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X Richard and My Music
I've been writing silly songs about the West since I came
to Montana in 1975. Richard really liked them. He had me and our friend "Dobro"
Dick Dillof play together at his parties. Dobro's dobro added just the
right amount of irony to songs like "I Don't Waltz and She Don't Rock and
Roll." He even had me sing a more serious song, "Roll on Missouri," over
the phone to his girlfriend Masako. I think he was hoping she would see me
as an extension of himself. It must have worked because when he stopped
seeing her, she continued to write to me. When the Japanese came to
interview Richard for a series on FM Tokyo called "Welcome to Hard Times"
he invited me to join him and sing some songs for the show. While I was
singing "The Ballad of Billy Montana," a bee stung me and the ensuing
drama became part of the recording. FM Tokyo was always interested in
Richard. In Richard's words, his work sold "like hotcakes" in Japan. In
fact, there were even billboards saying "I read Trout Fishing in America
wearing my (some Japanese brand) sunglasses," since the Japanese consider
it a "dark" novel. But one time in a sour mood, he had me call them and
break off a big contract they were working on to advertise Japanese Jim
Beam at Richard's place. Before he called it off, we were thinking of
using regulars from the Eagles bar in Bozeman in the ad. One of the
reporters hinted that if Richard broke the contract he might commit
suicide, and Richard said that was his business but he would never commit
suicide himself. He said he wouldn't want to leave a mess for someone to
have to clean up.
When the reporters left from recording the segment for
"Welcome to Hard Times," Richard decided we should try to get me a
recording contract. So I recorded some songs on my ghetto blaster out in
my garage, and Richard sent it to a friend, Paula Bateson (a Korean woman)
who worked with Colombia Records. He called her and said it was coming,
etc. We figured all of this wouldn't work, but it was basically a "what
the hell, why not," proposition. Of course, the tape came back quickly
with a polite thanks-but-no-thanks. After that, we decided that playing at
parties was enough.
I tried not to ever ask Richard for any favors. He always
volunteered them. I figured that if I asked him to help me, he would
gradually grow to resent me like he did so many people who had asked him
for favors. He once told me that he had never gotten professionally
involved with anyone who he didn't start to distrust. Another favor he
volunteered to do for me involved a screwy little picture of a fish rising
into the sky that I painted over and over in watercolors. Richard liked
the picture. He also liked how I painted so many copies of the same thing.
He liked repetition--in his speech and in his work. Anyway, he wanted to
have an exhibit of my fish pictures. He said, "We'll paper a room with 'em,
and sell 'em off the wall." I really liked that idea but knew it would
never materialize (which it didn't). Eventually I put the picture on my
first chapbook of poems. When I gave him a copy, he called it a "sweet
piece of machinery and sent copies to his friends. He offered to do blurbs
for my next book; in fact, my editor dent a galley of it to him as he lay
in a dead heap in Bolinas. I felt ironic, stupid, and guilty about that:
the first time I'd ever tried to "use" Richard, he was lying in a
festering dead heap.
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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