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Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariņa and Richard Fariņa by David Hajdu; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 328 pages; $25.00.
Centering around Greenwich Village and the Newport Folk Festival, the folk music scene was as important for its political aspirations as for its musical contributions. Dylan, of course, is a towering figure; second only to the Beatles in the way that he influenced both music and society in the 1960's and beyond. (In recent years Dylan won both a Grammy and an Oscar, reflections of his enduring artistry.) While Joan Baez is second to Dylan as a poet and an artist, she is a better singer and a more committed activist. In fact, with the possible exception of Allen Ginsberg, no modern American poet has been as involved in so many different movements as Baez. On the other hand, the Fariņas are remembered, if at all, for their link to Dylan and Baez. Positively 4th Street, if it does anything, will renew public interest in the long-ignored Fariņas, whose books and records are, incredibly enough, still in print.
In fact, Dylan comes across in this book as a selfish, hateful human being, which is no surprise to anyone except for those who still think that Dylan can do no wrong. All four principals were narcissists always on the lookout for Number One, certainly not the nurturing world savers that folk music myth would have us believe. There is, of course, more to the folk music world than Baez, Dylan and the two Fariņas, but Hajdu deliberately ignores the rest for the sake of his four principals. Folk music itself was on its way out by 1964, when the Beatles arrived on the scene and blew everything else away. Dylan realized it, which is why he "went electric" -- repudiating folk in favor of rock -- at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Hajdu takes time to expose the "myth" of Newport -- Dylan wasn't booed by outraged folkies, as legend has us believe -- which really doesn't matter since Dylan did believe he was being booed. In any case, the mid-sixties were also pivotal years for Joan Baez, whose growing involvement in the antiwar movement made her a greater person but a lesser musician. Everyone's lives turned in 1966 when both Bob Dylan and Richard Fariņa were involved in motorcycle accidents. Fariņa died and was quickly forgotten. Dylan survived and became the stuff of legends. Positively 4th Street is named after a Bob Dylan song that effectively dismissed and repudiated a folk music scene that had nurtured him and made him famous. As research for his book, Hajdu interviewed virtually all of the surviving players, including the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, who was Richard Fariņa's good friend and best man.
The only one Hajdu could not
interview was Dylan, which doesn't help Dylan much as far as this book is
concerned. But there are much better biographies of Dylan, the most recent
one being Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes. It's
better that we take Positively 4th Street for what it is: the story of
several years in the lives of four talented people who interacted with one
another on their way to creating some very good music.
On July 18th Mimi Baez Fariņa died after a two-year battle with cancer. She was 56. Since Richard Fariņa died, the two Baez sisters ended their sibling rivalry and became close friends, singing together and working together for what they both believed in. "Mimi filled empty souls with hope and song," said Joan Baez after the death of her sister. "She held the aged and forgotten in her light. She reminded prisoners that they were human beings with names and not just numbers." Of the four principals in Positively 4th Street, Mimi Baez Fariņa was the one who was the most vulnerable and the most human, and the one that I would have liked to have known. Now, of course, it is too late.
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David Hajdu (pronounced HAY-doo) is the author of Lush Life,
the acclaimed biography of Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's, openly-gay
collaborator. Positively 4th Street, Hajdu's latest slice of music history,
is the group history of four of the most enigmatic figures in the 1960's folk
music: Joan Baez, her younger sister Mimi Baez Fariņa, Mimi's first husband
Richard Fariņa and Joan's erstwhile lover Robert Zimmerman, who as Bob Dylan
revolutionized the music world. The result is like a VH-1 Behind the Music
special, an entertaining story that doesn't say much about the art and craft
of making music but too much about the private lives of the people who make
the music.
Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer who lives in South Florida with
his domestic partner. He can be reached at