‘Fourth Street’ Positively Fascinating

The revival of folk music and bohemian culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a crucial milestone in the development of contemporary rock music. The young generation was rebelling against the dark and stagnant feelings and atmosphere of the post-World War II era with their own messages of hope and casual simplicity–by returning to the unadorned, noncommercial and basic folk music style, they had found a mantra for living, as well.

Men, women, blacks, whites, socialites and poor college kids alike united under the musical hybrid of the folk movement. Folk music “gloried in the unique and the weird,” and its followers fit this description to a tee. Long-haired, homeless troubadours with flannel shirts, unwashed jeans, sandals and scratchy voices filled the cafes and crowded the street corners of the American folk hubs. Anyone could participate; the only requirement was an instrument, whether it be a hand-me-down Gibson or a so-so set of pipes. As folk icon Pete Seeger once declared, “Make your own music … We don’t need professional singers. We don’t need stars. You can sing.”

David Hajdu’s descriptive, enthralling account of the 1960’s folk scene, “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina,” follows the progression of folk music from a backwoods, basement sing-along to a national phenomenon that enhanced and reinvented rock-and-roll by detailing the relationship between his narrative’s four protagonists. Hajdu develops each character separately, only to pull them together in a competitive, supportive, quirky and erotic puzzle of sorts. Each of them finds his or her niche in the crazy, off-color folk settings however, as the book relocates itself from Cambridge to Greenwich Village to Carmel, California to London and back again.

Dylan (“a little spastic gnome”), Joan (“spirit of a child-queen, floating in off the moors”), Mimi (“the pretty one … she looked like an angel”), and Farina (“he was controlling … a wild, wonderful wildman”) all added their own colors to the folk revival.

Hajdu worked with and dissected a tangled web of over 100 new interviews (including the first interview conducted with Thomas Pynchon, a world-renowned author and close personal friend of Richard Farina) in the writing of “Positively Fourth Street.” He presents the basic facts surrounding the four main characters–Joan and Mimi were in constant sibling rivalry, Dylan was obsessed with business and making money, Farina courted and married 17-year-old Mimi when he was still married to folk star Carolyn Hester. Yet, Hajdu peppers these basic facts with first hand insight and anecdotes from his interviewees. The reader finds himself at the rain-drenched Newport Jazz Festival of 1959, where Joan Baez made her barefoot singing debut, or seated at a table in the small rental house in Carmel, California, decorated in modest daisies, where Farina and Mimi said their second wedding vows in 1964. For Hajdu, it is not enough to say that Farina was a roguish character with a penchant for falsehoods and self-promotion; instead, Hajdu introduces Farina onto the folk scene with a full paragraph presenting a cryptic, contradicting account of Farina’s childhood, pieced together from the stories he told his close friends and new acquaintances.

At times, Hajdu’s descriptions borderline on scandalous gossip; however, the real-life relationship between Dylan, Farina and the Baez sisters crossed that line constantly. The four are incessantly involved in a misshapen love and business quadrilateral: Bob has eyes for Mimi but uses Joan as a leg up to advance his career; Joan is madly in love with Dylan but suspects Farina may have a thing for her; and Farina is too wrapped up in his alcohol-saturated, self-absorbed universe to notice.

Hajdu treats the ongoing folk soap opera with sophistication. His research and attention to detail lend credibility to a world of subjectivity. In describing Dylan’s decision to “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival (the same festival that gave Joan her start six years earlier), he does an excellent job at dispelling the myths surrounding the historic event. Rock legend has it that Dylan was booed off the stage until he pacified the audience with a couple of his acoustic staples. In actuality, though the boos may be accurate by some accounts, many witnesses and friends insist that because the equipment at the festival was not constructed to support electric instruments, the audience and fellow performers were dismayed at the poor sound quality, and not by the icon’s revolutionary career move. As years pass, it becomes harder to discern musical folklore from actual fact, but Hajdu provides the reader with various viewpoints and perceptions in an effort to sharpen the blurred lines between myth and reality.

Hajdu’s narrative, unique in its execution and subject matter, focuses as much on the folk scene as it does on the four main players–almost subconsciously keeping their egos, especially Dylan’s and Joan’s, in check. While countless texts have been written about Dylan, a fair number about folk music in the 1960’s, and a few about the Baez sisters, Hajdu’s account is original in the way that it ties the people inseparably into the music and the times.

One unique aspect of this book is that it brings to light the tragically short life of Richard Farina. Though Farina’s name is not widely recognized, Hajdu suggests that Farina may have had an equal, if not greater, hand than Dylan and Baez did in the revival and progression of folk music and bohemian culture. In Farina, the reader discovers an often-controlling, bitingly confident thinker, writer, partier and, in a stretch of description, musician. Was it not Farina who gave Dylan the idea to “hook up” with Joan Baez as a strategic business move? Was it not Farina who revolutionized bohemian literature with his widely published short stories, poems and one novel (the release date was also Mimi’s twenty-first birthday and the day of his untimely death)? Though it was Dylan who played the James Dean character of folk, the roving wanderer who was good with women, short with words and certain to die an innocent, Farina assumed the role in an ironic twist of fate–wouldn’t that make a good Dylan song?

A light but wholly satiating read, this narrative will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates music in its various forms. By detailing and exposing some of folk and rock’s most prominent figures, Hajdu reduces them from idols to everyday people, thereby making their stories accessible to even the most novice music enthusiast. In tradition with the folk culture that Hajdu explores, he manifests his strength in his attention to detail, in his careful assimilation of various influences and sources, in his simplicity of logic and rhythm and in his emotional, real and sometimes comical descriptions.