Neal Cassady: Drive He Said

 

King of the Road

“Twenty years of fast living - there's not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done." - Neal Cassady

If he was just a clown, a hyperactive dunce, a celebrity buddy, he would have been abandoned by  American literature. But Neal Cassady always makes into the footnotes. He’s always there, On the Road with Kerouac or On the Road with Kesey or wherever – he always seems to be moving, vibrating, jabbering and anxious to devour Life just before it devours him.

Cassady & Kerouac: Hit the road Jack

He drives the beatniks. He drives the hippies. He drives a neon-noir zeitgeist into the perfumed arms of flower power. He belongs to mid-century America (I like Ike but I dig Kennedy), a post-war Huckleberry where the Mississippi meets macadam. And like all travelers who know the real purpose of moving, he never takes baggage because the game is about escaping, not finding.

- 1968. His last breaths of life fog cold metal of a railway track at night. There he is, under a Mexican moon, hanging on, alone, the Holy Goof slowly slips behind the wheel for a velvet drive to the stars.

Always keep moving

Richard Farina and Roman Candles

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved ... who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

― Jack Kerouac




The poet, the writer, the singer

Richard Farina was more than a cross-over figure of the 1960s, conjoining the folksy, woody-guthrie-depression-era-communist sing-alongs with the electrified, drug-infused, youth-enabled latter half of the decade. He sang with Pete Seeger and jammed — kind of — with Bob Dylan. He did that —but he was more.

He married Joan Baez’s sister, Mimi, (of whom critic Greil Marcus once wrote she was so beautiful it was hard to look at her) and was a college pal of Thomas Pynchon.

1966. Farina died in a motorcycle accident, age 29, after the launch party of his only novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. The book is more interesting than great, part relic, part testament, with the loopy, lasting and atavistic appeal of an Easy Rider. The talent was there.


Richard and Bob

And the talent was in his poems, songs and singing. You can feel it. He was driven, ambitious, creative, and young—and it was the 1960s and beatniks were hanging at the coffee bars while the hippies began the Quest for Woodstock.



Rich and Mimi go for it

Does a short wick burn brighter? Never. Then what to make of this Roman candle with a ghostly shadow, his trembling voice and votive glow that flows across the stars.