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List Price: $17.00 | | Publisher: North Point Press
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Editorial Review:
When twenty-five-year-old Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was already recognized as a genius, a youth idol with an acid wit and a barbwire throat; and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark, was unquestionably the center of youth culture.In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu recounts the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular and enduring art form as the story of a colorful foursome: not only Dylan but also his part-time lover Joan Baez -- the first voice of the new generation; her sister Mimi -- beautiful, haunted, and an artist in her own right; and Mimi's husband, Richard Fariña, a comic novelist (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me) who invented the worldly-wise bohemian persona that Dylan adopted -- some say stole -- and made his own.A national bestseller in hardcover, acclaimed as "one of the best books about music in America" (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post), Positively 4th Street is that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s -- about how the decade and all that it is now associated with were created in a fit of collective inspiration, with an energy and creativity that David Hajdu has captured on the page as if for the first time.
Description of Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina:
David Hajdu (pronounced HAY-doo), the prizewinning author of the magisterial jazz biography Lush Life, now steam-cleans the legend of the lost folk generation in Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña. What a ripping read! It's like an invitation to the wildest party Greenwich Village ever saw. You feel swept up in the coffeehouse culture that transformed ordinary suburban kids into ragged, radiant avatars of a traditional yet bewilderingly new music. Hajdu's sociomusical analysis is as scholarly as (though less arty than) Greil Marcus's work; he deftly sketches the sources and evolving styles of his ambitious, rather calculating subjects, proving in the process that genius is not individual--it's rooted in a time and place. Hajdu says Dylan heisted many early tunes (e.g., "Maggie's Farm" from Pete Seeger's "Down on Penny's Farm"): "Dylan [told] a radio interviewer that he felt as if his music had always existed and he just wrote it down ... [in fact], much of his early work had existed as other writers' melodies, chord structures, or thematic ideas." But Dylan and company made it all their own, and Hajdu vividly evokes the scenes they made.
Positively 4th Street is very much a group portrait. When something amazing happens, Hajdu puts you right there. The unknown Baez barefoot in the rain, bedazzling the Newport Jazz Festival and becoming immortal overnight. The irresistibly irresponsible Fariña talking his folk-star wife out of shooting him dead with his own pistol. The "little spastic gnome" Dylan transmogrified into greatness onstage, bashing Joan with the searing lyrics of "She Belongs to Me." A stoned Fariña advising Dylan to cynically hitch his wagon to Joan's rising star and "start a whole new genre. Poetry set to music, but not chamber music or beatnik jazz, man... poetry you can dance to."
The book is as delectably gossipy as Vanity Fair (one of Hajdu's employers). Richard married the exceedingly young beauty Mimi and helmed their career, but he might have dumped her for big sister Joan, whose madcap humor and verbal wit harmonized with his--except that he ineptly killed himself on a motorcycle first. Bob mumblingly courted both sisters, but when he cruelly taunted the insecure Joan, Mimi yanked his hair back until he cried. The account of Bob and Joan's musical-erotic passion is first-rate music history and uproarious soap opera. Hajdu's research is prodigious--even Fariña's close chum Thomas Pynchon granted interviews--and his anecdotes are often off-the-cuff funny: "[Rock manager Albert Grossman] was easy to deal with.... It wasn't till maybe two days after you would see Albert that you'd realize your underwear had been stolen." Full disclosure: Hajdu was one of my long-ago bosses at Entertainment Weekly, but that's certainly not why I heartily endorse this book. It's scholarship with a human face, akin to "poetry you can dance to." --Tim Appelo
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina Reviews:
Winning the Hearts of the Baez Sisters . . . and Some Folk Music History 
2008-07-01 - Did you ever go to a coffee house to hear folk music? Did you buy the early folk albums put out by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan? Did you ever want to go to the Newport Folk Festival? This book's for you, and you'll recall those heady days with joy.
Those who are looking for a history of folk music (or how it exploded into the popular culture), will find plenty of references, but the spotlight is on four people: Joan and Mimi Baez, Bob Dylan, and Richard Fariña. If you want to know more about the music, this isn't the book for you. If you relate to the social protest aspects of folk music, you'll find this book to be mostly looking elsewhere. If you are a huge fan of these performers, you may be disappointed to find that author David Hajdu isn't too impressed with his subjects.
For my taste, the book took on a little too much of the flavor of how young performers become stars . . . with A Star Is Born (any of the movie versions based on that theme) as a subtext. Ho hum. Who cares?
Bob Dylan and Richard Fariña are described as being people who would climb over their grandmothers to advance a career. I didn't really need to know that. Sometimes the gossipy approach to public figures can go too far: I think this one did.
The book's redeeming quality is that Mimi Baez and Richard Fariña are interesting people, and this book added a lot of information about them that I didn't know.
If ever a book cried out to have a companion CD with some of the music on it, this one did. Alas, I didn't see one.
Positively hard times
2008-04-08 - Those were hard times. Folk music fed on the Beat generation, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, mixed in the ferment of the times (drugs and sex are a potent brew). Some were nearly-instant celebrities in very small communities, and two become immense stars: Joan Baez first, who then supported the young Dylan, by this reading. While Hajdu seems biased toward the Baez family and too hard on Dylan, it appears to me that both got as good as they gave. They both used each other for what they needed. Dylan moved on, Baez didn't (couldn't?).
By Hajdu's account, the 1965 British tour was as bad as film maker Pennepacker documented it in "Don't Look Back". Driven by fan demands, Albert Grossman, drugs, and hangers-on of all stripes wanting to touch the hem of Dylan the arrogant master, Dylan physically and mentally crashed and burned during that tour, to the point that the fabled motorcycle crash shortly afterward saved Dylan's life by some accounts, including his own.
The celebrity machine driven by the incredible confluence of influences of the era would splinter the Beatles fame and lives in short time afterward, as it did Dylan's. That he survived, as an individual under those pressures, is notable; that he made and remade his music and philosophy several times over again for the next 40 years is remarkable.
Our prophets and poets may not be saints.
I gave this book as a gift 
2008-01-20 - I gave this book as a gift to a friend. He apears to love the prospect of reading it, though he hasn't as yet. The service, however, was just wonderful, and I received the package sooner than I expected. I will use Amazon again and again . . .
Elaine Mahin
Ballad of some thin men
2007-10-24 - It takes a great biography to both read like fiction and create enough historical specifics to truly adjust your mindset to the setting at hand. That's how I felt in Positively 4th Street - that I was amongst the atmosphere that treated folk music in the 1960's as if it were current pop music, the stuff of teen obsession and high celebrity. Following the folk scene that turned Joan Baez and later Bob Dylan into major celebrities, David Hajdu's endlessly thorough reporting unearths enough letters, charts, documents, and real conversations to truly present the 60's air of revolution and experimentation, and for a music fan like myself for whom the 60's are pure myth, this is an incredible accomplishment. It's fascinating to discover the true extent to which Joan Baez made Bob Dylan into a phenomenon, and though the post-stardom narcissism of Dylan is well documented, Hajdu presents that personality with such scrapbook authenticity that it's like the unveiling of an ego at its purest. The stories alone astonish (Dylan sitting on a wood floor surrounded by a pile of ripped up newspaper clippings to write Bringing It All Back Home, the protective chokehold Richard Fariña held on Mimi Baez even as he obsessed over Joan's every move), but collectively they're vivid, page-turning examples of the way forces that can change the world can tear individuals apart. As a music lover who, I thought, was well informed, I didn't know the fate of Richard Fariña, or his influence over the time - for people like me, his story is identical to great fiction. His story is ripe for fictionalization, but the credit for that is with Hajdu, whose straightforward, detail-heavy telling is a masterwork of characterization so perfect it can only be nonfiction.
Must Read
2007-04-11 - I was reading this book while filming a movie on Bob Dylan this summer-I lost the copy before I was finished but had to buy it again to see how it ends-really a fascinating insight on the whole West Village Folk music scene of the 1960's.
