Positively 4th Street
Tony,
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StumbleUponWell, thank you. I can still manage a few serviceable hours each day, sometimes, provided I get my nap.
We seem to be in general agreement about the Dylan-Fariña relationship. It fairly pulsates with dramatic potential. Two gifted young men, thrown together because of their lovers, charismatic in very different ways, consumed by competitiveness and ambition and the egotism that often accompanies ambition, eyeing each other's women covetously and eyeing each other's talent equally covetously, and circling each other suspiciously ... and yet, for all their mutual mistrust, also genuinely fond of each other. I'm not sure I see it as a Henry James novel, but it sure would make a superb Woody Allen film, one in the tradition of Hannah and Her Sisters. I suspect that, had Fariña lived, the way their relationship played out over the years would have engaged us all.
Back in the 1970s, a former police reporter named Anthony Scaduto published an intermittently interesting biography of Dylan. (It's going to be reissued in October, presumably with new material added.) I read it when it first appeared and haven't looked at it since, but I still recall two anecdotes from it (you know how it is with us crocks; the olden days seem so much clearer to us than what happened five minutes ago), anecdotes that seem relevant to our current discussion.
The first concerns a 1950s high-school talent show in Hibbing, Minn., in which the teen-age Bobby Zimmerman, performing at the piano, sang a couple of Little Richard numbers. Those present at the time later told Scaduto that the young Dylan made a god-awful noise and embarrassed himself and everybody else, and that isn't hard to believe. But the very fact he did it suggests something about his early musical alliances. When he issued Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, he wasn't repudiating his roots at all; he was, rather, doing exactly what the title of the album suggests. Rock was his initial and most authentic enthusiasm. As Fariña says (now it's my turn to complete a quotation you've cited in your posting), "Some of us had been listening to AM radio for a number of years." Dylan appears to have been listening to it his entire sentient life.
The second concerns an evening at some Village coffee house, in which a group of young folk singers, Dylan included, were sitting around a table schmoozing. One of the people present mentioned that Ramblin' Jack Elliott was actually the son of a Jewish dentist from Brooklyn and that his given name was Elliott Adnopoz. Apparently, when Dylan heard this, he began to laugh hysterically and couldn't stop, finally actually collapsing off his chair and under the table in helpless hilarity. We don't hear many instances of Dylan laughing. His reaction to this news suggests, it's fair to speculate, some deep-rooted and deeply ambivalent feelings about his own origins. And Hajdu's book adds to the significance of the anecdote; he tells us that, when the news of Dylan's own Jewishness became public (in a Newsweek article Hajdu sees fit to characterize as "an exposé"), he went into virtual seclusion for a number of weeks, refusing to talk to the press and even canceling a planned concert tour with Richard Fariña.
All those lies Dylan told, and all that self-mythologizing--all the bullshit--must have come out of some profound misgivings about himself. As, it seems likely, have all his subsequent changes of identity. Some of which have appeared, along the way, bafflingly wrong-headed and misguided. But maybe even his most perverse choices have served his art. Perhaps the words James Joyce put in the mouth of Stephen Dedalus are right: "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." The young Dedalus was talking about Shakespeare, but his observation may be even more applicable to the mysterious maddening figure who transformed the very nature of popular song. If only because the latter's errors have been more numerous and more public.
It's been great to revisit this period and some of its most exciting music with you. Of course, it's true that, as you've had occasion to point out several times, I have several years on you, and therefore I can remember the period first-hand and you can't, but that discrepancy may not mean much. Because after all--everybody sing!--I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
All best,
Erik
This week, Slate's Book Clubbers assess David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña. Click here for an explanation of our format and here to buy the book. 
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Robert Duncan reminisces about GreenwichVillage in the 60s here, and Mr Jones argues about "Idiot Wind" here. There were a number of posts from readers who couldn't see the point of Dylan: Jack Baltimore's defense is here, while the Fray team (big Dylan fans, listening to his finest song while reading this Fray) thought the exchange below summed it up best:]
I have never fully grasped the level of adulation given by Baby Boomers to Bob Dylan... I'll admit he's written some fantastic songs and is particularly strong on lyrics, but still, I can't quite see how his status is so elevated above many other great songwriters over the years... Perhaps if I'd been there from day one and heard his music within the context of the times, maybe then I'd understand, but listening to his music from the perspective of someone my age, 32, my general assessment of Dylan would be: great songwriter, mediocre guitar player, terrible singer. No more, no less.
--John McKinzey
(To reply, click here.)
To John McKinzey:
Your bewilderment makes sense, and I mean that without any patronizing overtones. Relative to the last forty years, your assessment seems about right, to me. Dylan's been a fine working musician and excellent songwriter for decades. Try to imagine, though, what it was like to hear Dylan in the 60s, against the backdrop of what music was before him. You had 50s rockers, folkies, pop, and the as-yet-whitebread British invasion. Against any and all of that, listen to "Postively 4th Street" or "Like a Rollin' Stone." No one before wrote with such piercing humor, anger, wit, impiety, grit, verbal power, and musical drive all at once. Even Woody Guthrie lacked Dylan's lyrical, stylistic, and emotional range. Think of the lines, "I wish that for just one time/you could stand inside my shoes/ You'd know what a drag it is to see you." No one in popular music, to my knowledge--and to our knowledge at the time, though musicologists may dig up some oldie to refute this as a historical assertion--had spoken with such raw, direct venom about a break up. Dylan opened up whole new worlds--which musicians of the last forty years have gladly entered and made home. I can easily understand how someone who has grown up familiar with that terrain might not "get" how startling it was to first see it opened up for habitation.
--Tbob
(To reply, click here.)
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