Positively 4th Street
Dear Tony--
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StumbleUponOne of the great moments in the lives of us baby boomers occurred the first time we played a Dylan record for our parents. It was sheer malicious pleasure to watch their faces fall when we insisted that, yes, no kidding, we really did believe this was terrific stuff. An irreversible declaration of independence, establishing beyond any doubt and any argument that the distance between our generation and theirs was now unbridgeable. That's why "The Times They Are A Changin' " was the only possible boomer anthem.
Which, as we learn from David Hajdu's book, is only fitting. Because one of the things it demonstrates, possibly without the author's even being aware of it--as you pointed out, interpretation isn't really his bailiwick--is the extent to which Dylan's entire career has been a string of quasi-Oedipal betrayals and repudiations. It's the impulse that gives his work its energy.
Hajdu's book, in fact, may be more provocative than it realizes. It chronicles a generational shift, a period when one generation of dissenters--the Old Left, the Beats, and the old folkies--gave way to a new generation with a new style of rebellion and a new approach to music. But since this change occurred within a counterculture, underground (subterranean?) one may fairly say, it wasn't visible to the outside world at the time, and its dynamics remain obscure even now. Hajdu goes some distance toward remedying this state of affairs. Had he made the theme more overt, he might have made a good book even better.
The shift didn't happen all at once or right away, of course. Joan Baez, after all, was a Pete Seeger protégé, and she and most of her contemporaries were at first content to ape their forebears, ape their style, their attitudes, and even their choice of repertoire. Their rebellion was against the conformity and conservatism of the Eisenhower years, not against their left-wing predecessors and mentors. And for a while, Dylan gave every sign of being part of that. (Hajdu seems to suggest this represented a careerist strategy on his part rather than authentic commitment, but there's no way to prove such a proposition, and he doesn't take it very far.) In any event, within a few years, he was throwing down the gauntlet: Here is "Subterranean Homesick Blues," one of the songs, personal, elusive, apolitical, amplified, and rock-inflected, that led to his being booed at the folk festival at Newport, led to Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax sputtering in fury backstage, and led Irwin Silber, editor of the folk music magazine Sing Out!, to chastise him in print: "You seem to be in a different kind of bag now, Bob--and I'm worried about it. I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people ... Your new songs seem to be inner-directed now, innerprobing, self-conscious ... Now, that's all okay--if that's the way you want it, Bob. But then you're a different Bob Dylan from the one we knew. The old one never wasted our precious time."
A Stalinist trying to sound like a hipster. The sheer fatuousness of the reaction provides retrospective justification for Dylan's revolt. But he didn't really need any justification; provoking such reactions would be like oxygen for Dylan.
In fact, his amplified set at Newport was just a warning shot. Once Dylan chose to go electric--once he decided he was a rock musician rather than a folk musician--one of his pleasures was precisely to stick his thumb in the eye of the folk scene, and for him, that scene was personified by his lover, Joan Baez. Many of the best (and not coincidentally, angriest) songs of that period are, I believe, addressed to her.
Why do I think Hajdu may have missed the essence of the story even while telling it, and telling it competently? Well, take a song like "Maggie's Farm." Hajdu seems to believe this is some sort of socialist anthem, a protest on behalf of abused labor. I think he misses the point completely. The name "Maggie"--usually associated with Joan Baez in Dylan's music--is an important clue. Maggie's farm doesn't represent some capitalist agrarian combine, but rather the nexus of lefties and folkies around Baez who think Dylan is their creature, who think his considerable talents exist solely to serve their purposes and do their bidding. Well, he isn't having any of it. He ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. This song, in other words, is Dylan's scornful fuck-you to those who had tried to co-opt him. And it's one among many.
I see I've barely begun. I haven't mentioned the Fariñas at all, and merely brushed lightly over Joan Baez. I'll try to cover some of that ground tomorrow. This is a book that elicits complicated thoughts and conflicted emotion. I'm curious to hear more of yours.
Best,
Erik
Slate cover photograph of Bob Dylan by Lee Celano/Reuters.
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.)
(6/13)