The first part of ANTONIO PINEDA’s memoir of Richard Brautigan, a huge literary talent who became linked to the Beat eruption but carried his writing voice into the heart of the San Francisco hippie community, appeared in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation last month.
Now, Pineda applies his picaresque style, a puckish collage of psychedelic flashback and sparky New Journalism, to a further set of episodes in the Brautigan legend, first-hand encounters from our correspondent’s star-decked 1960s diary, including walk-on appearances by Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Herr.
But at the core of a highly-personalised account is Brautigan himself, a narrative that incorporates a recording session for the Beatles’ Zapple label, which would commission the novelist’s spoken word LP and actually pay Pineda himself a glorious royalty of $11…
ROLLING STONE’s Gurney Norman mused, ‘As a California writer Brautigan stands as a kind of gift from the West Coast to the rest of the nation which, judging from the immense circulation of his books, is a gift the nation accepts.’
However it was Kurt Vonnegut who introduced Brautigan to Delacourt Press and brought him from being maligned as a hippie writer to the mainstream of American literature.
My hippie commune at 625 Ashbury #11 was a short walk from the Grateful Dead house. John Ranier Long, now a screenwriter in NYC, was a co-founder of the commune. He had encountered Brautigan on walkabout in the hood, chatted him up and brought him home.
John escorted him to the mini ballroom upstairs, a feature of Victorian architecture of a previous generation. John and I showed Richard around. The dance studio had beautiful hardwood floors and mirrors on the walls. Half a dozen girls & guys from the commune were reviewing their Tai Chi Chuan movements.
He explained, ‘You see, Richard, Michael McClure dropped by with his friend the actor Rip Torn. They met Master Choy Kam Man who taught his system here at our studio and in Chinatown. Michael studied with Sifu Choy for a while.’ John was Master Choy’s stellar disciple who continues the tradition of the system, practising and teaching in New York City.
Pictured above: Novelist Richard Brautigan
Richard ingratiated himself with the young kids in the class. McClure and he were idolized by hippie girls. Michael told me, ‘Tai Chi was a positive experience. He was spiritually and physically uplifted. I ran into Rina Morning Star. She trained in yoga at your studio.’
I introduced Richard to our fellow communards. ‘We organize social events here with musicians and poets jamming and performing spoken word. The punch bowl may be spiked with modest doses of acid. Lots of dancing and romancing. If you’re hungry we can go downstairs to our vegetarian kitchen.’
John was from Philadelphia and Bucks County. I explained: ‘We scored a 100lb sack of brown rice. Dinner tonight is mung beans and rice.’ By synchronicity John would, in the future, live opposite Rip Torn and Geraldine Page in the Big Apple. He would later gleefully reveal their mailbox read ‘Torn-Page’!
Richard was in his element. An attractive hippie woman seemed to take a shine to him. Brautigan remarked, ‘Thanks for your hospitality. I dig your pad. Rip and Michael spoke highly of you.’ He was attired in his bohemian blue uniform. He proposed to the hippie danseuse. ‘My dear, would you like to join me for coffee at the I and Thou Cafe. I need to move on to my next scheduled public engagement.’
Future flash: I enter a performance space in North Beach, the Fugitive Theater. Director Robert Hinish has anointed me as coffee boy-doorman for a project re On the Road, overseen by Francis Ford Coppola. Michael Herr, author of the great Vietnam war novel Dispatches and Apocalypse Now screenwriter is Francis’ co-pilot. They sit on stage with a typist from Coppola’s company American Zoetrope.
Pictured above: Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola
Brautigan appeared at the door of the Fugitive Theater. He had been walking by and was intrigued by the atmosphere. Francis and Michael greeted him casually. I offered him a coffee. Richard watched silently as the cineastes ran through their paces. North Beach was a small village where everybody of note knew anybody who mattered.
Richard whispered, ‘Francis wrote the Godfather screenplay at Caffe Trieste. I’m on my way to meet a friend for lunch at Gino and Carlo.’ The writer jammed his hands in his navy blue pea coat and slipped away quietly so as not to disturb the proceedings
Robert Hinish, avant garde stage director, has assisted Francis in assembling and casting local stage actors to read the characters of the novel. Herr and Coppola dictate and edit the material into a screenplay typed by his assistant. It’s a convivial experience, Francis exudes bonhomie and Herr and I chat re Dispatches, cinema and cabbages and kings.
The process at the underground theater takes a fortnight. On the Road undergoes a final reading recorded in the style of a radio program. The Kerouac classic will eventually be shot by Walter Salles for a budget of $25m dollars. It is entered at Cannes in competition and receives mixed reviews though acclamations, too, for its bold and rousing manner. The adaptation by Salles, also referred to as ‘intoxicating’ and ‘frustrating’, will still draw in the viewer by its visual and aural hedonism.
The Fugitive Theater wraps the production. Francis acquiesces to feature in a group photo with director Hinish, myself and the cast of young thespians. Michael Herr graciously gives me a signed copy of Dispatches and encourages me to continue my odyssey as a nascent writer. Francis and Michael exit to enjoy midday drinks at Gino and Carlo, the North Beach venue of choice for wining, dining and socializing.
Francis Ford Coppola’s film Megalopolis wrapped last year and will celebrate a gala screening at Cannes in May of this very year. Festival director Thierry Remaux observed, ‘Megalopolis is a project Francis wanted to achieve for so long and he did it, independently, in his own way as an artist.’ The film is a passion project in which Francis has invested $120m of his own money.
Mad River were an American psychedelic rock band popular in the Bay Area. Out of the Antioch College scene, they moved to Berkeley from Ohio and attracted, as promenaders on the streets of North Beach, the attention of Brautigan. They became popular on the psychedelic ballroom scene, gigging at the Straight Theater, the Western Front and Chet Helms’ Avalon Ballroom.
Richard championed the band, often attending their performance. His influence shot them, if only briefly, to the mainstream of the emerging hippie counterculture. The group cut two albums for Capitol Records.
Brautigan endured poverty as a youth. He was arrested for disorderly behavior December 24th, 1955. Instead of prison he was sent to Oregon State Hospital where he was subjected twelve times to ECT, electroconvulsive shock therapy. Eventually, he moved to San Francisco in 1956 where he would mostly remain the rest of his life.
His association with the socio-political group Diggers and Mad River exemplified a powerful personal connection to the youth culture of America, of which he seemed, at the time, the most representative. He published 23 short pieces in the radical San Francisco Rolling Stone, launched in the city in 1967, before the Sixties were out.
The towering poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti characterized Brautigan as naïve. ‘As an editor I was always waiting for him to grow up. It seemed to me he was essentially a naïf.’ Richard was also an alcoholic. According to his daughter Ianthe, he was often sad and depressed and mentioned suicide.
I wander the streets of North Beach. I browse inside City Lights book store, traverse the course of Jack Kerouac Alley-to-be, and enter Vesuvio to cruise and socialize. Evening shadows fall as I exit and strike out in the direction of South of Market to the studio where Zapple Records, a subsidiary of the Beatles’ Apple label, will be recording Richard.
Pictured above: Brautigan’s Zapple album which eventually came out through Harvest
The sound studio South of Market was hosting an event under the banner of Zapple, an exciting, if all to short-lived, spoken word album project the group, though particularly McCartney, had conceived. A très cool crowd of slumming socialites, ultra hip bohemian folk, scene makers, mixed and mingled among celebrities.
I retained fond memories of Richard’s performance at the San Francisco Poetry Festival. With Ferlinghetti in attendance, Richard gave an enchanted performance, wry and humorous, a cosmic comedian enrapturing the audience. The Grateful Dead were known to be enthusiastic fans of his oeuvre.
Richard approached me at the recording session and introduced me to a producer. I suggested I might translate a poem of his into Spanish and record it for posterity. Richard selected a poem. I was given the green light, and the result was thus:
It’s so beautiful to wake up in the morning all alone
And not have to tell someone you love them
When you don’t love them anymore.
Es tan bello despertarce por la manana solo
Sin tener que decirle a alquien te amo
Cuando ya no mas te amo
For all its artistic vision, its splendid intentions to create a poetry-centred imprint showcasing Beat writers and their fellow underground travellers, Zapple was quickly shut down by the Beatles’ post-Epstein manager Allen Klein, a businessman whose eye was constantly, fiercely, on the bottom line and would not last long in the prestigious post.
Instead, Harvest Records would release the live reading as Listening to Richard Brautigan. To my surprise I received in the mail a royalty check forthwith for the grand sum of eleven dollars from Zapple Records. .
The camera flashes forward to Enrico’s Sidewalk Cafe in North Beach where Richard is seated at a table courting a blonde surfer girl. He waves me over and hospitably treats me to a cocktail. ‘Tony, this is my friend Roxanne.’ I was struck by her convivial personality, California girl look and comely limbs. She extended her hand in greeting. ‘Hi, my friends call me Rocky. I’ve seen you before at Bimbos 365.’
‘Right,’ I say, ‘We exchanged greetings at Jerry Garcia’s gig with Old and in the Way. I dig that bluegrass-folk country vibe.’ Richard orders a round. He was feeling no pain. ‘I just got back from Japan. Tokyo is like Paris. Everybody should experience it once in a lifetime.’
A bearded hipster and doe-eyed girl strolled in front of our table, playing guitars and busking in the crisp air of midnight. They burst into the jazz standard ‘Summertime’. Richard threw them some lolly, and they wended their way to a table of prosperous burghers, who were delighted by their fashionable panache.
Richard was the celebrity writer in residence, recognizable as a North Beach bohemian personality who dated neighborhood girls and was perennially in good nick. We knew he had been married to a Japanese woman called Akiko Yoshimura. Rocky shot him a look of admiration. I sipped my espresso martini. ‘I remember meeting Jim Morrison at Michael McClure’s crib on Downey street,’ said I.
Richard waved to some folk strolling by. ‘I dig Jim’s poetry. It’s so musical.’
Rocky exuded charisma. ‘Jim was so handsome and sexy, like a Greek god in black leather pants.’
I enquired after the Hells Anger poet Free Wheeling Frank Reynolds, who had co-authored a book with Michael McClure. Richard commented. ‘His poetry is visceral and true. Not like my thing at all. Frank is getting into Zen.’
Richard reflected on his dear friend McClure. ‘I really enjoyed Michael’s theater piece, The Beard.‘ A wave of memories overcame me of a time when life was a beautiful dream and poetry was king. Revered were the free thinkers and poets. The poetry of love will never cease.
Brautigan was in his immortal pomp. However, behind the scenes on location of this literary bio film the wheels were started come off. The whiskey and the wine had changed the poet we once knew Much has been inferred about alcoholism and the depression which drove Richard to suicidal thoughts. In my view, much like Sylvia Plath who also underwent ECT treatment, not enough has been attributed to the enduring remnants of the latter.
For sure though, a death wish seemed to haunt him. He had bought a big house in Bolinas with the royalties from his literary conquests. He lived alone. He had survived boyhood poverty, dysfunctional parenting, that brutal and damaging period of therapy, to bask in the post-Beat, neo-Beat and hippie counterculture stardom. The poet had been deceived by seemingly the most innocuous of addictions, alcohol. His inner demons triumphed over spiritual glory.
In the year of George Orwell, on September 16th, neighbors watching an NFL football match recounted hearing loud blasts from the novelist’s residence. Richard Gary Brautigan, who once glittered when he walked, died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum bullet to his head.
The camera cuts away to a shot of his decomposed body on the living room floor fronted by a large window overlooking the ocean. Robert Yench a friend and private investigator discovered the body on October 25th, 1984. The writer was just 49 years old.
Editor’s note: The first part of Antonio Pineda’s memories of Richard Brautigan, ‘Richard remembered: Recollections of Brautigan #1’, appeared in Rock and the Beat Generation on April 28th, 2024. To conclude this final section, Pineda offers a farewell in memoriam to his long-gone writer friend…