by James Wallace Harris, 6/10/25
2025 is the 60th anniversary of my living through 1965. I discovered Bob Dylan in 1965 when “Like a Rolling Stone” came on Top 40 AM radio. That was when rock and roll matured, becoming rock. I’ve never been able to forget the sixties. That’s mainly because I was an adolescent during that decade, and few people can forget their adolescence. To compound the biological factor, we were Baby Boomers, believing the whole world was watching us lead some kind of revolution.
I thought Bob Dylan epitomized the decade when I was a teenager growing up with his albums The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1962 through Nashville Skyline in 1969. I’ve been listening to those albums for sixty years, and I’ve read a lot about Bob Dylan. He wasn’t my hero, but someone I admired and envied. While watching the recent film A Complete Unknown, I couldn’t help but feel they got everything wrong. Although the film and acting were dazzling.
Bob Dylan is legendary for hiding behind a mask. He has always worn an enigmatic persona. I think to understand Dylan requires not looking directly at Dylan but at everything that surrounded him and how he reacted. Of course, that belief may only be a delusion on my part, and it’s impossible to know the man.
Of everything I’ve read, Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu provides the best account of Dylan, Baez, and the Folk Revival movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I just reread it for the third time because it was selected by my nonfiction book club. I assume the others voted for it because of the film A Complete Unknown. This 2001 book is out of print except for Kindle and audiobook on Amazon.
A Complete Unknown claims Dylan broke with the Folk Music crowd when he went electric. Positively 4th Street documents how he left Folk Music with his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The Folk Music Revival was about rediscovering, recreating, and reinterpreting historical music from many subcultures and countries. As soon as Dylan and others started writing their own songs, they became singer-songwriters. That was a new music genre. Those artists left folk music behind, and changed pop music, and rock and roll.
The Sixties can be remembered in many ways. There was a great deal of turbulent political change. Many histories of the Sixties are quite ugly. But the counterculture remembers it as a transcendental revolution. I did for most of my life. On this third reading of Positively 4th Street, I’m seeing evidence that undermines that perspective.
In my book club’s discussion group, David wrote:
I almost gave up on Positively 4th Street because of the gossip and drama described in the personal lives of some of my most admired musicians who were icons of the age of the folk era in the late 50s and early 60s.
I am not one for gossip that appears in People Magazine and ET describing the drama of celebrities, but when I learn about the personal lives of some of the great artists I wonder how they ever produced things of such beauty, truth, and goodness.
So I got thinking, is “narcissistic arrogance” a necessary ingredient for a person to create great art?
My reply was successful people often come across as assholes because of their relentless self-promotion. After reading David’s comments, I paid attention to their validity while rereading the book. It became quite apparent that these icons of the Sixties were chasing fame and fortune first. To reach the top of the creative heap means brutal competition. That often meant demeaning their peers. I need to rewatch A Complete Unknown to see how it interprets this aspect.
To think Dylan broke with the Folk Music Revival crowd when he went electric in 1965 is to miss the mark by a mile. Dylan had already blown through several artistic phases by 1965. Who can imagine where the man is at sixty years later.
I was thirteen when I first heard “Like a Rolling Stone.” I thought it would be fantastic to become a singer-songwriter like Dylan, or an astronaut like Wally Schirra, or a science fiction writer like Robert A. Heinlein. I couldn’t imagine what it would take to become successful like those famous men. Years later, I learned I didn’t have what it takes, but more importantly, I didn’t really want to be successful like Dylan, Schirra, and Heinlein. Reading Positively 4th Street reveals the low-level personality details I didn’t understand at thirteen.
Positively 4th Street is a wonderful, detailed history of a tiny creative scene that occurred from 1959 to 1966. David Hajdu culled the significant facts to tell this history, making it vivid and maybe even somewhat close to the truth.
While reading, I’ve listened to the folk albums mentioned in the book, and I’ve discovered that I don’t particularly like songs from the folk music revival. They are historically interesting, but they don’t press my emotional buttons like rock and roll or classic rock. It’s understandable why Dylan quickly fled the movement. The Beatles and the British Invasion buried the Folk Music revival.
Still, Positively 4th Street is an engaging history to read.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Since I never met the man, I figured the movie captured those few years as well as anyone could. I started following him in the early sixties, being a teenager then and also playing guitar. I have most of his albums and still spin them, but, my favorite is Nashville Skyline, that’s when he embraced country and we have Cash to thank for that. Good read.
haven’t seen the movie; didn’t really look like anything i’d be interested in at this point in space and time. i caught the last thirty minutes of martin scorseses documentary on AMERICAN MASTERS while waiting out a damp,drizzly evening at a hotel in vancouver; it occurs to me that it might be one of the missing pieces of the puzzle, along with dylans role in PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, which he kind of works through with a look in his eye of ‘how in the hell did i let myself get talked into this? (it’s the kind of part that richard dreyfuss could likely have done amazing things with…) mainly, i recall a scene in a saloon where james coburn asks him, ‘who’re you?’ to which bob dylan replies, “that’s a very good question.” i recollect skimming POSITIVELY 4TH STREET some years back. i was a bit put off by the hagiographic style of the author. which leads me to the conclusion that the best piece of journalism on bob dylan i’ve yet read was published in the SATURDAY EVENING POST sometime in the summer of 1966 entitled “WELL WHAT HAVE WE HERE?” by jules siegel {anthologized circa 1973 in RECORD, a collection of siegels work). i’ve always felt that if hunter thompson had been a jewish guy from new york instead of a ridgerunner from kentucky, with a bit more discipline, he might have been jules siegel, if you catch my drift. if not, i’ll drift further and ask if you caught david cronenbergs new flick, THE SHROUDS. caught it about thirty days ago in seattle; it’s the sort of moment when you think that there’s still hope for cinema.
The description of THE SHROUDS sounds interesting, I’ll have to watch it.
I doubt any journalist in 1966 could have given an accurate picture of Dylan. POSITIVELY 4TH STREET is the complete opposite of hagiographic. It captures the subjects like no other book I’ve read. You should give it another try.
Dylan is only one-fourth of the story. It also covers Joan and Mimi Baez, and Richard Farina. Have you read Farina’s book BEEN DOWN FOR SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP? Farina was friends with Thomas Pynchon, who gave him advice when writing the book. Supposedly, it’s quite the literary tale of the mid-sixties.
BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME is a reasonably entertaining but somewhat annoying exercise in smug hipness, redeemed towards the end by the protagonist’s losing a little bit of the smugness. Definitely a period piece.
I was lucky to find a hard cover version in pretty good condition of “Positively Fourth Street”. Being interested in all four musicians and their relationship to each other, I found it was hard to put the book down. I had only heard of Richard and Mimi Farina because many years ago I had purchased the first volume CD “Troubadors of the Folk Era” and found out Mimi was Joan Baez’s sister.
As an aspiring singer/guitar player in the late 60s, I taught myself several Bob Dylan songs with accompanying harmonica. I really loved Joan’s voice and tried playing and singing a few traditional folk songs. “Birmington Sunday” was a song I liked to sing when I was gigging in the local coffee shops.
So…about the book – I came away with a new impression that Dylan was quite the asshole in the way he treated Joan, and Richard Farina only married Mimi as a sort of consolation, since he had eyes for Joan. Still, I really found the book intertaining and enjoyed learning about the lives, times and influential people all four artists got to know and work with.
Glad to know someone else has read the book too. I feel so isolated sometimes.
None of the main characters come off well. Mimi was fairly ordinary, but Bob, Joan, and Dick were egomaniacs. The book really is a study about ambition and the desire for fame. But it’s interesting. I think Joan craved attention, yet Dylan got more attention than he wanted. I think Dylan and Farina were creative conquerors who wanted to claim the top of the hill as artists. They used attention as a yardstick of success, whereas Joan used attention to feel important.