Positively 4th Street: the Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. By David Hajdu. Bloomsbury. 328pp, 16.99 in UK
As the world has heard, Bob Dylan turned 60 this year; so did Joan Baez, though we've heard less about that. Is there a purpose to be served by another book about the fabled icons, or about what is possibly the most documented decade of the last century? Can we credit the publisher's claim that this one is "that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s"? And even if it's true, does it much matter?
I didn't think so either, but this one really is different. It's not a personal memoir that tells more about the biographer than anyone else, nor a tribute, nor an exposΘ; and it's certainly not the journalist's standby, the cut-and-paste job from the clippings.
Hajdu met his subjects nearly 40 years ago, and he quotes them from his own interviews. Many first-hand sources co-operated in producing this work, particularly Joan's sister, Mimi. True disciples will want to know that most of the quotes from Bob Dylan are from Robert Shelton's interviews with him, material published unaltered here for the first time.
This kind of intimate and detailed research, written this well, draws you so far into the story that you read it as a novel; as if you were present, meeting the central characters on the stairway, discussing them with the neighbours, peering at them in smoky coffee houses while they tune their guitars.
As with a good novel, you see the moral of the story not as old and familiar but freshly confirmed. In this case it has to do with the arbitrary nature of fame, the unpredictable outcome of a collision between determination and the twists of history.
When Joan Baez was 13 and her sister Mimi was nine, they were brought to a concert in a high-school gym near their California home. It was 1954 and the Cold War was at freezing point. Pete Seegar, who would have been playing in concert halls and nightclubs a few years earlier, was on the bill.
Seegar, as always, delivered the message that music was democratic and powerful: "Sing with me. Sing by yourself. Make your own music. Pick up a guitar". The Baez sisters took heed. So did countless other youngsters, and when Joan enrolled in Boston University four years later she wasn't the only one with a steel-string Gibson and a modest repertoire.
But Joan was more enterprising than most, and she set about picking up everything she could from better musicians. She was also a bit more ruthless. When the girl with whom she was performing in Cambridge dropped out due to illness for a few weeks, Joan appropriated her entire set - words, chords and inflections - and so launched her solo career.
It is clear Hajdu believes there were other gifted women singers in the genre - including, perhaps, her sister - who might have become the voice of the era with more justification. Joan's appeal wasn't immediately apparent; she always hated her faintly Latin, angular face, a legacy from a Mexican father Mimi didn't share. But for a college generation bored with conventional cultural standards and restless for signs of a new order, her dark maid-of-constant-sorrow look was suddenly as right as folk music itself.
The Baez phenomenon was just that. She rocketed to success. When she forced her way onto the stage of the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, "Newport absolutely exploded", as one witness put it. Her first album in 1960 stayed in the charts for 140 weeks.
At the time, Dylan was still a student at the University of Minnesota, just discovering Woody Guthrie. Neither he nor Baez was initially interested in politics, but they became politicised in response to their audiences.
By 1963, Dylan had an enthusiastic following among folk aficionados in Greenwich Village and Newport. But he was a nonentity compared to Joan Baez, queen of a movement that had just begun to find itself. She pulled him by hand onto the stage at the Newport festival and begged her fans to listen to the odd little man with the pebbledash voice because he had something to say.
The song of the night was "With God on Our Side", a steal from "The Patriot Game", which Dylan had learned from the Clancy Brothers. The night created legends which have endured remarkably well.
No legend attaches itself to Mimi Baez. She had a close but difficult relationship with Joan through tumultuous years, and with her husband, writer/songwriter/musician Richard Farina, whose attitude toward - or relationship with - Joan didn't make life any easier. The talented and eccentric Farina, a genuine legend among his peers, is now unremembered. He was due to sign copies of his first book on the morning in 1966 when he was killed in a crash, riding pillion on a friend's motorcycle.
For an era of revolutionary change, it was very brief. Two years after his glorious debut at Newport, Dylan wrote what Hajdu describes as his "valedictory to the Greenwich Village scene". The relentless verses of "Positively 4th Street" are Dylan's harshest attack on some or all of the folk community who accused him of betraying their ideals. He had just released "Like A Rolling Stone" and was heading elsewhere.
The music served the artists well, the artists moved on, and the fables remained in place. Once in awhile, an author pieces it all together and puts it in perspective. We must be grateful for that.
Mary Maher is a freelance journalist