Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, David Hajdu. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 328 pages, $25.00.
Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes. Grove Press, 527 pages, $27.50.
Because folk music in the 1960s was driven by larger-than-life personalities and agendas to match--because it was a scene--it's especially susceptible to grandiose analysis. That's what makes David Hajdu's critical equilibrium in Positively 4th Street so distinctive. Hajdu neither worships nor maligns; he reveals complex insight into the folk movement, particularly into "the lives and times" of four musical artists: Bob Dylan, Richard Fariña, Joan Baez, and Joan's sister Mimi.
The author begins by describing life in the Baez household when Joan and Mimi were young. A Quaker upbringing taught the girls about pacifism, though their own relationship was marked more by rivalry than peacefulness. (Mimi was beautiful and Joan felt unattractive. Joan was funny and bold; Mimi, quite shy.) After their aunt took them to a Pete Seeger concert, the sisters got guitars. The Baezes eventually moved from California to Massachusetts, where Joan attended Boston University, spent lots of time in coffeehouses, and thus found the stage before her younger sister did.
Joan Baez had established herself as Harvard Square's folk queen when Bob Dylan began attracting attention in Greenwich Village, first as a Woody Guthrie devotee but later as an original. Richard Fariña, a talented writer, elbowed his way into the folk mix by marrying the lovely singer Carolyn Hester and becoming part of her act, with his dulcimer and his poetry. Later he divorced Carolyn to court and marry a high-school-age Mimi Baez. Meanwhile, sister Joan became disenchanted with the English ballads she'd been performing and found new purpose in Bob Dylan's politically charged lyrics; she sang his songs, repeatedly invited him to perform with her, and became his on-again, off-again lover.
And so the four came together. In relaying the details of their lives and the progress of their art, Hajdu always has an eye on context. He draws upon a wealth of interviews and an extensive bibliography in order to shed light on the 1950s counterculture and how it evolved into that of the 1960s. Yet his central characters remain in focus. Background doesn't overwhelm the compelling narrative, which we follow with great interest to the end, when Richard Fariña (a newly published novelist) dies in a motorcycle accident and Dylan (hugely successful but strung out on drugs) nearly does the same two months later and actually heeds the wake-up call.
Positively 4th Street charts an intricate web of influence--personal and musical--in the folk scene at large. For being antislick, these people worked their connections: They schmoozed at parties and piggybacked onto one another's performances and recordings. When Hajdu points out that Baez, Dylan, and Fariña were keenly ambitious for acclaim (Mimi Baez Fariña was more subdued, even passive), he doesn't pass judgment. They just did what everyone else was doing.
Nor is Hajdu afraid to let ugly behavior speak for itself. Joan Baez couldn't stand being an audience member; at several small concerts, she sang along with the featured performer, loudly, until she was invited to come on up. After Dylan surpassed her in international fame, he wouldn't share his stage time with her during his first tour in England, even though she was largely responsible for his success and remained loyal when the old-guard folkies attacked him for turning his back on protest and going electric. And then there was Richard Fariña, perhaps the most self-interested one of the bunch. He may have loved Mimi Baez, but there's ample evidence that her maiden name was a big part of the attraction.
Of course they were arrogant, manipulative brats, Hajdu's matter-of-fact tone suggests. They were barely adults, and famous.
One peripheral figure who shows up more than a few times in Positively 4th Street is Robert Shelton, a critic who covered folk music for The New York Times when Baez and Dylan started out. Shelton's review of Dylan's debut performance at Gerde's Folk City is often credited with having launched one of the most influential music careers in America. His folk criticism tended to be "advocative," as Hajdu puts it. Shelton "would describe an act he disliked as 'promising.'"
Shelton is one of several writers defeated by the task of capturing Dylan. His biography No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (a 1986 book that was reissued as a paperback in 1997) reads like a jumbled, passionate letter from an unrequited lover--albeit with a useful discography appended as a postscript. Oddly, Hajdu omits mention of Shelton-the-biographer. And though his individual comments about Shelton-the-critic aren't especially acerbic or unwarranted, added up they seem a conscious--though needless--effort to undermine a biographical predecessor. For example, he writes that Shelton's "main job at [The New York Times] was proofreading and that his reviewing was a sideline." He implies that Shelton was more of a public relations agent than a critic because he faithfully transcribed Dylan's "parade of colorful fantasies." Perhaps Hajdu oversteps here. After all, his own endnotes reveal a heavy reliance on Shelton's archives; Dylan is notably absent from the acknowledgments in Positively 4th Street.
Shelton was tangled up in his material; Howard Sounes, by contrast, hovers above his in Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan--which came out this spring in time to commemorate Dylan's 60th birthday. Sounes's bird's-eye view makes for a detailed, cohesive account, but his voice is distant and book- reportish. He says that when Dylan was young, his mom "helped [him] make friends by organizing enjoyable parties for him"; that in addition to Dylan's teen idol James Dean, Elvis was "another very exciting figure"; that Dylan's early years "were filled with remarkable achievements as he wrote songs with fecundity, recorded extraordinary albums, and regularly gave brilliant concerts."
Sounes gives us the scoop on Dylan's personal life, particularly his formerly secret marriage in 1986 to singer Carolyn Dennis. But when it comes to the music--not just Dylan's, but everyone's--the analysis is shallow and at times forced. To Sounes's credit, he's done an impressive amount of legwork. And he clearly holds Dylan in high regard. (His goal is to convey "the full grandeur of Bob Dylan's artistic achievement" as well as "the true life of this fascinating and elusive man.") Yet he doesn't approach Hajdu in richness, subtlety, or spirit.
Hajdu's choice to zero in on the intersection of four lives is a smart one. Exploring their connections with one another and with the folk crowd generally, he's able to step back and theorize a bit, without too much stretching. Folk's "rural vernacular music," Hajdu writes, "put a premium on naturalness and authenticity during a boom in man-made materials, especially plastics." College students--contemporaries of Hajdu's central characters and certainly their largest audience--were drawn to coffeehouses much as the Lost Generation's expatriates were to Paris. The attraction "was conspicuously counter-American at a high point in the United States' world prominence--espresso and existential doubt, no cocktails, no glitz, an appealing combination to postwar college students seeking their own generational identity." The perfect poster child for this sensibility was an uncosmetic, earnest, half-Mexican Joan Baez, whose soprano voice was purity incarnate. Add Dylan's artful lyrics, the Fari"as' inventive instrumentation, and attitude galore, and you have yourself a movement.
Another advantage of Hajdu's focus is that it makes his task manageable. For Shelton and Sounes, anyway, uncut Bob Dylan proves to be unwieldy. Especially when he was younger, Dylan served up little but lies and cryptic non sequiturs to the press. He's always valued his privacy--enough to beat up A.J. Weberman (according to Weberman, anyway), a self-proclaimed "Dylanologist" who is infamous for digging through his hero's garbage and hounding the artist about hidden meanings in his songs. And Dylan is as hard to pin down musically as he is personally: To the delight and frustration of anyone who has performed with him,he never does a song the same way twice. In short, he's a "mystery tramp," and his image as such is inseparable from his art.
In fact, image cultivation is a recurring theme in Hajdu's book. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Richard Fariña were quick studies in self-creation. They knew how to construct a persona and then revise it as needed, generating optimal buzz. In high school, Dylan was Bobby Zimmerman, a clean-cut rock-and-roller in red leather; he (briefly) came to the University of Minnesota with a tweed jacket, which he quickly replaced with "work clothes" and a cap that were in keeping with his fabricated past as a hobo and a carny; eventually, when he started mixing musical idioms, he was back in leather, black this time, and he let his hair go wild.
Fariña's tales were even taller than Dylan's. He said that he had a metal plate in his head, that he'd fought with the Irish Republican Army, that he'd run guns in Cuba. Most people were more charmed than annoyed by his bullshit and realized that he wasn't all show. Although not as calculating as her husband or her sister Joan, even Mimi Baez Fariña played a couple of roles: the ethereal complement to Fariña's vivacity, the give to his take.
Presented as a package deal, these four are a logical coda to the literary Beat Generation. They prized nonconformity in politics and spontaneity in art; they thrived individually as well as collaboratively. And as Hajdu demonstrates, their relationships with one another had a tremendous effect on their creative output.
Still, though Positively 4th Street is very much about a group, it's named after an individual's work--a song that Hajdu calls "Bob Dylan's valedictory to the Greenwich Village scene." It's tempting to see Hajdu's title as a gesture of favoritism, but that wouldn't be quite right. He's careful to give equal time and treatment to each artist. More likely, the titular nod to Dylan is quite literal: In lyrics and in life, Dylan bade farewell to his roots and moved on to completely new aesthetic territory. The Baez sisters didn't, and Fariña died before he could try. Dylan didn't just use folk; he survived it.
