As Bob Dylan Turns 60, New Scrutiny of his Life and Times

Down the Highway:  The Life of Bob Dylan

by Howard Sounes, Grove Press, 527 pages

Positvely 4th Street:  The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina

by David Hajdu.  Farar, Straus & Giroux, 328 pages

Atlanta Journal/Constitution

Review by Jeff Calder

Bob Dylan's life has been an American Myth with a mouth large enough to swallow The Great White Whale. In Down The Highway, Howard Sounes' contribution to the sagging Dylan shelf, all stages are present: North country boy, hallucinogenic Jacobin, rustic-in-retreat, religious fanatic. In the end, the old lad can be found slouching across Walt Whitman's (disappearing) landscape, a millionaire vagabond muttering about "The New Dark Ages" and picking up the check.

Through it all, Sounes rides next to Dylan's donkey, galloping from one pratfall to the next. By comparison, David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street is more impersonal, coolly skeptical. Hajdu focuses on the most intriguing period of Dylan's career (1961-66). His book succeeds by removing the maestro from the center of its narrative. The author divides his attention equally among his four subjects, revealing their dynamic of art, politics and ambition.

Hajdu's portal into the action is Joan Baez. A major star prior to Dylan's arrival on the scene, she promoted him with a generosity rare in show business. Yet, her drive was a ruthless as Dylan’s, and she had a jealous streak when it came to her younger sister, Mimi. Mimi hovers as a benign presence over Hajdu's counter-Camelot tale. In 1963, Joan exploded in anger when Mimi, then 17, announced her marriage to the brilliant Irish/Cuban rake, Richard Fariña.

Positively 4th Street is the first book to deal at length with Richard Fariña, whose importance has been obscured by his sudden death in a motorcycle crash in 1966. Fariña was the hip Renaissance man whom Hajdu suggests was the true progenitor of folk rock. (Hajdu has brought other back players into the front office before, notably Duke Ellington’s collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, in the excellent biography, Lush Life, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award.)

Like Dylan, Fariña embellished his background with various ruses. Just as Dylan had never been a circus hand, Fariña had not been "born at sea," as he once proclaimed. On the contrary, he had led a pampered, middle-class boyhood in Brooklyn before arriving at Cornell University, where, a friend later remarked, "he walked and talked as if he'd been born wearing a cape."

Within Cornell's literary circles, Fariña became friendly with Thomas Pynchon, who would serve as best man at Mimi and Richard's wedding. (As part of his research, Hajdu was granted an interview with the eremitic Pynchon, an unprecedented literary event; in a rare personal elaboration, Pynchon confided to Hajdu, “if I could somehow manage to be less remote in my work, more open to myself, to experience and so on, why I would owe this to Fariña more than anyone else.”) By the time he moved to New York City in 1959, Fariña had begun work on the novel that would become Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, which is, to this day, the only real novel written by a rock musician. Despite his claim that folk music was "square to the beat," he took up the Appalachian dulcimer and reinvented it as something of an Indian drone-machine.

One afternoon in 1961, Fariña expounded a new concept to the folk singers Eric Von Schmidt and Bob Dylan, who had only recently begun writing his first songs. "We should start a whole new genre," Von Schmidt recalls Fariña saying. "Poetry set to music. Poetry you can dance to. Boogie poetry! Yeah!" Three years later, Richard and Mimi tracked the eclectic Celebrations for a Grey Day. In Hajdu's estimation, "No one had recorded songs with mature, poetic lyrics and music in the rock style until Fariña's 'One Way Ticket' and 'Reno Nevada.' " This, let it be said, was months before Dylan's rock & roll breakthrough, Bringing It All Back Home.

In the beginning, Fariña was one of the few to recognize Bob Dylan's talent. To the New York folk establishment of 1961, the Minnesota native was still a figure of ridicule. Fariña's presentation of Dylan to recording executive John Hammond was the most important break in Dylan's professional life. At another crucial moment, Fariña suggested to Dylan that he advance sexually with Joan Baez in order to further his performing career (which Dylan did, and it did).

Even Baez initially questioned Dylan's ability; that is, until she heard him perform "With God On Our Side" at a party. "I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad," she said. "It was devastating." Originally an acolyte of Woody Guthrie, Dylan split the atom when he discovered that the melodic structures of folk music could be retrofitted with words influenced by Byron, Blake and The New York Times. Both Hajdu and Howard Sounes note that "Blowin' in the Wind" had as its source the antislavery ballad "No More Auction Block"; "With God On Our Side" and “Masters of War” were derived from antique ballads of the British Isles.

Positively 4th Street lacks the passion of, say, Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music, but it is a thoughtful revision of the moment in the '60s that became the first intellectual uprising of Pop. Hajdu did not have access to Dylan-- who ever does?--but then neither did Howard Sounes. Down The Highway follows up Sounes well-received biography of Charles Bukowski (1999), and it is a likable, if conventional, Dylan primer.

Sounes dutifully records and reprimands Dylan for his wicked ways: the inexplicable cruelty to Joan Baez; the tendency to dismiss musicians and friends with hardly a nod. Like King Farouk, the man's expertise at managing a corral of women is enough to stagger the most libertine of readers: Such is the stuff of myth, with Sounes as Pan, piping on a large stone off to the side.

Yet, the author makes a strong case that Dylan has never lost his deep sensitivity even during times of excess and personal crisis. And Sounes reminds readers of Dylan's fantastic sense of humor: When asked at a 1966 press conference about his song, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," Dylan responded, "It's sort of a Mexican kind of thing, very protest, very, very protest and [one] of the pro-testiest of all things I've protested against in the protest years."

Down the Highway falls short as a first-rate biography, in part because Dylan's story is now so well known. Sounes adds tidbits here and there, culled from new interviews; updated session notes appear for the great milestones. But mostly we just see more of the same man that we saw in Robert Shelton's No Direction Home (1986) and Clinton Heylin's Behind The Shades (1991). Rarely applying the critical brush, Sounes makes no attempt at the perspective of Invisible Republic (1997), Greil Marcus' work of historical imagination.

Perhaps biographies of even the most creative rock stars are destined to falter not unlike the subjects themselves. The "lifestyle" is squalid and predictable, a closed system of self-involvement deadening to any intellectual pursuit. Reclusive, often inarticulate, Dylan's self-expression has been almost exclusively through image projection and song. The mysterious appeal of his youth today seems like the dark preoccupation of a Howard Hughes, and with fingernails just as long. As such, his character, like that of most celebrities, has come to seem opaque, even boring. Rest assured, though, that Bob Dylan will have the last word on himself, and it may be that his most deliberate achievement will have been as phantom engineer of a wholly new American myth, one that is unrepeatable, disappearing into the deep.