Readers looking for a nostalgia trip — a sunny return visit to Greenwich Village in the early 1960s — will be surprised if not disappointed. David Hajdu is far too honest a writer to serve up sentimental pabulum.
Instead he has written a book about ambition and image-making, the central passage of which is to be found in his account of Bob Dylan’s “first major work of imagination — his own persona.”
Hajdu writes: “Performers had always changed their names and adopted professional images that diverged from their biographies.
Indeed, transformation has always been part of the American idea: in the New World, anyone can become a new person. The irony of Robert Zimmerman’s metamorphosis into Bob Dylan lies in the application of so much illusion and artifice in the name of truth and authenticity … Folk would accommodate [middle-class kids] and their ambitions, no matter who they really were, as long as they could create the illusion of artlessness, and Bob did so giftedly.”
So did Joan Baez, with whom Dylan had a prolonged affair that paid handsome dividends for his career, and so did Richard Fariña, who systematically — if not outright schemingly — “capitalised on his personal associations for self-advancement”. Though none was a child of privilege, all came from comfortable circumstances yet found it in their interests either to fictionalise their middle-class histories or ignore them. They reinvented themselves as faithful to folk music’s “antihero mythos — a sense of the music as the property of outcasts, drawn in part from the idiom’s romantic portrayal of bad men and underdogs, murderers hanged, lovers scorned, and in part from the mystique surrounding folk characters such as Woody Guthrie, the hobo roust-about, and Leadbelly, an ex-convict.”
Baez came first. She was still a teenager when, in 1958, she began singing in the coffeehouses that were springing up around Boston, but she had drive and purposefulness. Blessed with a distinctive voice, she quickly learned how to project “an air of regality or ethereality”; she also learned how to sing other singers’ songs, copying their arrangements, intonations and interpretations, and picking up a number of rivals, if not enemies, along the way.
But the shamelessness of her ambition was nothing compared with Fariña’s. He got to Cornell in the 1950s and quickly established a literary reputation. He “cultivated relationships with faculty members and fellow students who he thought could help realise his literary dreams”. Among the latter was Thomas Pynchon, who remained his friend; Pynchon’s contributions to this book are perceptive, affectionate and uniformly engaging.
Part of Fariña’s problem was that he had too many talents and didn’t seem to know which to develop. When, in 1963, he married Baez’s younger sister, Mimi, herself a gifted guitarist and singer, he veered off into a strange musical career of his own, but his real gift was for writing, as his only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, made plain.
Fariña died in a motorcycle accident days after the book came out. His death, like Buddy Holly’s and Jimmy Dean’s, was instantly romanticised, but it is difficult to become infatuated with the Fariña mythology after reading Hajdu’s account of his life. This is not to say Hajdu is unsympathetic to Fariña, rather that the evidence Hajdu presents tends to convict him on his own. As Fariña began to court Mimi Baez, her sister Joan saw him as “a glory-hungry bluebeard who had to be stopped”. Though she later revised that view, there seems ample reason to believe that Joan was the prize he actually had his eyes on.
Obviously the most accomplished of the four people at the centre of Hajdu’s tale is Dylan, and also the most enigmatic. Hajdu’s principal focus is on Dylan’s relationship with Baez. It seems to have been a singular mixture of personal affection, sexual attraction and mutual exploitation. Dylan was little known but ambitious when, in 1961, Fariña told him that Baez could be “your ticket, man”. Two years later the two appeared together at the Monterey Folk Festival in California, she invited him to visit her house nearby, and by that summer they were having an affair.
To what extent Dylan entered into it in Fariña’s spirit and to what extent genuine feelings were involved presumably never will be known. Dylan didn’t talk to Hajdu; and Baez, though she did, can speak only for herself.
All in all, not a pretty picture. Whether this orgy of backscratching, sabotaging and coattail-riding produced music and literature of enough merit to justify the means by which it was created and promoted is not the point of this book, or at least does not seem so to me.
Positively 4th Street is about the real world in which “art” often gets made, where cynicism and self-dramatisation are as commonplace as they are in the supposedly less exalted world that the rest of us inhabit. It is also a book about the self-delusion of the 1960s counter-culture, in which middle-class ambition and self-interest played at least as large a role as peace and love and flowers.