RICHARD AND I GO WAY BACK IN TERMS OF KNOWING ONE ANOTHER AND being involved with and in the D.C. music scene. When I left music journalism to manage artists, produce concerts, and otherwise be a music business guy, I recommended that Richard take over my weekly music column in the Washington Star. I knew his writing style from various “underground” publications he wrote for, and I knew he was a good interviewer. Richard accepted the position at the Star and eventually moved over to the Washington Post as that paper’s pop music critic.
Another thing Richard and I have in common is kind of a warped sense of humor. I think it was in December 1973 when I pulled off a prank on Richard that he and I still laugh about to this day. I was in the lobby of Constitution Hall in D.C., taking a break between afternoon and evening concerts by John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu orchestra, Richard arrived after the first show had finished, clearly anticipating an evening of sonic fireworks.
Richard approached me and said, “Hey Mike, how is McLaughlin?” I responded, “The concert is over. He poured gasoline on himself and self-immolated onstage as a protest against the war in Vietnam.” Richard ran over to a pay phone and called in a story to the paper, saying, “Run this. McLaughlin set himself on fire at Constitution Hall. He’s dead. More details to come.” I knew that Richard believed me. Buddhist monks were protesting in Vietnam and at times setting themselves ablaze. Richard didn’t ask details, nor did I tell him that McLaughlin was a devotee of Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, better known as Sri Chinmoy—not a Buddhist but rather a follower of Hinduism.
After finishing his brief phone call, Richard walked back over to me and asked for more details. I said, “Richard, I was just kidding. It’s intermission. He’ll be back on in a few minutes.” At first, Richard looked angry, but his anger quickly subsided, and a sly grin appeared on his face. “You got me,” he chortled. Then he went back to the pay phone, called the newspaper, and told them to “kill” what he had called in a few minutes earlier. That was probably the cruelest prank I ever played on him. I kind of regret what I told him—but not really.
I sat down with Richard in August 2019 and asked to interview him on tape for this book. As pop music writer at the Washington Post, Harrington was and is an important figure in the music scene. I have condensed that interview to what you will read below:
Yeah I was in boarding school in New York at the Harvey School during the folk revival, the folk scare of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I actually formed a trio up there when I was in the eighth grade, and one of the other people in the trio was Loudon Wainwright. We were a Kingston Trio type of group, as embarrassing as that might be, but they were very popular. For an eighth grader, I did a very sincere version of “Scotch & Soda.” Now imagine that song coming out of an eighth-grade voice. I was also playing guitar in the group. After I graduated, from there I went to a school called the Hotchkiss School. Hotchkiss was a feeder for Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. My father had done that whole process of Hotchkiss to Yale, and I would have done that as well except that I ended up going to jail instead.
I sold a nickel of weed to an undercover agent in 1968. Coincidentally, my very first appearance in the Washington Post was in a story about that drug bust. In D.C., I was living above what later became Desperados nightclub. At the time, it was called Groovy’s. So, after I sold to the undercover agent, I went before Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, a federal judge who presided over momentous cases in the Watergate scandals, the release of the secret Pentagon Papers, the Iran-Contra affair, and the legalization of abortion. He was not in a good mood and sentenced me to twenty months to five years for possession and sale of a nickel of grass. I pleaded guilty to possession, and they dropped the sale charge. However, the judge was still in a bad mood, and he sent me to Lorton. My lawyer got me out after a little less than six months. Then I spent the next six months on parole. At Lorton, there was medium security and heavy security. I was in medium security. I knew enough people in prison from the street, and they told me the best thing you can do since you already look like Charles Manson is to act like you’re crazy. Prisoners know that a crazy person will kill you without looking. I never even had a fight when I was in Lorton because I looked really crazy. Also, I don’t think I was a good fantasy fuck. I’m not the kind of guy that anyone would fantasize as a girlfriend so to speak.
So, it’s still on the records as a felony, and I’m not allowed to vote. I never looked into getting it expunged. To me it was always a badge to have had that experience. The experience was important to me because when I got out, I never wanted to be in a situation where I wasted time again. I became a workaholic. I knew that I never again wanted to be in a situation where I was locked up and couldn’t do anything. When I got out of jail, I had no idea what I wanted to do. That same year, when I got out, I did a little bit of answering phones at the Washington Free Press, but I never wrote or did anything like that. Then, somehow or other, I became part of the original staff at Quicksilver Times. Famously, one of the writers who wrote there under the name Sal Torre was actually Sal Ferrara, undercover agent with the Central Intelligence Agency.
He wrote some of the more controversial stories in the paper as part of the COINTELPRO (derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) (1956–1971), a series of covert and, at times, illegal projects conducted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. Later we found out that probably two or three other people who were on the staff (and it was not a big staff) were from the Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI. I’ve been trying to get the Washington Post for years to do a story about it. Sal was a very smart guy, a very smart political operative, and definitely a rabble-rouser. That’s why he was there—not only to observe but to incite. I think it’s a great story. I’d love to see that story told someplace. In the history of the underground press and Washington, there’s very little information about this. Quicksilver is where I first started writing. The first review I ever did was the Boys in the Band play at the National Theater, then I did a bunch of music reviews, not very distinguished, I must say.
Then I got tired of the politics at Quicksilver, so I decided I wanted to do my own paper and just have it be about the arts. That’s when I started Woodwind. Woodwind was meant to be arts, poetry, graphics, short stories, etcetera. It wasn’t a very good paper. It became a good paper when I left and Mike Schreibman took over. I used to do the paper from Mike Schreibman’s apartment. Mike was a salesman for the paper at the time, and I did the layout, which is why those early issues look really terrible. After hearing Buzzy Linhart at the Cellar Door, I decided I needed to get out of Washington, so I moved to Boston. I was in Boston for about seven or eight months and really didn’t get anything together up there, so I came back to D.C. That’s when I started writing for the Star when you had left the paper.
At a Who concert at Georgetown University, I actually followed the group Love, Cry, Want and performed before the Who came on. Mike Schreibman, my pal, was the promoter of the show. This was in 1968. There was dickering going on backstage for more money; otherwise, the Who was going to refuse to go on because the Who knew that a lot of people crashed the gates. So, while they were dickering, Mike said, “Can you go out there and grab a guitar?” Of course, I hadn’t brought a guitar, so I must have gotten one of Pete Townsend’s. I went out there and did about five numbers. I was not well received. I don’t even know if the microphone was on. There was no spotlight on me. I think I was just sort of a weird little distraction. Many years later, the first time I interviewed Pete, I said, “Listen Pete, we’ve had two previous encounters; one was at Georgetown, and the other time was when you played Merri-weather Post Pavilion in 1970 and there was traffic going up Route 29 five miles in each direction and somehow or the other I ended up being the emcee of that concert.” So, I said to Pete, “You guys were dickering backstage about all the people who had crashed the concert. Thirty-five thousand people showed up, and the venue only held 19,000.” Pete said, “We used to do that all the time.” He was laughing out loud and said, “We were highway robbers.” He was laughing so hard, and from his point, I could see it was pretty funny. They had me go up onstage because they knew me from Woodwind magazine and thought I looked like the kind of person who could go up onstage and calm the masses. So, with the Who concert at Georgetown, my career ended fifty years ago because that was the last time I ever played live.
I left the Star around the time I met my first wife, Carolyn. On a whim, we moved up near Woodstock. I was freelancing, a few stories for the Star, a few stories for the Chicago Sun-Times, some stuff for the New York Times, but there was just not enough work up there. Now I have no idea why we moved there. There’s a lot of things in my life that I have no idea how I ended up in these situations. We had a nice little house in the Catskills, in the mountains. To make enough money to live up there, I sold off a lot of my records, and Carolyn made quilts and pillows and stuff like that. That’s one reason we moved back: there just wasn’t enough work up there. When I came back to D.C., the first thing I ever wrote for the Post was in 1976. My memories of the first thing I wrote for the post was a review of the Osmonds at the Capital Centre. So, I was mostly writing concert reviews. I was also writing freelance features in the “Style” section. Then I became the editor of Unicorn Times in 1976 while I was still writing for the Post.
I had met Elliott Ryan that year at the Unicorn Coffee House in D.C. I occasionally performed there as a folkie. I had no illusions about the quality of my work. Tom Zito (a Washington Post music journalist at the time) always thought for some reason that I was a very good guitar player, but I wasn’t. I knew how to play about three or four different things really well. I was not a jammer, I was not a virtuoso. So, I was doing Unicorn, selling advertising, doing the designing and layout, and that was my main thing. I had been freelancing on a number of stories for the Washington Post. So, in 1982 or 1983, the Newspaper Guild thought that I had been working there for a number of years and found out that I hadn’t. Though I had a desk at the Post and made a number of assignments, I wasn’t a member of the Guild. But they thought that I was a staff writer because I wrote more than many people on the staff. The Guild filed a grievance on my behalf and went before the National Labor Relations Board. The Post didn’t want to set precedence, so they settled and created a position for me, which was fine. My title became pop music critic. They had never had an official pop music critic at that point. That took me from about 1982 or 1983 to 2008. During that time, I did long-form interviews and reviews and made assignments for others.
Before me, usually no one got hired at the Post without having an interview with Ben Bradlee. I never had an interview with Ben Bradlee.
By 2008, the Post had already had two major buyouts. There was a third one, and they made it pretty clear that it was time for me to move on and also made it clear that this was going to be the last generous buyout. Depending on how many years you were there, the terms of the buyout were really, really good—plus you could access your pension right away. So, it kind of made sense. So, in 2008, I took the buyout. Since that time, I’ve done some liner notes for people, and I’ve done some program notes, like for the Woodstock fiftieth anniversary show at the Warner Theater. Then I started to work on this history of controversial album covers. I did about 300 interviews for that and wrote most of the stuff for a book on those album covers. Then, a little more than five years ago, my sister came down with dementia. I had a book contract, and Dick Bangham had done some fantastic layouts, but when my sister became ill, I became her guardian and conservator. Basically, those first two years were insane adjusting and being her main supervising caregiver and stuff. By the time I was ready to come out of that, the publishing industry had changed, and what was to have been a forty-five to fifty-dollar coffee-table book, about 300 pages or so, suddenly was not in the realm of possibilities. There were controversial aspects of it which two years earlier had been one of its charms and now less so. So, I put it aside, and the last couple of years, until my sister died in May, she needed to have round-the-clock care. Plus, I was helping my friend Mike Schreibman, who was in a difficult situation. So now I’m thinking, the book is already done; I may just put it up online for free because I don’t really need the money. I never was going to make a lot of money off it. I was going to make two or three dollars per book. That’s not really good for the amount of work I put into it. So, I’d rather put it out for free and have lots of people see it.
Richard lives in Takoma Park, Maryland. He continues to take part in music-related seminars and he (along with me) can be seen in the documentary Led Zeppelin Played Here.