Rating: 
Summary: Positively Don't Bother
Review: "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times..." reads like a hatchet-job on Dylan and Baez; an ain't she sweet love poem to Mimi Baez-Farina; and tainted hagiography for Richard Farina. I don't think any of us in our callow youth would fare much better as personalities, the problem with this book is that Mr. Hajdu doesn't have much of a feeling for the art that came out despite the creepiness of the milieu. It's a problem he shares with Howard Sounes's "Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan." Both books rank as over-inflated tabloid fodder. As far as giving us a feeling for the Greenwich Village folk scene - well, we catch a whiff of its seedier aspects, but Mr. Hajdu hasn't been able to find much joy in it all. If you'd like to check out a well written, critical biography of the troubled and talented Bob Dylan, I'd suggest, "Behind the Shades: Take Two," by Clinton Heylin.
Rating: 
Summary: farina and dylan with the baez's
Review: a very specific subject of the relationship of joan and mimi baez with the two early loves of their lives during the 60's. an interesting book that details the rise of dylan in accordance with the already established career of joan baez and the disappointment she felt when he left her to move on by himself without her anymore.
Rating: 
Summary: If these facts are wrong, what about the rest of the book?
Review: Although it may be difficult to capture the sound of an era through the written word, Hajdu deserves some credit for trying. As a Farina fan, I looked forward to reading the book about 2 enigmatic characters from my misspent youth.That said, what can we say about a book that seems to have gotten by the fact checkers. Hajdu writes that Dylan was in a car traveling up Interstate 5 to the Monterey Folk Festival. In 1963, there was NO Interstate 5. He goes on to state that Dylan stopped at "Boulton" at Anderson's Split Pea Soup. The town is, in fact, Buellton, and it lies along Highway 101. These seem like easy facts to check--and Hajdu fills his book with incessant factoids down to what one character or another had to eat at a certain meal! If he can't get the little facts straight, how can we depend on him to get the big picture straight? In the absence of any other book about Richard and Mimi Farina, this one will have to do for the time being. Best bet--check it out from the library.
Rating:
Summary: Highbrow folk gossip
Review: An interesting, gossipy book . . . but (though not to idolize Dylan or anything), can he possibly have been the monosyllabic bastard that Hajdu tries to portray him? In other words, this is an entertaining read, especially if you enjoy dirt on famous people, but I would take its character judgments with several quarts of salt. Also, as a long-time dulcimer player, I resent Hajdu's dismissal of Richard Farina's musicianship because that's "all" he played. It's not as easy as all that!
Rating: 
Summary: THE NOSTALGIC, FREEDOM YEARS
Review: As a young woman coming of age in the 60's, I grew up in the era of flower children, coffee-houses, beatnik jazz, poetry, sit-in's, love-in's, protests, and the legendary folk music of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Those where the days of youth and splendor. "Positively 4th Street" is an in-depth look at the magic of the moment, the beat of the music, the Bohemian culture of the day, and the triumphs and tragedies of a unique breed of individuals breaking ground from Greenwich Village to Canada's west coast. Share the wild adventure, golden opportunities, steamy affairs, hot passion and stone cold deceit in the lives of four extremely gifted and talented people - Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. The music was, indeed, a sign of the times, and "the times they were a-changing." It was an unparalleled era when love, peace and individuality ruled supreme, and freedom was part of the traditional dream. Take a trip down memory lane back to this nostalgic era revisited through the pages of a well-written and fascinating book. "Positively 4th Street" is....positively the best!
Rating:
Summary: Positively ... inadequate?
Review: As one who joined the folk scene in the late 1960's, I was looking forward to learning what I had missed in the earlier part of the decade. Thus, I had high hopes for this book and I really wish I could give it more stars. (Perhaps 3 is a bit harsh, and it's closer to -- but less than -- 4). The book held my interest, but I always felt that I was getting more gossipy, superficial information than a real sense of how these four individuals waltzed through and impacted the 60's folk scene and the larger world. I.e., the author seems fixated on whether Joanie thought she was unattractive, Dick/Richard was on the make only to further his career, Bobbie was an opportunist --which leaves only Mimi unscathed -- but naive? Come on, there's more to life, history and respect for individuals than is offered here. (In retrospect, perhaps it is much closer to a 3 star book.) Sorry.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Insight
Review: Author David Haju has done an excellent job in painting a picture of the Greenwich folk scene in its reality. Hajdu removes the halo and idealism from this time period while still showing extreme reverence for the music of the time. This is a page turner and is very easy to read. Despite what some may say about the tabloid - ish nature of the book, these instances rather reveal a more intimate and fuller picture of what came to define a generation.
Rating:
Summary: a riveting look at a vital cultural moment
Review: David Hajdu deserves a National Book Award if for no other reason than that he was able to interview Thomas Pynchon AND Fred Neil -- two of three of America's most reclusive creative artists (J. D. Salinger being the third, of course). He seems to have talked with nearly everybody who played a role, however marginal, in the 1960s folk scare. He tells a mesmerizing, soap-operatic tale of four interweaving lives played out against the backdrop of a particularly vital moment in our country's cultural history. Though Hajdu is in no sense a debunker, only Mimi Baez Farina emerges mostly unscathed here. The other three come across, in varying degrees (Joan Baez the least, relatively speaking), as narcissists and opportunists, an impression left even after Hajdu's perhaps too-generous concluding chapter. Dylan in particular is given to jaw-dropping fits of odious conduct, though this is hardly news. Even would-be hagiographers (of whom Hajdu, though certainly a compassionate observer, is not one) struggle with longstanding reports of bad Dylan behavior, especially in the early years of his international stardom. Dylan had the dubious fortune of becoming a great artist before he became a grown-up. Still, as with all of his other biographers, Hajdu's Dylan remains as inscrutable as ever. The nearly forgotten Richard Farina, the real star of the book, is more approachable, more human, more fun: a personable, self-absorbed man on the make -- one is reminded of Melville's phrase "one eye on the cosmos, the other on the main chance" -- and canny manipulator with genuine gifts, a superior literary stylist to Dylan, but not in Dylan's class as a songwriter. Then, however, who is? Hajdu's splendid book, the finest so far on the folk revival, led me back to Mimi and Richard Farina's Vanguard recordings, which proved better than I had remembered them from my last hearing maybe 25 years ago. If Richard was not a musical genius of Dylanesque proportions, he was a more focused, disciplined craftsman. His most successful songs (for example the brilliant "Birmingham Sunday") stand up remarkably well. Mimi was his perfect musical partner, possessed of an appealing voice and technical skills her husband was unable to master before his tragic early death. Hajdu writes interestingly of Richard's determination to create a "boogie poetry" -- what would become known as folk-rock -- before the idea ever occurred to Dylan. Phrased that way, the idea sounds more original than it may have been. Rockabilly singers in the mid- to late 1950s had already wedded folk and bluegrass songs to stripped-down blues rhythms. Folk-rock was well nigh inescapable. As the revival began to lose its creative and commercial force, it was the only logical place to go, and it would have gone there even if Dylan and Farina had never existed. But happily, they did, and Hajdu helps us appreciate anew the wise and thrilling songs these decidedly imperfect human beings brought into the world.
Rating:
Summary: Positively Entertaining
Review: Entertaining and interesting. I'd recommend it for people looking for a good story, people interested in the 50's and 60's or music aficianados, especially fans of Dylan and Baez.
Rating:
Summary: A Madonna but No angel
Review: Four young people, uncertain and unshaped burst onto the folk scene and gave birth to a revolutionary musical age. The ephemeral, Baez sisters, the Byronesque Richard Farina and the anxious, midwestern adolescent, Bob Dylan, attained a status and sound far beyond their own, and others' expectations. Their story includes tragedy, betrayal and lays the social and musical impetus that would reverberate throughout the second half of the twentieth century. For two of the four; their careers would extend into the milennium and become headings in the history of American music and social activism.
Joan Baez, we read in David Hadju's "Positively Fourth Street," was drawn to the Peace movement legitimately. Through her early experiences in Quaker meetings, she pursued the concept of passivism in her politics and her relationships, particularly with her younger, prettier sister, Mimi. Baez' life reads less liberated than her image but most lives of women of her era, and well beyond, do. Mimi, suffering dyslexia, and the status of the younger child, sought recognition beyond Joan, but that was not to be. She become the wife of the self-promoting and wayward Richard Farina, who died in a motorcycle accident, in tandem with Dylan, who survived. These four were incestuous, and, as with many who embraced free love experimentation, were more often victims of this 'liberation' than celebrants. The cost to women, was far greater. Joan's fame came early and some may say, she lingered overlong in a style that had outlived itself. Robert Zimmerman, whom she endorsed in the music scene and in the Greenwich Village culture, entered the scene as an awkward, obsessed and undistinguished adolescent. He came from the Middle West on a pilgrimage to the bedside of Woody Guthrie, his suffering idol. Fellow artists in the Village ridiculed Dylan whom they said imitated the twitching and tics of his mentor. Later, he was accused of stealing his music as well. All in all, the early Dylan, whose name was originally taken from Matt Dillon, of the TV show Gunsmoke, and not, as he would later state, from the iconoclastic Dylan Thomas, rebel-lord of that period in the Village. Embarassed by his comfortable middle class, Jewish background, Dylan painted a more romantic past; part Native American, and devoid of the bourgeois elements of a furniture merchant's family. Even later in life, Dylan tried to obscure his past, claiming that he never knew what a suburb was, how his youth was spent without such impedimenta. Once Dylan gained entry into the folk establishment, it appeared that much of the music was handed to him. What was not freely given, he often appropriated for himself. He copied and reworked but the outcome, the voice, the anger, was purely, irrevocably his own. It came as much from his hunger as from his self-loathing and his brilliance. He was also a product and ultimately leading spokesman of his time. In his name, compounded of a prescience that spoke to a generation pulling apart like none of its predecessors, was the recklessness and spiritual conflicts of the end of the modern and beginnings of the postmodern era.
Joan Baez, funnier than her image, endorsed Dylan, and loved him. His ultimate response was to be cruel and derisive. Once he had attained some stature, he threw off the pacifist, resistance yoke and traveled into a far more country and rock and roll blend that became the roots of myriad forms and eventually a revolution.
This book was well-researched and sensitively drawn. I doubt anyone harbored any ideal of Dylan as an ideal mate, and his detractors, Dave van Ronk and the others whom he idealized, and then took advantage of, do not and could not diminish his status and contributions. Most musicians borrow and blend, but none can match the robust opus of Dylan, nor do they try. His talent, his timing and combustion of his ambition, moved the sound of a society. Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, and many other women, saw in him a manchild in need of protection. He took it, and then tired of it. Those men, always end up ingrates, and Dylan was that and more.
The music is not the subject of this story, but a secondary theme. For fans of Baez, Dylan or any combination of music enthusiasts, it is a quick and worthwhile read.
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