Listening to Richard Brautigan.

All good people dig Richard Brautigan.

They just might not all know that all the other good people do yet.

Whilst I was growing up, working my way through as many canonically ‘weird’ mid-20th C. books as I could lay my hands on, as scattered references and recommendations led me on a merry path from one ‘cult’ author to the next, nobody ever bothered to hip me to Richard Brautigan.

In fact, I’d barely even heard of the guy when I happened across a few of his books in the always reliable charity bookshop on Queen’s Road in Leicester, and thought “hmm… these look interesting”.

I have neither the time nor the eloquence to attempt to encapsulate the man’s work here, but needless to say, within ten minutes of getting stuck into those two paperbacks, I knew I had a new favourite writer all to myself.

I’m not usually a big re-reader; the vast majority of books I read get ploughed through once, and sooner or later end up shelved forever back in my old bedroom in my Mum’s place, in waiting for the day when I fulfill my dream and open a lending library for weirdos. Not so “Revenge of the Lawn” and “A Confederate General at Big Sur” though - they travel with me. I return to them whenever I feel the need, almost like music albums. I’d feel uneasy deeming a place ‘home’ were they not within easy reach.

In subsequent years, happy shadows of Brautigan have started popping up all over the place, much like a style of architecture or, I dunno, a fashion accessory or something, that you don’t notice until someone points it out to you, and then you start to see it everywhere.

I’ve still never actually read any tributes to Brautigan on the printed page, but all of his books have been republished with garish new covers (I much prefer the lovely old ‘70s Picador editions, most of which seem to feature a photograph of the author standing near a pretty girl, looking confused), and you can probably find one or two of them on the shelves of your local Waterstones for £8.99 a pop, which speaks of a certain ongoing popularity.

I’ve also bumped into various other Brautigan fans, most of whom seem to have independently discovered his writing in much the same way I did, and all of whom have been united by the fact that I have found them to be thoroughly decent, friendly, upstanding folks. One of my favourite bands, Comet Gain, sang a song about Richard Brautigan on the b-side of a recent single.

From once briefly thinking of him as a lost luminary whom I’d haphazardly rediscovered, I now tend to accept the possibility that EVERYBODY reads Richard Brautigan…. but they just don’t think to mention it to each other all that often.

ANYWAY, point of this post is: a while back, I was having an online forum type conversation about Richard Brautigan, with some fellow fans who were lamenting the lack of any but the barest scraps of audio/visual documentation of the author’s life, and in particular, the complete unavailability of “Listening to Richard Brautigan”, an LP that he initially recorded for Apple in 1969 (The Beatles were quietly busy being big fans of his too, it would seem), but that actually only saw the light of day a couple of years later on Harvest/EMI.

Quickly dropping out of print, and having never been reissued on CD, it’s a tough one to track down, but I came across a rip of the LP on a download site a few months back, and I guess it’s my duty to pass it on to all the other good guys out there, so, here goes:

Listening to Richard Brautigan (120mb .zip file).
[Link updated 03/11/12.]

It’s a pretty fun listen all in all, although perhaps not the best introduction to RB’s work. He reads extracts from “Trout Fishing In America”, “Revenge of the Lawn”, "In Watermelon Sugar" and “A Confederate General..”, along with a whole swathe of pomes from “The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster”, in addition to which you get to hear the great man goofing about the house with some friends, discussing how one guy has an obsession with making really strong coffee, and what they’re gonna have for dinner. He records some “sounds of my life in California”, answers the telephone, and somebody decides to subject the world to a couple of post-Revolution No#9 type “sound pieces”. Unsurprisingly, Brautigan sounds like a really nice, easy-going guy. His voice is a kinda half Kermit, half Stephen Hawking monotone that I’d imagine could get real whiny real quickly if he was in a bad mood, but thankfully here he’s in a good mood, and everything is cool.

I think this would be a perfect record to put on on a spring afternoon, at the weekend, whilst you’re, say, carving something out of wood, or rewiring a hi-fi. Or perhaps in the early morning, laying in bed with a headache. Yeah!