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Title: Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina by David Hajdu ISBN: 086547642X Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 10 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11
Rating: 5
Summary: The 60's you never saw before....
Comment: This is the captivating, intimate story of the lives of four musicians who influenced a generation of young people and created a new era of popular American music. From the Greenwich Village coffee houses to the top of the pop charts, they were drawn together by their music and mutual attraction to take folk music to new heights, and create totally new sounds, re-defining the genre and mesmerizing the children of the 60's. Joan and Mimi Baez played guitar and sang from a very early age, and Joan was recognized as queen of folk music when she and the rising star, Bob Dylan met. Richard Farina, an up and coming novelist and sometime musician, was entranced by Joan, but married the beautiful Mimi when whe was 17 years old. David Hajdu explores the influence of other artistic greats such as Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and James Dean as he captures the personalities of the Baez sisters, Bob Dylan and Richard Farina along with the complexity of their personal realationships. He Tells us of their hopes and dreams, their disappointments and their struggles to make it to the top. Whether you are a fan of their music or not, this marvelous book that reads like good fiction will give you a new understanding of what it's like to be an idol to generations of Americans. Hajdu conducted several hundred interviews to bring us a new story of the 60's that will touch your heart as it has mine. Beverly Rowe, reviewer for myshelf.com.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Madonna but No angel
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: like a rolling stone
Comment: I don't remember who recommended this book to me but I'm glad I gave it a chance. While I'm a casual Bob Dylan fan, I was unfamiliar with the Baez sisters and Richard Farina and I found it captivating. A very quick read for me. David Hajdu paints the early 60's folk scene, in rich detail, through the lives of these extraordinary musicians and poets. You really get a feel of the subculture and the importance of the music and the words these artist used to represent their views of the world.
I enjoyed it so much that I'm sorry its finished. I might read it again someday - it was such a joy. Now - time to acquire all of this influential music!
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Title: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Twentieth-Century Classics) by Richard Farina, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Fariina ISBN: 0140189300 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title:The Complete Vanguard Recordings ASIN: B00005QK16 Publisher: Vanguard Records Pub. Date: 13 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $24.98 |
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Title: Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years by Eric Von Schmidt, Jim Rooney ISBN: 0870239252 Publisher: Univ. of Massachusetts Press Pub. Date: July, 1994 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir by Joan Baez ISBN: 0452260949 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: July, 1988 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes ISBN: 0802116868 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 09 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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