooting themselves in the feet. I was watching Richard during this whole thing, and I had a feeling that he was taking it all in and getting ready to write it down. I think he liked to do that, put people together and then sit back and watch."

Mad River released their first recording, a three-song EP for the local independent label, Wee Records. Lonnie Hewitt, an East Bay jazz musician and aspiring record producer, had heard them in rehearsal, liked them, and booked the session. For one side of the EP they recorded a truncated version of their signature instrumental, the Eastern-flavored "Wind Chimes." Though in performance the piece could go on for thirteen minutes or more, one side of an EP could only accommodate a little over seven minutes in those days, so they were forced to edit it down. Also recorded were two Lawrence Hammond songs, "Amphetamine Gazelle" (titled "A Gazelle" on the EP) and the strange and lovely "Orange Fire," which evokes a napalm attack from a Vietnamese child's point of view. A thousand copies of the record were produced, and in the do-it-yourself spirit of the thing, the band actually glued the album jackets together themselves. Some recall Brautigan pitching in, as well. Rick Bockner: "That was a fun project. Five guys, a chunk of hashish, and some mucilage, gluing the covers together. We glued our own covers, and, to my knowledge, I haven't seen one that's still in one piece!"

The release of the Mad River EP signaled a change in the band's fortunes. Tom Donahue at KMPX, San Francisco's underground FM radio station, dug it, and Mad River's music began circulating on the local airwaves. This led first to some better gigs, and eventually to their recording contract with Capitol Records. Greg Dewey: "The Capitol thing was spurred on by the EP. The EP brought on the record thing, and that was Tom Donahue's influence. The radio play from the EP was what brought on the record companies. Just all of them came." Exactly how much money the band received as an advance from Capitol is something no one seems to recall with certainty, but what money they did see was mostly spent on a new van, better guitars, and better amplifiers.

While some members of Mad River do not recall one way or the other, others remember that a bit of their little financial windfall from Capitol was used to help finance the publication of Brautigan's Please Plant This Book. Rick Bockner thinks Mad River kicked in five hundred dollars or so. "I wouldn't be able to tell you the figure," says Greg Dewey. "I thought we financed it, period." Please Plant This Book was a folder containing eight seed packets—four of flowers, four of vegetables. On the front of each packet was a poem; planting instructions appeared on the back. Some of the members of Mad River helped assemble the folders. Dave Robinson: "Brautigan helped us glue together our EP jacket, and in return we helped him glue together the folder for Please Plant This Book. We would sit there and lick these things, and the glue tasted horrible! Those were two jugs of wine, pot of spaghetti kitchen projects." For his part, Greg Dewey does not remember the folder-gluing project at all, but, as he says, "Anything involved with Brautigan included booze, so I could have been blotto!" Once the books were assembled, Mad River helped distribute them. "We stood around on the corner in Sausalito," Rick Bockner recalls, "passing out these books to people to plant them." Lawrence Hammond: "I remember being given four or five copies to distribute. I think I have several copies. I think I still have the seeds, so I disobeyed the title! I think everybody thought that this was going to be a souvenir, something to have down the line. We did help to glue them together, and I don't think the glue held up!"

During the time Mad River knew Brautigan, whatever was going on in his romantic life seems to have been something of a mystery to them. Says Tom Manning, "I don't remember ever seeing him with a woman." Rick Bockner: "I don't know if he kept them away from us on purpose! I suspect that he wasn't an entirely happy man. I didn't think about that at the time, you know? I could see that there were probably those little quirks in his personality that might make him possessive or guarded in some departments, for sure." Says Dave Robinson, "We were all attracted to the ladies. In that time and in that consciousness and in that spirit, everybody was on the make. That's the reality of it. I always think that he wound up at our place 'coz we generally had these beautiful women around! God bless him, Richard would go after anything that wasn't nailed down, right now! I think that was part of his deal, that was part of his psyche, and very important to him. His love life was central to his consciousness—and I cringe to call it 'love life.' No, I won't do that, it's not at all what it was about. It was something more than that, and it was important to him. It was important to all of us. We didn't see much of the women he was with; he was kind of guarded. He was guarding his and eager to meet ours!"

Occasionally, some of the Mad River guys would visit Brautigan in his flat. "It was right at the corner of Geary and Masonic," says Lawrence Hammond, "and it was this old house that sat all alone. He had the first floor. It was Spartan in the extreme." Rick Bockner: "Not a lot there, but it was really a welcoming space, a very nice space to be in." As Dave Robinson remembers, "It was a hippie flat, one of those wonderful old flats where you walk up the stoop and there's a parlor. You walk up the hall a little bit and on the left there's a water closet. Then off to the right there's a living room and a dining room, then a bedroom, another bedroom, then a kitchen in the back, all down off this long hallway. With those big San Francisco bay windows. Very spacious, full of light."

"At this time," says Hammond, "Trout Fishing in America was just way up the Best Seller list and there was all this money, but Richard just couldn't fathom that, and so he was just living as he'd always lived. I remember going over there and he decided he would scramble us some eggs. He actually at times liked to cook and liked good food, but only one burner on his stove worked. I said, 'Richard, how long has it been like that?' and he said, 'Ever since I've been here. I've become good at one-burner cooking.' There was nothing in his bedroom. He always wore the same clothes. I suppose he went out to a laundromat somewhere." The simplicity of Brautigan's lifestyle extended to transportation, as Greg Dewey recalls. "I remember once when I was walking with him and I said, 'So, Richard, how come you don't have a car?' and he says, 'Well, I don't have a driver's license.' I was astonished he didn't have a driver's license and I said, 'What do you mean, you don't have a driver's license?' He says, 'I don't need a car.' I went, 'What?' He says, 'Well, who needs a car?' I said, 'You've got to have a car to get around' and he said, 'No, I don't. I just put my thumb out, or I could walk, or I could get on a bus.'"

Considering Brautigan's eventual sad end, it is hard to avoid a sense of ominous foreshadowing in the fact he kept guns around his flat. He liked to talk about them at times. "It's kind of creepy in retrospect," says Lawrence Hammond. "I just kind of let him talk about it, because he was such an unviolent guy." One of Brautigan's memorable disquisitions involved a World War II vintage machine gun he had in his place. "I can remember him expounding on why the Japanese lost the war," says Dave Robinson. "He wasn't a gun freak, but he had guns around. He had this Japanese light machine gun. A heavy thing with a tripod, so you can steady the barrel. There's a handle that comes out of the side of the barrel. In the Japanese machine guns, that handle is welded to the barrel, so that the barrel itself, if you take the gun apart, is a 25" tubular affair with a handle sticking out the side of it. That's the main weapon that's used in jungle warfare, a light machine gun. Those go bad very quickly. If you fire a hundred rounds through that, it's ruined. It just gets plugged up with lead, it warps, it gets too hot. So, the logistics of jungle warfare is to get food and medicine and machine gun barrels to your guys. And because of that handle welded onto the side of the barrel, they could only pack I think like six of those guys in a box one man could carry. Which is a very inefficient way of doing it. The guns that were used by the Americans and most of the Australians had a screw on the handle, and you get twenty of those barrels in a crate. So, the geometry of that [Japanese] barrel limited the number of machine guns that could be operable. That was Richard's theory. It takes many a good reefer with this!

"He was a great one for implications. A lot of his wisdom was jumping to the ultimate conclusion. Being able to travel great distances through logic and intuition to the end point of an argument or question, often with great humor."

Brautigan and Mad River often performed at the same events, for it was the nature of the times that poets and musicians shared the same stage. "Remember, this was not only music," says Dave Robinson. "There are bands, there are musical hangers-on, there are poets, there are ranting idiots who take the microphone from time to time, there are political rabble rousers. Those shows were a chance to get to a microphone, so that people whose art flowed through a microphone were attracted to that. There were standup comedians, too. So, anybody that could hold their own for more than a minute or two would show up at these things. I think that's part of it."

As Rick Bockner recalls, "Our neatest gig—I think the most interesting historical gig—we played a gig for poets against the war in Vietnam. It was at the University of Santa Barbara, in '68. It was Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Bly, Lenore Kandel, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders.It was like the cream of the cream of the crop of that Beat up to Hip era. It was just a real powerful night. That was a neat literary moment, and we were the music for it. Richard was there; it was probably him that made the connection with that group for us. To me, that was some kind of a cultural moment that I didn't truly appreciate at the time. But when I look back at the poster from that, it's just an amazing lineup of the best poets of the Sixties." [Note: The poster image featured artists/musicians/painters/poets on clouds, attached to strings, like marionettes.]

Also memorable was a beach party in Santa Barbara which was organized—if that is the word for it—by the Diggers. Says Bockner, "This is one of those California beach parties that are only talked about in legend and song. It was a mixture of Hells Angels and poets and musicians and surfers—it was just a mix. Brautigan was there. I remember cops running around going 'Who's in charge here?!?' —which is the wrong thing to ask at a Digger event! Everybody said, 'You are! What do you want to do? What do you want to see happen? OK, take it away! If you can do it, then you can get it!' It was absolute chaos, and we were playing on the beach there." Dave Robinson: "We actually wound up sleeping right on the beach. Terrible sand fleas."

For their first LP, Mad River were assigned veteran L.A. producer Nik Venet. Venet had worked with countless acts, including the Beach Boys and Bobby Darin, and had recently scored a hit with "Different Drum" by the Stone Poneys, but he had never produced anything remotely like Mad River. Says Tom Manning, "He comes up from L.A. in his Jaguar XKE, trying to figure out what the fuck these longhairs from the Haight-Ashbury are trying to do—it just blew him out of the shop!" Greg Dewey: "I remember us doing mixes where all five of us had hands on the slide pots, and Venet's back there going 'Give me another pill!'" There was also, according to Isaac "Harry" Sobol, Mad River's manager, a bit of romantic intrigue during the sessions. "David Robinson started having an affair with Nik Venet's girlfriend, or secretary, or something like that. How that effected Venet's take on things, I don't know!" As Rick Bockner recalls, "There were a lot of arguments with Nik. We were really prickly, you know. I hate to say it, but we didn't trust anybody. We really took that 'Don't trust anybody over 30' business way too seriously at the time, and we were pretty sure we were gonna get screwed somehow. And we were! It was a self-fulfilling prophesy."

Any joy they experienced the day the carton containing 20 copies of the freshly pressed and packaged Mad River LP arrived was extremely short-lived. It was bad enough that the band members' names did not match up with their pictures, and Rick Bockner's last name was misspelled as "Bochner." The real horror came when they opened one up and put it on the turntable: in post production, Capitol had actually sped up the tracks. "It wasn't a mistake," says Tom Manning. "It was considered at the time that 18 minutes per side was the best high fidelity, and they just sped it up to fit into that." The resulting product did the music, which was often speedy enough already, no favors, and was especially unflattering to Lawrence Hammond's vocals. Greg Dewey: "It was one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life, to have our dream come out and just about everything about it was wrong. Then we get slammed in Rolling Stone of all places, and by someone that we know. [Reviewer Ed Ward was a fellow Antiochian.] That was just about as bad as it could get."

Due in part to the critical shellacking it had received in Rolling Stone, Mad River did not sell, and Capitol did not renew the recording contract. Mad River was, however, able to record a second album, Paradise Bar and Grill. Produced this time by an old friend, Jerry Corbitt of the Youngbloods, the second album, recorded in Berkeley, boasted a much more varied sonic palette, blending acoustic and electric textures in a way the first album had not. The album was this time dedicated to departed bandmates Greg Druian and Tom Manning. (Manning, feeling increasingly outclassed by the formidable musicianship of the other guys, had decided to leave the band.)

Paradise Bar and Grill also featured the recording debut of Richard Brautigan, "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend." This performance was actually recorded during the sessions for the first album, but was held over for the second. Says Greg Dewey, "My personal feeling was that we didn't have a concept where that fit. We just wanted to get it on tape." This was, in retrospect, a wise choice, as it sits very nicely indeed on the first side of Paradise Bar and Grill. Recorded live, Brautigan reads his poem to an acoustic guitar duet put together by Robinson and Hammond. Says Rick Bockner, "I thought that was such a great contribution to that album; it made it very special for me. A great moment."

As to how the session came to be, Tom Manning says, "I think Lawrence asked him to read a poem and said we'd put a piece of guitar work behind it." "I think it was sort of a band idea," says Greg Dewey. "I think it was one of those drunk night ideas. Richard was there, and the idea was, 'How about if you read a poem to a guitar?' and he thought, 'Okay, yeah!' But he had really never done anything like that; he had no idea what we really meant. The guys came up with the piece. We got back together at the studio—we didn't practice it. Richard had absolutely no concept of how to read it; he read the whole poem before they even got done with the first verse of the music! He had trouble with the verse concept, waiting around to read his poem. We basically had to direct him. It was rough. The music didn't actually work the way we intended it to, so we cut it in half. We got Richard to slow down and we cut the music in half." Manning adds, "It took a while and probably more than one joint to figure out what the hell was going on, to make it work." Dewey continues: "He was used to just reading his poem the way he felt like it, and in this case he had to wait for the guitars to get done. I think he had considered that songs are a lot like poems, but he had never considered how you have to perform the poem within a song. So, suddenly he was trying to do it and it was harder than he thought. We didn't want him to try and sing it; we just wanted him to be Brautigan."

Asked about his take on the poem, Dewey replies, "It was kind of a startling poem. I don't think I was prepared for it to be that poem. It struck me as, wow, a heavy poem—he's lighter than that, usually. I think that he's talking about he had a friend that fell in love with him, and that was difficult for him. He probably had a buddy, a fuck friendship with this person, and I think he had a number of those, but suddenly it was turned into a love affair, and it was more complicated than he needed it to be. I think that's what that was about, but I'm guessing, 'coz I didn't talk to him about it."

An unqualified artistic success, Paradise Bar and Grill also fared a bit better commercially than had the first album, and actually managed to chart, albeit at #192. Though there never was a break up—indeed, the members of Mad River remain good friends to this day—things just wound down. For one thing, the Draft, a worry that had long dogged most of them, finally caught up with Rick Bockner, who split to British Columbia. And when Greg Dewey was asked to drum for Country Joe and the Fish, then at the height of their success, it was hardly an offer he could turn down.

"After Mad River broke up," Dewey recalls, "Brautigan came over once. He was getting famous. So was I. I was with Country Joe and the Fish. He was busily drinking me under the table, as usual, and he said to me, 'So, what are you planning on doing? Are you going to get rich, or famous, or both?' It didn't occur to me that I had to think about that. I just thought if you got to be famous, you got both, so I said, 'Well, you know, famous.' He said, "You better plan on getting rich.' He was right about that."

Lawrence Hammond and Greg Dewey kept in touch with Brautigan, though over the years they saw increasingly less and less of him. "I'd go over to the Bolinas bar," says Dewey, "and I'd see Richard there, and then I'd go over to Richard's house and we got reacquainted. But I stayed acquainted with him. The way I did was by running into him at Enrico's. I made a point of dropping into Enrico's, 'coz he made a point of being there. If I was going through the City I went there, and if he was there, I stopped. That's just the way it went."

Of the sad trajectory Brautigan's life took in the following years, Rick Bockner says, "It was hard for me when he ended up just kind of sinking into wine and killing himself. It was really a harsh way to go for a guy like that. He was kind of a prince at the time we knew him, you know."

"To tell you the truth," says Lawrence Hammond, "I didn't foresee what happened to him was going to happen. I was apprehensive for him, but at the time the book [Trout Fishing in America] came out, I imagined that this guy was just going to go on and become a literary giant. It didn't work out that way. I just think that the literary world moved on, and he ended up as a novelty, a sort of artifact of the hippie deal. He went on doing what he'd been doing, and suddenly there were a million people doing it and doing it more elaborately, or even better. When he started hanging out with [Thomas] McGuane and those guys, I think that—either because of his drinking or other things—they just outpaced him. Tom Robbins, that whole set.

"Like Hemmingway, he became an imitation of his own art—continued to try to imitate what had worked before, and wasn't really able to forge ahead. I think that when he was hanging out in Montana with Thomas Berger and those guys, I think that was probably really bad for him—a bunch of flamboyant personalities who were also fairly disciplined artists and fairly disciplined about their drinking. Richard, being an alcoholic, couldn't be disciplined. I'm quite sure he was probably bi-polar, and I think he was bi-polar long before he became an alcoholic.

"That thing with guns. I didn't think too much about it for years, and then I heard that when he was out at Bolinas he would drink and go out and shoot cans for hours. In terms of literary style, he might have denied it, but he borrowed so much stuff from Hemmingway's tricks, in terms of brevity. What was supposed to be left unsaid, he'd write it down and then leave it out, which Hemmingway did in a lot of his stories. As the years went on I kind of thought of Hemmingway's drinking more, prone to depression and carrying the pistol his father had shot himself with around with him. It all just seems kind of creepy to me. It seems as time ran on that Hemmingway and Brautigan wound up being afflicted by the same addictive disease, and they became imitations of themselves and had invented a public persona. The inside didn't match the outside. It caused them to suffer a lot. I don't know, maybe I'm dragging the parallels too far, but they both seem kind of bi-polar."

Greg Dewey was in Mill Valley, not far from Bolinas, when Brautigan ended his life, in the fall of 1984. "I started becoming aware that there were these rumors going around about what a jerk Brautigan was, and that he'd been 86'd from the bar in Bolinas. At this time I was trying to confront my own alcoholism problems; I was in trouble myself. I knew Richard wasn't a bad person, I knew that this was one of the kindest people I'd ever met in my entire life. I knew that this guy had the same disease I had, and I wanted to help him personally. At the time I was, oddly enough, what's called 'twelve-stepping' people. I was very effective sending people to AA, and I wanted to talk to Richard."

Though Dewey wanted to contact Brautigan, he was, for whatever reasons, brushed off by the people he spoke to. "He had people around him that were basically groupies," he says. "I was trying to find Richard. I thought he was in Bolinas, but they said he was in Japan. I was in Mill Valley, I was only eight miles away from Richard, and I wanted to talk to him, 'coz I knew that he was just a drunk." When asked why he thinks his attempts to communicate were rebuffed, Dewey says of the people he talked to, "Their basic trip is that it's more important for them to be his friend than to have me be his friend—they wanted to deny my friendship to him. Marty Balin and I called them EV's, which stands for 'energy vampires.' They can get severe. People get between you and them. They think they're protecting him from people. They didn't believe me that I knew him, or they didn't want to let him know that I was there, or whatever—I don't know what the fuck. But, at any rate, they prevented me from finding him and he shot himself. Not that I could have made a difference—I just wish I could have found him. We could have shot each other, or gotten into a fight, or we could have gone to the bar and got drunk together one last time. I don't care what would have happened, I just wanted the opportunity to try. I wanted to find him and tell him that he was a beautiful person, and that he had the same disease I had."

Thinking back on his old friend, Lawrence Hammond says, "A lot of painful memories there, but good ones, too." "He had a lot of complicated things in his head," adds Tom Manning, "but to the people who knew him and loved him, he seemed to be one of the most uncomplicated guys there was."

Greg Dewey recalls a passing moment he shared with Brautigan one afternoon in San Francisco, long ago. "One time he said, 'You know that little breeze, Dewey?' It was in the summer, it was very hot. 'That little breeze was just like a poem.'"

Byrnes,1970

"Listening to Richard Brautigan"
Terry Byrnes
Rolling Stone, Nov. 12, 1970, p. 37.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

There is a line from one of Baudelaire's prose poems that sounds like Richard Brautigan: "When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair, it seems to me that I am eating memories." Then again, there is a line from Allen Ginsburg praising Gregory Corso in exile, and it goes like "All his originality! What's his connection but his own beauty? Such weird haikulike juxtapositions aren't in the American book," and sounds descriptive of Richard Brautigan. Well, here's and opportunity to hear what Richard Brautigan really sounds like; at home brushing his teeth, removing his clothes, shaving, answering the telephone, and even in the studio reading poems, selections from a few of his novels and a short story or two.

What Brautigan does sound like is pretty odd. Sort of like Vincent Price reading the lines of Hamlet's ectoplasmic papa; light — floating almost — and quite young; delicate, curiously inflected and yet, at the same time, flat and without much range. One gets the impression that if he yelled, his voice would crack like a 14-year-old's. Not all the sounds, however, are Brautigan's. "Love Poem," for example, is read by 18 different people, singly. Other sounds are made by passers-by and telephones.

Unfortunately, too many of the sounds on this record could have been made by almost anyone. It has much more prose than poetry and, despite the many fine qualities of In Watermelon Sugar, Confederate General and Trout Fishing, they are not meant for repeated listenings. The trouble is that the words stand out more than the performance. I dare anyone to listen to Ginsburg reading Howl and then, after the first hearing, to recite two or three successive lines from the poem. A lot of Brautigan's stuff, admittedly, is lower-key and more understated than Howl, but he still makes me feel as though my ears are bigger than my pelvis. (Poetry, of course, was originally lyric, meant to be performed with musical accompaniment, and even danced to.) Although poets today are more given to open forms, the sense of internal rhythm tends to stick around, and it lends itself to readings well enough that you can forget you are listening to a spoken voice a cappella. The words can be picked up at leisure, but sometimes Brautigan gives us no choice.

Despite this intermittent failure, Brautigan succeeds marvelously with a few of his prose pieces. "Short Stories About [sic] California" is read with an enthusiasm that, combined with the content, makes it funny every time you listen. Parts of "Revenge of the Lawn" work as well. The novel chapters are helped along by sparse, tasteful effects like the sound of a trout stream, or a lamp being blown out. The poetry, which comes mostly under the heading of "... Some Love Poems" and from Springhill Mining Disaster [sic], is read well and has considerable power. Even with the shorter poems, which are difficult to read, Brautigan pulls through. They follow close and fast enough to blur each other's edges, giving the impression of an entire body—a longer poem.

A few more peculiarities of this record: Its cover, which lists a few details of Brautigan's childhood, like a memory of "the exotic war between Japan and China," has his phone number printed on it. In big letters. 567-3389, which, to the best of my knowledge is the poet's last known telephone number. The bottom half of the cover features a non-folding diptych; the right half occupied by a winsome creature who looks very much like Ali McGraw in Goodbye, Columbus, and she is holding a telephone and smiling. The left hand side stars Mr. Brautigan leering out of what looks like a closet and proffering a telephone receiver with its on/off switch, to the entire sighted world.

Also, this record is on the longish side. Side one times out at 25:14, and side two, 27:30—useful statistics unsupplied on the cover. For the most part, a mixed hour of listening to Richard Brautigan.

Pero,1970

"Recordings: Richard Brautigan"
Leon Pero
The Tech, vol. 90, no. 38, Oct. 13, 1970, pp. 5-6.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan is the grandson of a minor Washington mystic, who, in 1911, predicted the exact date on which World War I would begin. Richard Brautigan's grandmother was a bootlegger during the Depression and she lived with a man named Jack, an Italian, who came down the road one day selling lots in Florida. He stayed with Richard Brautigan's grandmother for thirty years and Florida went on without him.

All this is related by Richard Brautigan in a tale called Revenge of the Lawn. It is one of over a dozen stories and poems which Richard Brautigan, who inherited magic from his mad grandfather, has committed to plastic on a first album called Listening to Richard Brautigan.

Brautigan is the 35-year-old prose poet storytelling mystic, whose four novels and three poetry anthologies have won him a secure place in the literary pantheon of the counterculture. His celebration of natural and every day things descends from the work of Robert Frost and the teachings of Eastern religion, for he finds in these a significance and beauty that transforms something as ordinary as a telephone call into a transcendental experience.

When most poets record their work, the result is generally of historical interest only. The ability to wrote poetry rarely guarantees the ability to read it, and a reader with any imagination can usually create a mental voice better than any poet's natural one.

This record, though, is not one for the archives. One thing that saves the material from being entombed in the polyester is the fact that Brautigan doesn't write poetry: his work is almost entirely anecdotal, consisting mostly of stories made poetic entirely by the richness of their imagery and rhythm. Brautigan writes stories; what is better, Brautigan is a storyteller. At first his voice comes through the speakers as a barely-modulated, well-enunciated tenor, a little breathy and set in that regionless American accent that betrays its owner as coming from any of dozens of cities in the Midatlantic States, or on the West Coast. (In Brautigan's case, Tacoma, Washington. Now he lives in San Francisco.)

After a while, however, the subtle nuances become perceptible—and the voice infuses the whole with the marvelous sense of childlike wonder that pervades Brautigan's writing. Soon he begins to weave a spell; then it is like sitting around a fireplace on a cold winter night listening to a storyteller out of the days of medieval bards.

Listen to Richard Brautigan tell about his grandmother's geese, who got drunk on the sour mash; she took them into the basement and stacked them like cordwood after plucking their feathers. An hour later the geese began to wake up. Listen to the sounds of Richard Brautigan's life in San Francisco.

There are a few minor complaints about the album. There is a totally superflous reading of "Love Poem" ("Love Poem. It's so nice to wake up in the morning and not have to tell someone you love them, when you don't love them anymore.") by 17 of Brautigan's friends and his wife—and the fact that San Francisco columnist Herb Caen is among them does not redeem it, even for me. Then there is the sound effect on Trout Fishing in America—more like a faucet than a brook. But these are small criticisms.

Bear in mind, however, the limitations of the recorded medium. Though Brautigan's readings are delightful the first time, in my opinion any reading will grow boring if unaltered and there is no way to change so much as the emphasis on a "t" after the record is pressed. Don't listen to it that much. But it would be a find thing to invite your friends over and have Richard Brautigan to enchant your mead.