Positively 4th Street

Dear Erik,

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You're right about the complicated thoughts and conflicting emotions--within us and also, I suspect between us. We may feel the same, but we see it from different points ... of view. For many in your generation, Dylan was the antidote to Pete Seeger. (More generally and germanely, of course, he was the antidote to Pat Boone, but you know what I mean.) For me, Dylan was Pete Seeger--that is, he represented a mode of revolt that belonged to the generation before mine, which I regarded with envy and alienation. At some point, many years after the nursery school experience I alluded to yesterday, I was digging through my parents' LPs and came across The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding, and I think Blonde on Blonde (though that one may have been at a friend's house). The power of the music on those records--and on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Another Side, which I plucked from used-record-store bins in short order--can hardly have diminished in the decade and a half between your discovery of them and mine, but my experience of that music, for reasons implicit in your posting, was inflected by irony and ambivalence. How, for example, was I to parse the verse in "The Times They Are A-Changin' " that goes "Come mothers and fathers/ throughout the land/ and don't criticize what you can't understand/ your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/ your old road is rapidly aging"? On one hand, the lyrics are abstract enough to express a condition, more or less renewable for every generation to come of age in the United States in the 20^th century or adolescent revolt. But the song's context and its historical referents were also specific, and they belonged to my parents' (and your) experience, not mine. If my mother and father were, within the song's frame of reference, "sons and daughters" where did that leave me? Playing the record for them would hardly have pissed them off but would rather have elicited campfire tales about the march on Washington, the Kennedy assassination, the old folk clubs of Harvard Square. By the time I got to Harvard Square, looking for a whiff of the scene Hajdu so wryly evokes, all that was left was used record stores and a bunch of losers doing Bob Dylan imitations in front of Au Bon Pain. Same deal in Washington Square Park. I'm not complaining, by the way. My point is that specific generational experiences aren't enough to explain Dylan's continued appeal. His work, rather, makes room for anyone who encounters it. It's too strange, too self-enclosed, and comes from too many different sources to be used up the way most pop culture does. The Beatles are like this too. You (or I, at any rate) don't listen to Blonde on Blonde or Abbey Road and think about the '60s. I don't know what the hell the '60s are, and with every year I care less.

Which is to say that Oedipal aggression--hell, aggression of any kind, against all manner of specified and unspecified persons--is a renewable resource and a durable commodity. And one of the reasons Dylan has not dated is that he exploited his own gift, the birthright of any ambitious twentysomething, for grudge-holding. Once the political targets have faded into oblivion, what's left is that jolt of affect, something very different from the righteous indignation you get from Pete Seeger or Joan Baez: "I hope that you die, and your death will come soon," from the Cold War protest song "Masters of War," takes up a theme that returns 15 years later in the apolitical "Idiot Wind": "Someday you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes, blood on your saddle." What's thrilling about these lyrics--and the music in which they're embedded--is the sheer exuberant joy the singer takes in his own venom. They're the musical revenge of every nerdy misfit weirdo who ever felt ignored by the cool kids or misunderstood (oh but how he loves to be misunderstood) by his friends, rivals, and lovers.

Dylan must be the greatest put-down artist in music history. It's always amusing to speculate about the real-life target (Joan Baez? Lyndon Johnson? A clerk who was rude to him at a London hotel?), but much more fun to stand in front of the mirror and snarl along with "Positively 4^th Street" or "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" or "It Ain't Me, Babe" or "Like a Rolling Stone." It would be absurd to deny that part of the visceral charge comes from the undercurrent of misogyny that runs through these songs.

Of course, there are as many other sides of Bob Dylan as there are songs--there is the tender troubadour love poet, the goofball surrealist, the balladeer--and I am purposely limiting myself to songs from the period covered in Hajdu's book, a period that ended when Dylan was 25.

As I read this book and tried to imagine what these people must have been like, I kept thinking about how young they were. Mimi Baez married Richard Fariña when she was still a teen-ager and he was not much older (it was his second marriage). Joan Baez was on the cover of Newsweek at 22. I was listening to Dylan's first album the other day, and some of the recordings he made under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt to finesse his contractual obligations to Columbia, and I thought stuff like this sounded pretty callow. But the guy was 20, and to read Hajdu alongside Dylan's first seven albums is to marvel at how many literary and musical influences Dylan assimilated--Woody Guthrie, William Blake, Appalachian old-time music, blues, gospel, Child ballads, the Beats--and how quickly he did so. On top of his eclecticism there is his originality, and his unshakable sense of self-mastery.

I'd like to talk more about his curious alliance with Baez, the oddness of which, in terms of temperament, ideology, and musical style, is much remarked-upon in "Positively 4^th Street." An easy way to convey just how different they are is to listen to their versions (recorded many years apart, granted) or Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd." Here's Joan and here's Bob. It's the difference between over-singing and undersinging, piety and wit, performing a song and inhabiting it. It must have been strange to see them together.

And what about Richard Fariña, who shadows Dylan like a better-dressed, better-socialized doppelgänger? Is he due for a revival? Does Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, another touchstone of baby-boomer revolt (by, it should be pointed out, a non-baby boomer, just like all the other characters in Hajdu book), stand up after all these years?

And another question: How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?

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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