"They are kept away from society, kept away from community life, family life, a kind of normal home life that most people have to deal with. Being on the road, in planes, in elevators, in hotel rooms, in backstages, you really are hidden, just the way an institutionalized person is hidden from society. Having watched one entertainer after another come out of an institution saying, "Boy, there but for fortune..." I can't help but think some of those creative minds will have to respond, maybe not now, maybe twenty years from now....
It really pains me to see people who were inspired when they were young, who got chills all over at the sound of music or a piece of art, something that inspired them to want to do it themselves...it made them excited and made them gleeful and happy and energized and vital, and to watch that go down the drain for the sake of the industry, for the sake of money, for the sake of receiving future funds that'll enable them to live until eternity in a happy house with a pool and a sauna, that is uninspiring to me and takes away from the value of the art."
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| Letter Mimi wrotte to Ralph Rinzler in 1975 |
"I got fed up with the commercial music world. It was degrading , and I wanted to be treated like a person, not 'an act.'"
"Struggling to succeed in the music business, it's so easy to lose the joy of the art, the reason you fell in love with music in the first place," she says. "So I was complaining about it all, probably in a pretty belligerent youthful way, and various friends and relatives would offer suggestions. And one day my cousin Skipper, who was running a halfway house in Marin, suggested I come and sing there, because it would be a chance to use my art without any of the commercial strings attached that I was complaining about. So I did and I could see the use of it. I could see the need to bring music to people who are confined or suffering or not in touch with the outside world. You don't have to preach or say anything, you just have to be there and make the music and it gets through on another level than medication or punishment or whatever else people experience in institutional life."
And there was something that Richard, who in his romantic fashion wrote often about death, used to say, "that stayed in my head, about the commonality of us all, that we all come into the world alone and we all die alone and we spend most of our time trying to find something that nourishes and reassures us that we are not alone in this very unfathomable situation called the planet. And music, in those intimate institutional settings, is about commonality. It brings people together, it makes us equal."
So she thought about it for maybe a year, still doing other things, and one day, when she'd come back from being on the road, "which is such a disorienting experience, you're busy all day and living on the stage and then you come back and there's this empty space," she "picked up the phone and started calling institutions and people were very receptive."
So she began performing herself, enlisted her musician friends, and Bread & Roses was born. "I didn't exactly have a vision," she says. "It was more like writing a song than making a plan. Some feelings popped in me and I had a picture of what it would be like to bring pleasure to people."
Flying to New York in June 1974, I spotted Fariña on the plane -- she had a gig at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village. As we flew east, she outlined her plan for what was to become Bread & Roses and got my assurances that she would get newspaper coverage.
She started working out of her home. Booking entertainers all over the Bay Area, anywhere they were needed, from celebrities like Boz Scaggs to traveling Irish folksingers and local bellydancers. The name was her sister Joan's idea.
Mimi was among the most persuasive and generous of human beings. She often began her calls with, "Hello, this is Mimi -- again; you know why I'm phoning." Then she'd ask for help in getting more volunteers or publicizing a Bread & Roses fund-raiser. Those who knew Mimi loved her; she always got the support she wanted.
"I'd been thinking maybe we should rent a room somewhere and make it our office and wondering what we would call ourselves," she said. "And we were coming up with things like Hand to Heart and Interchange, which sounded like a highway sign. It just wasn't going in the right direction. Then my sister quoted me the end of the first verse of this song which had been written by a man watching the 1912 textile mill strike in Lawrence, Mass.: 'Our life shall not be sweated/from birth until life closes/Hearts starve as well as bodies/Give us bread but give us roses.' And the image was just right."
We met at the Brea& Roses offices in downtown Mill Valley, a bucolic redwood canyon community nestled in the lap of Mt. Tamalpais. Mill Valley, where Mimi Fariña has lived for the last eight years, has been called the "Scarsdale of the West." Its landscape is Swiss; the climate is Mediterranean; and at lunchtime the streets look like downtown Munich with all the BMWs and Mercedes. It is said that amidst the scenic succession of valleys and affluence in surrounding Marin County lives the second largest (after Los Angeles) resident population of musicians in the nation.
The Brea& Roses headquarters in Mill Valley's Lytton Square is a surprisingly modest second floor walk-up. The staff shares bathroom facilities with an organization across the hall called the Marin Roommate Bureau. On the walls of Mimi Fariña's corner office are photographs of her sister Joan, and a poetic tribute from an inmate to the "queen of Bread and Roses."
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| 78 Throckmorton Avenue, Mill Valley |
Fariña wore an air of elegant simplicity: navy sailor trousers, a white silk embroidered blouse, a purple peasant scarf with a border of crimson roses, a delicate peacock pendant on a gold chain. Her voice is soft, and one hears a slight Jersey City twang. She is warm and kind, yet on first meeting a bit shy. As we speak she pauses to ponder questions, a carefully choosing her words, as if we were picking out a new song on her guitar. Soon, she is telling amusing stories of her childhood and a fan who signs his letters "Cool Commander of the Unarmed Forces." She can get tough, but she can also giggle like a teenager.
Fariña believes she inherited her missionary zeal from her grandfathers, both of whom were ministers. "I was raised as a Quaker, and I believe the Quaker saying that there is good in every man. You just got to organize it."
Eventually she rented a tiny office, hired a staff and really put the show on the road. From the beginning, she established a few fundamental principles that still guide the organization:
- Recruit high quality professional and amateur artists who (a) have a natural rapport with their audiences, and (b) will volunteer their time.
- Provide all performances free of charge to client facilities.
- Garner other volunteer resources, sound and light technicians, photographers, and the like, to reduce production costs.
- Treat volunteers, donors, and clients with grace and gratitude.
To this day the group accepts almost any kind of donation, money, or talent. More than 400 professional and amateur performers -- from jugglers to belly dancers, ventriloquists to mimes -- have put on shows for the Bread & Roses cause.
Says Fariña: "Everybody gets an equal chance, and no one gets paid." For the first five years of the organization, Fariña, its executive director, did not draw a salary.
Perhaps the reward is more roses than bread, says James Scott, one Bread&Roses performer. "Playing for Bread&Roses has been the finest musical experience I've had since coming to the Bay Area . . .. The Bread & Roses audiences are of different background and ages, but they all seem willing to let the music touch them, to give themselves to the performance. I felt that the audience was as close to many of my pieces as I was. Everything I gave to them they gave right back. I felt very good after the show. For Bread & Roses you play for free, but you don't play for nothing."
According to Fariña, while prison concerts draw the most publicity, performing in facilities for senior citizens is the most challenging. "Old folks are mistreated so badly. They are drugged with sedatives they don't need, and shoved in front of televisions they don't want to watch. Of course, they are cranky. You would be too, if your family left you alone there. A lot of convalescent homes are run with about as much sensitivity as food chains. The more I see, the more I believe it should not be happening to them."
(indeed, this is true, but Mimi eventualy understood that altough these places are far from perfect, they are needed as she describes latter on an interview for the book LOCAL HEROES - THE REBIRTH OF HEROISM IN AMERICA )
What keeps Bread & Roses and its performers plugging away?
Often simple thank-you notes like this one: "I'm always listening to my own drum -- however this last time I heard yours. And was filled with the joy of life. Then looked around from time to time at others and saw that I felt a serenity and was glued to my chair, never taking my eyes and ears away for a moment. Thank you Bread&Roses I ate the bread and smelled the roses and I heard you."
The goals and philosophy of Bread&Roses are now wide- reaching, yet the group originated from many of Mimi Fariña's personal concerns: a deep social conscience rooted in her Quaker upbringing, a disenchantment with the recording industry, what she calls her "on and off" singing career, and perhaps even sibling rivalry with her older sister, Joan.
"Joanie and I are two strongheaded females in the public eye, and, though we're very tight, there is always some jealousy and envy. We still have to keep our distance. I still haven't totally come out of Joanie's shadow. Bread&Roses has certainly helped give me a new sense of identity." Fariña told me a few days after the San Quentin concert.
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| Sketch from Joan Baez to Bread&Roses - 1979, from the Bread & Roses office |
1975 / 1976 (?)
Maybe that the war is over? "I think the war isn't over; as long as we live in a state of preparation for war, we might as well be killing each other."
And then she starts talking about Bread & Roses, saying, "There's a real difference between enjoying music and making money," it becomes clear that questions, about living in the past are not about music, but about the music business.
She's put commercial trend-consciousness far enough behind her music that its hard to say who's living in the past and who's the midwife to the new age. One of the main points with Bread & Roses seems to be that if you take the business out of music, it can only get better.
BREAD & ROSES, now approaching its second birthday, is a Marin County, Calif., venture that grew out of Mimi's quest for an identity independent of things past and her sister's fame.
"I'm happier now than I've ever been as a result of the search for identity and finding my own source of satisfaction. We do 20 to 30 shows in institutions per month. People volunteer all around Marin County. Some are pros, some are amateurs."
With a staff of five and a lot of volunteer help, she takes entertainment to prisons, children's homes, hospitals for the chronically ill and similar places where people live outside the mainstream in the Marin County area. She said the purpose is twofold: "We're trying to improve the mental and emotional state of performers as well as people in institutions."
"Travelling on constantly, with very little sensation of home and community," is the way she describes the working musician's world. "And then if you become rich and famous you can lose sight of why you were interested in performance in the first place."
The San Quentin News reported on the effectiveness of the program, quoting an inmate: "The name Bread & Roses in here means something. You ask these guys to name the organization that puts on any other show and they can't tell you. They know who's doing this one."
MIMI WAS HAPPY to tour with Lightfoot, and still works the U.S. club circuit about four months per year, but she is a lot more real talking about using her talent to help build a real sense of human community in her own backyard than about finding a new record company and making the Big Time. "Old folks and people in institutions become acquainted with you and it's like you make them feel a part of life," she said, and smiled like she knew she is on a good path.
The only problem with the name, she says, is "that it doesn't say what we do, which has caused complications. People still come up to me on the street and think we're a rock and roll band." And others think that the annual fundraising concerts, which used to be held at the Greek Theater in Berkeley and feature long lists of celebrities, including Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Robin Williams, Pete Seeger and, of course, Mimi and Joan, and are now held at the old prison on Alcatraz - where this year's concert featured Bonnie Raitt - are Bread & Roses.
"People say, 'Are you doing Bread & Roses this year?' and it's so frustrating," she says.
But Bread & Roses concerts - and there is at least one being performed nearly every day someplace in the Bay Area - are well-produced but modest events in the most unglamorous settings.
One night, a gospel choir might entertain a roomful of homeless people in a converted bathhouse, in a room painted a brave yellow under a ceiling crisscrossed by water pipes and airducts that is converted after the show, with rows of portable cots, into a crowded bedroom. Or a tapdancer might spend an afternoon performing for and flirting with a group of elderly people in wheelchairs. Or a blues guitarist might rouse the inmates at the Marin County Jail.
Farina says that a Bread & Roses show is "usually acoustic, but not always, to accommodate a small room and the fact that we have a small sound system, which is time-consuming to take along and set up every time. And the performers are screened and interviewed and auditioned, not just for their skill as performers, but for their natural rapport with an audience. There has to be something about them that guarantees our audiences will be satisfied."
If there is glamour associated with Bread & Roses because of the celebrities who have supported it over the years and because of Farina's own celebrity, there is nothing trendy or slick about what they do every day. And the fact that they have persisted in doing it for 21 years, long after it has become old news and celebrities are more difficult to line up for yet another fundraiser and journalists are more difficult to persuade to write about it, is testimony to Farina's wisdom about life's deepest satisfactions.
"These are the trenches," Farina says. "There is something so empty about the trendier events - 'Live Aid' and 'Farm Aid' and 'We Are the World.' They're sort of a big party for the performers and a photo opportunity and it's hard to know where the money's going. They're so detached. What we do is completely hands-on. And I feel so lucky to have fallen into it. It wasn't until Bread & Roses that I felt I had come into my own, that I was finally doing exactly what I was meant to do."
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| The CoEvolution Quarterly Summer, 1978 pag. 70-71 |
SAN FRANCISCO -- OCTOBER arrives and Mimi Farina, founder and executive director of the year-round "Bread & Roses" program, braces herself - this is the month that her Mill Valley office phone rings off the hook with well-meaning callers asking, "Are you doing Bread & Roses this year?"
Meaning, of course, "Are you putting on a fund-raising activity, with big-name performers - like you used to do in the Greek Theatre in the '70s?"
"I tell them, "Yes, we're producing our annual benefit show at Alcatraz that will begin with a Blue & Gold Bay Cruise and dinner, then a performance on Alcatraz of "Evolution of the Blues" by Jon Hendricks and his family group with the Oakland Interfaith Choir, piano jazz by Les McCann, tours of the facility and a panel discussion, "Reconciliation," hosted by Richard Kamler. . . . And the Committee's Gary Goodrow will be there, too.
"But sometimes," an exasperated Farina admits, "I'd like to answer, "What do you mean doing Bread & Roses this year? - I've been "doing," as you put it, Bread & Roses all year, every year since 1974' - but such a snippy reply might mean a loss of friends of Bread & Roses, and some ticket sales."
Founded in 1974 by Farina, to "uplift the human spirit through the performing arts," the Bread & Roses organization / operation brings free live entertainment to residents confined or isolated in institutions, from disabled kids to prisoners on life sentences.
Bread & Roses provides a non-commercial environment in which performing artists may donate their talent. In earlier times, those artists (at the famous Greek Theatre affairs and elsewhere) included Neil Young, Kris Kristofferson, J.D. Souther, Leonard Cohen, Robin Williams, Tom Paxton, B.B. King, Taj Mahal, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Herbie Hancock, Etta James, Mose Allison, Bob Dorough, Steve Goodman, Melanie, Odetta, Kenny Rankin, Joan Baez, Chick Corea, Maria Muldaur, Pete Seeger, Kenny Loggins, Peter, Paul & Mary and many others.
"Those were times when performers of all ages and styles gave of themselves more freely, when performers would invite friends, other artists, and just show up," Farina recalls. "It was hectic, but fun."
When she says, "I've been doing Bread & Roses all year," she need only point to her yearlong daily schedule for verification - Bread & Roses produces nearly 500 free performances involving more than 2,100 individuals from top-line artists to volunteer drivers, technicians and other support groups.
"We're putting on shows, now, in hospitals, juvenile halls, convalescent homes, drug rehabilitation centers, AIDS wards, psychiatric and correctional facilities - and lots more.
"I've been to Chowchilla, which our governor boasts is the world's largest Women's "Correctional' Facility - what a terrible thing for California. Those thousands of women, crowded in, are mostly young, lonely, frightened and depressed - and I found, if you can believe this, that there are 500 women at Chowchilla on life sentences," said Farina.
"I'm trying to expand Bread & Roses to take in such frightful places," she said. "The public sector cannot supply funds to help make the lives of incarcerated citizens more worthwhile - although it can build more prisons. Some in the private sector help Bread & Roses, but we don't give lavish publicity to our benefactors - and that's what many of them want".
"So, we rely on the generosity of the artists with their time and (sometimes) money, and more than a little financial help from our friends," said Farina.
With that, I phoned Jon Hendricks at his Manhattan apartment in the wonderful new Battery Park City complex.
"Lookin' down from 36 floors up," Hendricks said, "at the yacht harbor. And if I look across the harbor I can see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island - and, across the Hudson, New Jersey, heh, heh, heh.
"Hey, Phil, I'm comin' out to prison for Mimi, you know? Bringin' Edith (Mrs. Hendricks) and Michelle, my daughter, Kevin Mahogany and Mavis Staples. I'm going to use that fine Oakland choir, and pianist Ed Kelly, who played piano on an early version of "Evolution of the Blues.'
"The last time I did a show for Mimi," Hendricks continued," was back in the '70s - we were ready for a San Quentin performance of "Evolution,' but they had a lock-down that day so we went up to her house in Marin County (we were neighbors, kind of, in those days) and had a ball.
"I've revised the ("Evolution') show - going to perform most of the new production at Alcatraz. Then, in November we're doin' the whole thing at Salzburg, with a bunch of European critics especially invited. We're performing in the Festspiel Haus, where Wagner and Mozart played - they're gonna open for us, heh, heh. George Faison is producing the show.
"My autobiography will be published in the spring, in German. The U.S. edition (in English, I hope) comes out later next year.
"I'm comin' back to San Francisco to help out Mimi and Bread & Roses," Hendricks said, "because I remember when she was gettin' that idea started. I'd go see her and Gary Goodrow - is he gonna be there on Alcatraz, too? - at The Committee, on Broadway. Hey! good times, weren't they?
"I hear I've gotta be through by 10 o'clock on the 18th, or they keep me at Alcatraz for a few years. I don't mind a long-time engagement, but not on Alcatraz. May be a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
The Bread & Roses benefit, "An Evening on Alcatraz," starts at Piers 1 and 2 (at the Ferry Building) at 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18. Tickets for general admission are $150 and $250. Bread & Roses information at (415) 381-0320. Blue & Gold Fleet ticket information at (415) 773-1182.<
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