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Dylan did not even sing on his first record appearance; he played harmonica for Carolyn Hester. But with Dylan it was always more about the words than the voice, and after Suze Rotolo—the woman on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, his second album—introduced him to the Civil Rights movement, the words became pretty political. At one point Farina suggested that Dylan take up with Joan Baez, who, he thought, could use a little modernizing. After all, “She's still singing ‘Mary Hamilton'.” Dylan did just that and soon his “With God On Our Side” would turn Baez into a singer of 20th century protest songs.

By all accounts an engaging charmer, Farina came to folk music as a writer of prose and continued doing that throughout, once writing of Dylan in a 1963 Mademoiselle profile, “Catch him now.... Next week he might be mangled on a motorcycle.” As the 25-year-old Farina's marriage to Hester faded, he met Baez's not quite 17-year-old sister, who had folk singing dreams of her own. On the day of their secret marriage, Mimi was scolded for returning home 45 minutes late for dinner. Farina ghostwrote her high school book reports. Thomas Pynchon, his friend from Cornell University days, later made an extremely rare public appearance as best man at their aboveground wedding; Joan was maid of honor.

Unfortunately, Richard was as bad on a motorcycle as Dylan— with even direr consequences: he was killed in an accident while returning from a Carmel Valley autograph party for his just published Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, the improbable and outrageous tale of one Gnossos Pappadoupolos. The party was on April 30, 1966— Mimi's 21st birthday and 60 days before Dylan's own career and life- changing crash.                 

Richard and Mimi recorded but two albums and a few more songs that sound unique and perfect today. Mimi subsequently recorded one solo album and another as part of a duo. When she founded the organization Bread and Roses to bring live music to shut-ins, she felt that finally she “was doing exactly what I was meant to do.”

Baez and Dylan negotiated the shoals of much longer careers. Certainly one of the greatest sopranos to record “popular” music; Baez has sung to thousands of audiences, many of which were barely seated before she told them about her latest antiwar and nonviolence campaigns and what she thought of the issues of the day. In this she has remained in Seeger's tradition.

Dylan has become opaquer with the years. Go to one of his concerts today and you will hear him sing, introduce the band, and that's it. He did not cooperate with the book, but Hajdu quotes freely from previously unpublished interviews with Robert Shelton. As hinted in D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back that covers some of the book's events, Dylan was not always nice—to put it nicely.

By 1965, Baez complained that while Dylan was as clear as a bell on what was wrong in society, “he ends up saying that there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it.” He told an old friend he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin,” because “It seems to be what people like to hear.” Later he attributed his early attachment to the folk music scene to the fact that “I knew that Woody did this kind of thing and Woody was famous and I used it.” Only his songs about George Jackson and Ruben “Hurricane” Carter stand as exceptions in later years. But if Dylan did not stay Guthrie's political course, there is no one else who has sung his own songs so distinctly since Woody. It was the brilliant writing of these years that made Zimmerman, Dylan.

Mimi Farina died of lung cancer this past year. She once told Hajdu, “I'll always love Dick. He was an impossible act to follow.” But his name was never mentioned at her memorial service as San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. It was, after all, so very long ago.     

Among her eulogists that day was San Francisco State Senator John Burton, which seemed an odd choice, particularly since Mimi's name had once been briefly floated for that same senate seat—at the same time that he first ran. But it turned out that Burton and Farina had dated at some point. Burton said that when he was in the rehab program he had checked into after leaving his seat in the U.S. Congress, he would use the one call allotted to him each evening to call Mimi—the California state senate president standing at the lectern of a cathedral talking about calling Mimi from drug rehab—I gotta think Richard would have loved it.     Z

Tom Gallagher is an activist and freelance writer.