Positively 4th Street

By: David Hajdu

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Positively 4th Street is a mesmerizing account of how four young people (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina) gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s.

The story of the transformation of folk music from antiquarian pursuit to era-defining art form has never fully been told. Hajdu, whose biography of Billy Strayhorn set a new standard for books about popular music, tells it as the story of a colorful foursome who were drawn together in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and inspired a generation to gather around them.

Even before they became lovers in 1963, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were seen as the reigning king and queen of folk music; but their songs and their public images grew out of their association with Joan's younger sister, Mimi, beautiful, haunted, a musician in her own right, and Richard Farina, the roguish, charming novelist Mimi married when she was 17. In Hajdu's candid, often intimate account (based on several hundred new interviews), their rise from scruffy coffeehouse folksingers to pop stars comes about through their complex personal relationships, as the young Dylan courts the famous Joan to further his career, Farina woos Mimi while looking longingly on her older sister, and Farina's friend Thomas Pynchon keeps an eye on their amours from afar.

Positively 4th Street is that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s: the story of how some of the greatest American popular music arose out of the lives of four gifted and charismatic figures.

©2001 David Hajdu (P)2002 Blackstone Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A hauntingly evocative blend of biography, musicology, and pop cultural history." (The New York Times)
"One of the finest pop music bios." (Booklist)

Frustrating

I couldn’t finish it. The reader if frustrating and the pace very slow. I had to speed up the reading speed to get it to sound normal.

The story was well written. I enjoyed the detailed description of the time and places.

Dislike the reader's reading in voices approximating characters in the book. It took away from the story and descriptions.

Great stuff!

For fans of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez this is a must. I first heard Dylan at school in 1966 in South Africa when we put on George Bernard Shaw's Arms And The Man and a teacher used Masters Of War as the main theme.
From their I got on to Baez and it opened a whole new world of music for me.
In January 1973 I was lucky enough to see Mimi performing at a coffeehouse in San Francisco with Hoyt Axton and it turned into one of my all time favourite evenings as Joan turned up. She had just returned from a concert tour in Japan.
She a Mimi sang together, performing In The Quiet Morning, written by Mimi about Janis Joplin.
Listen to this book. It opens up a whole new dimension on some of the greatest folk artists of all time.

Page Turner…awesome

Well read, well written piece. You don’t know Dylan or Baez till you’ve read this, and real story is much more interesting than the mythology. I found narration outstanding, thank you!

Best music-culture book I've ever experienced.

Gripping, exhaustively researched and masterful. Simply a tour de force. I'd read The Ten-Cent Plague, and was dazzled, but this was something else altogether...