BOOK REVIEW-Positively 4th Street- David Hajdu

Positively 4th Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariňa by David Hajdu

When Mimi Fariňa died of cancer a few years ago, her passing scarcely caused a blip on the radar screen of American popular music. Though in the early days the more musically proficient of the two Baez sisters, Mimi was always the understated one. Celebrity is something that more often happens to those who want it badly enough, and unlike her sister, her husband, and the kid from Hibbing, all of whom yearned for the limelight, Mimi was content just to be a player. In classic little sister fashion , she was swept along first on the momentum of Joan's rise to folkie fame, then on the energy of her husband, the novelist and self conceived folk legend Richard Fariña. It is perhaps fitting that Mimi, in the years following the short history of the folk fad, lived a life of service for which she will be remembered fondly, if not notoriously.A beautiful human spirit, Mimi devoted 25 years to her Bread and Roses Foundation, providing quality musical inspiration for the sick, the homeless, and institutionalized members of society.

A biographical sketch of Mimi and her three companions during a few short years in the early 1960's before they became known as "THE SIXTIES" is the subject of this offering by David Hajdu who also wrote Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. In this book Hajdu skillfully deconstructs the relationships and explodes the myths of Dylan and Joan Baez, and introduces us to the lesser known but no less driven Richard Fariňa. We learn for example that Joan Baez lifted her whole act from the repertoire and style from a little known Cambridge folk singer named Debbie Green, explaining away the theft with the rationalization that Debbie Green wasn't going anywhere anyhow. Similarly, we are informed that Bob Dylan originally copped Woody Guthrie's homespun persona, but that he "did" Guthrie so poorly that he was pressured by his peers into reinventing himself, something he's been doing ever since.

The character of Richard Fariňa, whom we know so little about anyway, turns out to be the most interesting of the profiles. Fariňa, like Joan Baez and Dylan, is a self absorbed artist hell-bent on fame, and with enough innate talent to make it happen. Even more enigmatic than Dylan himself, Fariňa was prone to tall tales about his past and huge ambitions about his future. A competitive spirit pervaded everything these three egomaniacs attempted, and was part and parcel of the impact they had on popular music.

Hajdu succeeds mightily in articulating the relationships between these fab four of folkdom. The book is well researched, mostly through interviews and correspondence with colleagues of the four, and he is insightful and fair in the treatment of his subjects. Among the literally hundreds who contributed their recollections are folksinger Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Paxton, Odetta, and author Thomas Pynchon.

Musicologically this is a book that needed to be written, for it covers a brief yet significant period in popular music that influenced much of what was to come in the lyrical content and attitude of rock music in the sixties and beyond. The impact of Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Fariňa's on the music is a combination of politically aware (if sometimes naive) lyrics, and a rhythmic sensibility coming out of black rhythm and blues that suited the post cold war youth environment to a tee. Bob Dylan has been called the spokesman of his generation and even if we didn't always know what he was talking about, Viet Nam Era youth identified with his attitude and swagger. Joan Baez lent an air of earnestness and integrity to the youth culture; starstruck though she was, she really believed in the causes she championed. Richard Fariňa, with child-bride Mimi as his de facto musical director, created himself first as a novelist (and a good one at that), then as a folksinger whose fire burned brightly and burned out tragically in James Dean fashion. Fariña died in a motorcycle crash in 1966 at the height of his literary success with the novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me.

There is something utterly American in the tale of these four modern day troubadours. Like Elvis Presley a decade before, their collective story is a strange mix of talent and hype, of craft and craftiness, of art and show business. Ultimately Hajdu has succeeded in telling it.