It ended last night at his home in Palo Colorado Canyon. His family sang him out with "Let It Be A Dance".
His website is here.His obituary is here.
I learned a great deal from Ric, both positive and negative. How to live and how not to live. I was given a front-row seat for parts of his life. I lived as a neighbor and as a cohort, a fellow performer and practically, as a family member, though my own inability to feel that I belonged to any family kept me at a distance.
I first met Ric at the Unitarian Family camp at Asilomar in Pacific Grove. He had presented a concert the previous year and this following year he and Billie were tapped to lead the high school age group of Liberal Religious Youth for the week.
I was most affected by them taking us down to their home in Big Sur. Sitting on their porch and looking out at a scene I could never have imagined. The immensity of the mountains and the ocean dancing together. The fog filling Palo Colorado and Rocky Creek canyons like a bathtub. I realized that it was possible to live like this. Not just vacation like this, but to have this as your everyday experience. I know that my life was changed that day.
He often related, even in our last conversation, a week before his death, how I had been the highlight of that week for him, as he told my parents. I think because I challenged his leadership. He worked to bring me around to accept him. I think he also accepted me. I had been attending this camp for years and had expectations of how the week would go, built upon how things had been. I didn't want some newcomer getting in the way. It was not a comfortable position for me to be in, but I took the role I saw as mine. He told me later how frightened he and Billie were about leading this group of kids, how little they really knew about what they were doing. I wonder what might have happened had I not defended my turf so strongly. In that world of awestruck Unitarians, I was a skeptic. He had a string of beads that he wore, which had been the center of attention. Everyone knew the story of his dying friend, Helen Weston, who had given her necklace to him, with an admonition that escapes me. I will try to find it. At the end of the week, he gave those beads to me and the unspoken challenge to live my life fully. I probably had them for maybe a week, before passing them along like a hot potato. I gave them to my best friend because he felt a little too awestruck that I had received them. Ric never asked who I had given those beads to. Maybe word got back to him. I wonder who has them now?
My mother and he maintained connection, as they were both darlings in the Unitarian world, often following one another onstage.
Occasionally, his family would visit ours, when they were in the area. It was an exciting time. A bit of the magical world of my summer life would emerge in the midst of "everyday". Ric liked my father. They could talk record business talk, probably sports, both having been high school football players. I think they would have been an interesting pair to observe, though I don't remember doing so.
My perspective of Ric changed when, after spending the summer hitchhiking across Canada and down the West Coast, I wound up in Palo Colorado Canyon as construction was progressing the first summer on Byrd Hillegas and Ron Cook's house. They had purchased property down the hill from the Masten's and were building a summer home. This was the first of many summers of work on that house. There were to be many visits from Starr King students getting practical experience in the world and a change of perspective themselves.
There was a disheveled crew of workers that summer from about 12 to about 60, I'm guessing at Byrd's age. I do remember he had a very attractive young girl friend, (Catherine?). That August, we poured cement, dug trenches, carried brick and lumber, tied re-bar, and worked as hard as I have worked. We smoked dope, drank beer, had lunch time competitions of sandwich creativity and basked in the story telling splendor of Ric's brother, Warry Masten, Bob Douglas and Owen Greenan. They let us know there were stories before the one we were living and there would be many to come later. I lived on the building site until the rains forced me back to the Bay Area in December. I returned periodically, until I came to live there full time about 1974, when the house was rented to me by Cook, who had taken the project over, when Byrd moved on to another project and another relationship.
I was treated to the world of Ric from the perspectives of his brother and his best friends. A world in which Ric was not the primary character, nor of particular importance. A world which was richly populated with larger than life characters, like Bob Douglas's telling of his stealing cable from the street at night, by huddling down covered by a blanket, to hide the light from his flashlight as he dug into the pavement. How he heard a strange squeaking sound approaching and jumped up, terrifying the bicyclist who happened down that street that night. There were so many stories . . . of Old Carmel, at least old to me, and of so many opportunities for mischief that were not left untaken.
We lived the story of the rebirth of "El Aguila" and "The Big Pour". I was an honorary "Old Guy". Mostly due to proximity, and the sadness in my eyes, I think. There were many "Old Guy" stories. Often featuring "trail treats".
The dark nights when I would lie in bed until the house was quiet and I would creep slowly down the hallway to April's room and crawl into bed with her, hearts beating with the secrets, though nothing of any carnal significance ever happened there, except the excitement. Ellen's whispers of co-conspiritorial concern, through the thin walls, that we might get caught.
I am often unsure of what my standing is in "the family". I remember one December 31st hitchhiking down to the canyon with some friends, expecting a warm welcome. That night we were just another of the number of wayward youth who regularly showed up at their home, unexpected. Maybe it would have been different had it been just myself. We were turned out to freeze our butts, Traveling up the coast and huddled up trying to sleep on Monastery Beach. Even the nuns across the road wouldn't let us in. The came to the door with their large dogs. At least they sounded large through the huge wooden door. It is the Franciscans who are known for their hospitality. These were obviously something else. It was a long cold night.
I traveled some with Ric, accompanying him on some of his California trips. Having the opportunity to experience what it was like to give the same presentation over and over and the responses from the audience. And the same questions over and over. So predictably. Watching him find his enjoyment in the unanticipated. I watched him rush through his writings so that he could talk about them, after he had read them. He had read them so many times he knew what those words were, his creativity became what he said about the poems and songs, rather than the work itself.
That might be alive. There might be something in this part of the sharing that allowed him time to be present and creative.
I watched him take an audience through uncomfortable territory and it became part of my expectation of my own presentations and those I experienced. I was shown what was possible . . . what depth one could attain . . . and I have come to expect it. So often I am disappointed by what I receive from performers because they use so little of the available spectrum.
Ric explored the edge. He liked to find out just how far you could go, just how far the audience would let you take them. He showed that they will often go farther than even they, thought they would go. We are hungry for intimacy.
I came to understand that his brain worked differently than mine. His ability to find fresh perspectives often surprised me. I don't know if it was his dyslexia, his intelligence, or perhaps the two in tandem. It was sometimes painful to see how conventional my own thinking seemed to be.
I witnessed his own estrangement from his family. He would go off to perform around the country and I would be home with those left behind. I saw the pain of his son, Stuart, as he became part of other families that he felt he had more in common with, or perhaps this is my projection, because it is what I have done.
He was the only boy of the four children, when Dad was gone, it was a strong female setting. So he was off with Nathan Pugh, testosterone on wheels. Shooting, smoking, howling up the dusty roads. Dirt and tobacco in their teeth. Stuart was there last night. I was glad to hear that. I remember sleeping out in the chicken coop with him . . . talking, rolling cigarettes. He always shared his tobacco and papers with me.
I remember when Ric was asked to be a guest on Tom Hunter's "God Talk" radio program on KGO. Tom was a close friend of mine, for a while. There was not enough air on that show for those two voices to fit into. I listened knowing that these two each had much to say, but because they were trying to say it at the same time, neither could be heard. and certainly not by one another. There wasn't much listening happening.
There were long spells when my life was elsewhere and I was struggling to find my own voice and I needed to be away from his influence. I realize that some of my value to him was to reflect his work back to him by singing his songs to him. My world certainly didn't revolve around him, but it was helpful to reconnect. Certainly when I was doubting myself, which was often. It wasn't an intimate connection. We didn't talk overtly. He would smile at me like he knew I knew. I wonder if I did. It was more that I was accepted into the group. A valued member who was there in the stories.
I have been fortunate enough to have had three of the most influential people on my work accept me into their lives. First, Ric Masten and then, Pete Seeger, and Faith Petric. I understand that this is a validation of who I am and a challenge to pick up the torch. I know that I am not the only one. Many seeds have been nurtured by their lives. Those of us who have been invited to continue the work can find guidance and comfort in the examples they have given us, both positive and negative.
I am grateful for the experiences that I was given by being in Ric's world, even peripherally. The monthly poetry readings were precious events and I savor the times I was able to participate in these gatherings. The memorial service for Bob Douglas was a look into a world and a man that I would not have had without my connection to Ric.
I know that Ric did not leave this world thinking he was unappreciated. I was happy to be invited to march with him in the First Night parade that his song was the theme of. He seemed to have wrung it all out. To have spent it all. Though you do wonder what might have been left unsaid.
I can only hope that this will encourage me to make sure that my own safe is empty when my life comes to an end. To remind me to spend it all . . . and spend it now!
Remembering to share with my audiences, not what they want to hear, but what I think they might not take the time to think about on their own. To bring us together in our humanity,
"Let it Be A Dance" is not a song you can dance to, at least not in a conventional way. You definitely must think differently to dance to it.
I think, it is not danceable, because we are meant to hear it's message, not to dance to the song. We are meant to dance to our own song, to find our own music.
The last thing I told him was that I loved him . . . he responded in kind.