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Leon Pero's review of 'Listening to Richard Brautigan'
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Recordings: Richard Brautigan

by Leon Pero?

Richard Brautigan is the grandson of a minor Washington mystic, who, in 1911, predicted the exact date on which World War I would begin. Richard Brautigan's grandmother was a bootlegger during the Depression and she lived with a man named Jack, an Italian, who came down the road one day selling lots in Florida. He stayed with Richard Brautigan's grandmother for thirty years and Florida went on without him.

All this is related hy Richard Brautigan in a tale called Revenge of the Lawn?. It is one of over a dozen stories and poems which Richard Brautigan, who inherited magic from his mad grandfather, has committed to plastic on a first album called Listening to Richard Brautigan.

Brautigan is the 35-year-old prose poet storytelling nature mystic, whose four novels and three poetry anthologies have won him a secure place in the literary pantheon of the counterculture. His celebration of natural and everyday things descends from the work of Robert Frost and the teachings of Eastern religion, for he finds in these a signifigance and beauty that transforms something as ordinary as a telephone call into a transcendental experience.

When most poets record their work, the result is generally of historical interest only. The ability to write poetry rarely guarantees the ability to read it, and a reader with any imagination can usually create a mental voice better than any poet's natural one.

This record, though, is not one for the archives. One thing that saves the material from being entombed in the polyester is the fact that Brautigan doesn't write poetry: his work is almost entirely anecdotal, consisting mostly of stories made poetic entirety by the richness of their imagery and rhythm. Brautigan writes stories; what is better, Brautigan is a storyteller. At first his voice comes through the speakers as a barely-modulated, well-enunciated tenor, a little breathy and set in that regionless American accent that betrays its owner as coming from any of dozens of cities in the Mid-atlantic States, or on the West Coast. (In Brautigan's case, Tacoma, Washington. Now he lives in San Francisco.)

After a while, however, the subtle nuances become perceptible — and the voice infuses the whole with the marvelous sense of childlike wonder that pervades Brautigan's writing. Soon he begins to weave a spell; then it is like sitting around a fireplace on a cold winter night listening to a storyteller out of the days of medieval bards.

Listen to Richard Brautigan tell about his grandmother's geese, who got drunk on the sour mash; she took them into the basement and stacked them like cordwood after plucking their feathers. An hour later the geese began to wake up. Listen to the sounds of Richard Brautigan's life in San Francisco.

There are a few minor complaints about the album. There is a totally superfluous reading of "Love Poem" ("Love Poem, It's so nice to wake up in the morning and not have to tell someone you love them, when you don't love them anymore.") by 17 of Brautigan's friends and his wife — and the fact that San Francisco columnist Herb Caen is among them does not redeem it, even for me. Then there is the sound effect on Trout Fishing in America — more like a faucet than a brook. But these are small criticisms.

Bear in mind, however, the limitations of the recorded medium. Though Brautigan's readings are delightful the first time, the second and even the third, in my opinion any reading will grow boring if unaltered and there is no way to change so much as the emphasis on a "t" after the record is pressed. Don't listen to it too much. But it would be a fine thing to invite your friends over and have Richard Brautigan to enchant your mead.

The Tech?
October 13, 1970: 5-6