Rick and his sister Pie.
The humble author is in the background.
The author in 1972.
Nothing Left to Lose
A Memoir of the Sixties
The character based story of two buddies, Rick Sager and the author, in the turbulent sixties totally devoted to sex, drugs, revolution, and rock and roll without knowing much about at least the former two. From smoking banana peels to dropping Purple Haze, from losing our virginity to contracting social diseases, from attending a live performance of Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Credence Clearwater, and on and on and remembering only Poco, we were generally speaking, screw ups. We started a commune in Denver that failed. We hitchhiked across country five times in search of kicks. We failed our draft physicals. We attended anti-war rallies such as the March Against Death. We missed Woodstock because we were in Mexico fleeing a tsunami. We fell in love with every hippie chick that crossed our path though in the end, I loved only one, the unrequited love. It was a wonderful time and would’ve lasted forever only it lacked one thing, commitment. To my generation commitment was a dirty word. But it is amazing what we accomplished as individuals and as a group considering our considerable shortcomings.
Blues Stories
I am a blues music fanatic and, as such, am in the process of writing a collection of stories based on blues songs. The aim is for an album size collection.
Here is one story followed by a performance of the song.
Cool Guitars (Song by Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers)
Cowboy Poetry
The poems in this project are based on photographs of myself and my childhood friends in our cowboy outfits, and, in contrast, photographs from The Album of Gunfighters, based on the Rose collection of Western photographs of outlaws and lawmen. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish the book, but it’s a fun hobby like painting by numbers.
Here are a few of my poems that appeared in “Rope & Wire”:
“Turning In Our Six-shooters To The Policeman At the Smithsonian”
Other Writings
Three stories in online journals:
“The Cook” (Short Story), Weber Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, Spring/Summer 2004
“Conowingo” (Short Story), Forge Magazine Issue 5.4 Spring 2012
“Ne’er-Do-Well” (Short Story), Caveat Lector Vol. 23 No. 1, Winter/Spring 2012
Jeff Richards’ fiction, cowboy poetry, and essays have appeared in 30 publications such as Prick of the Spindle, Pinch, New South, Southern Humanities Review, Gargoyle, and The Broadkill Review. He has also appeared in anthologies including Stress City (Paycock Press), Filtered Through Time (Killer Nashville), and Letters to Salinger (The University of Wisconsin Press). His essay “LD” about learning disability appeared both in Tales Out of School (Beacon Press) and the college composition anthology Higher Learning: Reading and Writing About College (Prentice Hall). Richards would one day love to read his poetry at a cowboy poetry gathering because this is the closest he could wish to come to realizing his childhood dream of growing up to be a cowboy.