Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina

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Confirmed baby boomers will know instantly that this book borrows its title from a 1965 Bob Dylan song. The book covers the same combustible period, a time when Dylan snapped into the lives of other future counterculture heroes. Billy Strayhorn biographer David Hadju threads his narrative through the heady interactions of Dylan, singer Joan Baez, her mysterious bohemian sister, Mimi, and moody novelist Richard Fariña. Around the fringes of this engaging icon bio are Greenwich Village eccentrics and a California scribbler named Tom Pynchon.

New York Times

A hauntingly evocative blend of biography, musicology and pop cultural history...[David Hajdu]...has discovered that within every movement, however pure, there is a healthy whiff of soap opera to be found.

Janet Maslin

[With this] hauntingly evocative blend of biography, musicology and pop cultural history, it is as if David Hajdu has struck a tuning fork and summoned the spirit of the folk-singing 1960's all over again.
— New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Sometimes, gifted people intersect at the perfect moment and spark a cultural movement. According to acclaimed biographer Hajdu (Lush Life), Joan and Mimi Baez, Dylan and Fariña were of that brand of fated genius, and via romantic and creative trysts, they invented 1960s folk and its initially maligned offshoot, folk rock. But their convergence hardly emblematizes the free-loving media version of the 1960s. Egos especially Joan Baez's and Dylan's clashed, jealousies flared, romance was strategic. Hajdu does not dwell on Dylan's thoughtless, well-documented breakup with Joan Baez after riding to fame on her flowing skirts. Instead, he spotlights Joan's younger sister, Mimi, a skilled guitarist in her own right, and her husband, novelist-musician Fariña. After divorcing leading folkster Carolyn Hester, the disarmingly groovy Fariña captivated teenage Mimi via love letters and, but for his untimely death, might have pursued Joan. Though Fariña comes off as more opportunistic than Dylan, Hajdu compellingly asserts that Fariña, not Dylan, invented folk rock and provided fodder for Dylan's trademark sensibilities. Hajdu provides a skillfully wrought, honest portrait that neither sentimentalizes nor slams the countercultural heyday. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

With the explosive early 1960s folk revival as backdrop, Hajdu (Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn) entertainingly recounts this downright Shakespearean tale of Folk Queen Joan Baez falling for the Ass, Bob Dylan. Meanwhile, Joan's younger sister, Mimi, succumbs to the spell of the charming writer Richard Fariña, and the two become a highly regarded folk-singing duo in their own right. Little does Mimi suspect that she is a convenient way for Richard to get closer to Joan. Tragedy strikes the foursome as Dylan dumps Baez once his fame eclipses hers, and Fariña is killed in a motorcycle accident on Mimi's 21st birthday, two days after the publication of his first novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Though Dylan and Baez will sell this book, the real star is the colorful but controlling rogue, Fariña, whose star was swiftly rising at the time of his death. Hajdu pulled off a coup in winning the participation of reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was a close friend of Fariña's. Recommended for Dylan fans and enthusiasts of the 1960s folk revival. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]--Lloyd Jansen, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

In Hajdu's biography of an art form, in the early 1960s the lives of sisters Joan and Mimi Baez intersected with those of Bob Dylan and the novelist Richard Farina; in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, the four charismatic artists and activists drew in a generation as they helped turn folk music from a quaint tradition into the soundtrack of their era. Hajdu, who is also a biographer of jazzman Billy Strayhorn, conducted several hundred new interviews to build his account of the quartet's complex relationships and rise to pop stardom. In a sad footnote, Mimi (who married Richard Farina at age 17) died of cancer in July 2001, not long after Hajdu's book was published. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Overweening ambition drives this insightful story of the 1950s folk music revival that anticipates the arrival of the 1960s counterculture. By the end of the 1950s, American folk music (by such performers as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie) had established a small but loyal following. Entertainment Weekly editor Hajdu (Lush Life) believes that young people became interested in folk because of "its antihero mythos—a sense of the music as the property of outcasts." College students who frequented the coffeehouses where folk began to flourish "were seeking something anti-intellectual" and would-be performers (including the Baez sisters, Richard Fariña, and Bob Dylan) flocked to the music because of its simple (and anti-commercial) approach. The charismatic Fariña was a promising writer who married folk singer Carolyn Hester and tried to hitch his wagon to her star (with little success), whereas Joan Baez (the "virgin princess") haunted the Greenwich Village coffeehouses on 4th Street, shamelessly stole other singers' material, and went on to fame. Mimi Baez coveted—and never came anywhere near—her sister Joan's success. And Dylan (who came to New York in search of direction and found his model in Woody Guthrie) got his big break from Joan, who fell in love with him. Although the naked ambition of each these characters presents an unedifying spectacle throughout, Hadju saves his censure for Dylan, writing that the "irony of Robert Zimmerman's metamorphosis into Bob Dylan lies in the application of so much elusion and artifice in the name of truth and authenticity." Even so, Dylan appears more deluded than mendacious—a man who hid his identity because he was more confused than his audience about who he was. A strong and vivid portrait of some remarkable characters—and one that manages against the odds to get to the people behind the egos.