Positively 4th Street

Dear Erik,

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In another lifetime (one of toil and blood), I used to teach literature to college freshman. At term paper time, there would invariably be a handful of earnest essays that began with sentences like "John Keats was one of the finest poets of his time" or "William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language." I was always at a bit of a loss as to how to respond. The statements weren't exactly wrong, but they weren't exactly interesting either. And they seemed, coming from 18-year-olds who often read only what was assigned to them (if that), a bit overdone.

So in approaching this "Book Club," I'm anxious to avoid what seem to be the unavoidable tropes of Dylanology--the whole voice of his generation, great American poet trip. Which will be hard, because I love Bob Dylan, and have had his words and melodies floating around in my head since I first heard "Blowing in the Wind" performed by one of the teachers at my progressive nursery school. In recent months there has been a crescendo of Bobolatry. This year, Dylan turned 60, won an Academy Award, and has in consequence been the subject of almost as much high-toned cultural punditry in the glossies and the journals of opinion as The Sopranos. Like the mistral or the Santa Ana, this idiot wind has its cycles and seasons. Every few years, Dylan, who has, since his recovery from that 1966 motorcycle accident, been recording and touring pretty steadily, is announced to have come back, and his new album, whether it's Street Legal or Knocked out Loaded or Time out of Mind is hailed by some as his best in years. (Others, of course, will continue to insist that he'll never match Blood on the Tracks or John Wesley Harding or Blonde on Blonde.) Generalists--Alex Ross in The New Yorker a few years back, David Remnick this time around--will offer their thoughts on Dylan's place in our musical and cultural history, while specialists will grumble and grouse that the rest of us just don't get it. You know something is happening here, but you don't know what it is ... Dylan's paradoxes--his ability to attract both dilettantes and cultists, to be prolific and inscrutable, to occupy both the center of the culture and its margins--might be grist for our discussions over the next few days.

But let's start with David Hajdu's new book, which for the most part declines to make pronouncements on the significance of Dylan, and attempts the more interesting (as well as more difficult and labor-intensive) task of establishing some facts about the man and his early milieu. At its best, Positively 4^th Street offers a window into the folk music scene of the early '60s, into which Dylan, cloaked in enigmas of his own devising, insinuated himself, and which he used as the launching pad for his career. Dylan is one of four principle characters, a player in a quadrille that also features Joan Baez, her younger sister Mimi, and Richard Fariña, a novelist and folk singer who shared some of Dylan's talents--for using people, for making up all kinds of bullshit about himself, and for repaying adulation with indifference. Hajdu's take on these characters, while thoughtful and sympathetic, is hardly worshipful. Baez and Dylan especially come off as a pair of insufferable narcissists. Baez, in Hajdu's account, stole her early repertoire and style from one of her friends, and used to sit in the audience at other people's shows and sing along at the top of her lungs until she was invited on stage. Dylan never bathed, lived like a pig in other people's houses, and repaid Baez's kindness--she was, when they met, the biggest star in the folk firmament, and her early support helped win over skeptical audiences--by turning his back on her when she might have needed his support. It's easily done, you just pick anyone, and pretend that you never have met.

Hajdu writes in a mode of erudite gossip. He clearly knows a lot about music and musicians, though his home turf is jazz and standards rather than the recombinant strands of folk, country, blues, and rock that gave us Dylan and his myriad imitators. (Hajdu's allegiance to other musical traditions asserts itself at odd moments, as when he begins a section with a long paragraph about George Gershwin's move from New York to Beverly Hills, the relevance of which is that, about 25 years later, Joan Baez moved from Cambridge to Carmel.) I found the book absorbing, and I appreciated both Hajdu's low-key, sometimes sardonic, style and the doggedness of his reporting. I mean, the guy interviewed Thomas Pynchon (who was Fariña's college roommate and the best man at his wedding to Mimi Baez). Yes, it was by fax, but still.

I couldn't help but feel that something was missing. My frustration with the book might be summed up in a chorus from The Basement Tapes: "Odds and ends, odds and ends. Lost time is not found again." The period and the personalities, though meticulously documented, never quite came alive for me. I was also bothered by a creeping magazine-feature tone of windy generalization: "A fabled bohemia since Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman squabbled in its basement drinking halls, the Village had long been infamously tolerant of cultural adventurism, including folk music."

Yes, including folk music. We should do some of that here. Do you agree that, while Baez and the Fariñas offer a sweet (or strident) nostalgic glimpse at the period, Dylan's songs, even the topical ones, do not date? Why do you suppose that is? And what did you make of the fact that audiences were, to say the least, cool to Dylan when he first came on the scene. Since I came on the scene much later (I was born in the last year of Hajdu's narrative, 1966, the year one motorcycle crash killed Fariña and another nearly finished Dylan), I can't imagine what his music sounded like the first time.

Well, that's enough for now. Sometimes I need a dump truck, baby, to unload my head.

Best,
Tony

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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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