Okay, so it's got an introduction by Thomas Pynchon and it brings back a lot of memories for people-who-were-young-during-the-Sixties, but what about those of us who were "unlucky" enough to be born after that halcyon decade crashed and burned? Is the book really any good? Yes. Farina was, for my money, one of the best writers of his generation, even though one novel and an out-of-print (but, if you can find it, surprisingly good) collection of short pieces isn't much to go on. Although the book is actually set around the turn of the decade, 59-61 or so, there's an eerie impression that it was written twenty years later. For all the drink, drugs and college high-jinks, Death, War and that other lost horseman of the apocalypse, Responsibility, are never far away. The main character, Gnossos Pappadopolis, is a rucksack-wearin' hipster who attempts to maintain his Cool in an atmosphere of student demos and faculty corruption. Farina makes no attempt to sanctify Gnossos, and nor would we want him to, yet we end up sympathising with him. Pynchon's famous jacket quote says that the book comes like "the Hallelujah Chorus being played by 200 kazzo players with perfect pitch" - make that Barber's Adagio being played by a jug band and you're about right.

I read this book more than a year before I found myself attending grad school at Yale - and am I ever glad I did! I picked it up knowing nothing about the book itself, being familiar with Farina only as a songwriter, and when I saw that it was set in the fifties I knew I'd either love it or hate it. Luckily, this book presents the fifties in the eye of one who actually lived through them and knew there was more to that decade than poodle skirts and "Ozzie and Harriet." Indeed, as Thomas Pynchon's great introduction explains, Farina himself epitomized many of the changes the fifties saw, setting the stage for the following decade that has ever since overshadowed it. Of course Farina never tells the reader that he's setting out to chronicle the crumbling of traditional Ivy League culture into the rebelliousness that was about to emerge on campuses anywhere - he just does it. Anyone with a streak of Gnossos in him or her who has spent any time in any of the older Northeastern universities and colleges will recognize the mixture of pride, love and isolation he exhibits throughout the book. And they'll be glad he came before. If you've outgrown "The Catcher in the Rye," you owe it to yourself to read this!

Richard Farina was a consummate songerwriter, poet and hopeful novelist, until his first and only novel burst onto the scene. Although a later book was released that was a compilation of some short stories, poems, and articles about him, this was the only book he had to stretch toward the literary heavens with. And it was indeed a smash!

Unfortunately, Farina, who was married to Joan Baez' younger sister Mimi, with whom he had forged a folk duo that played and recorded some of his wonderful poetry put to music, never lived to experience his own wild success, as he fell off the back of a motorcycle on the way home from the publication party for this book, and was killed instantly. But the book lives, indeed it flourishes, and the paperback version has never been out of print in all this time, which is ample testimony to its continuing power, verve, and its timeless message, as well as to its beautifully written story.

This is a wonderful book, one that has grown in reputation and stature over the intervening decades, and as another, much younger reviewer commented, it is one for everyone, not just for us greying babyboomers who were lucky enough to have discovered and experienced Richard in his prime. For all of us who have read his work, or listened to his music, or experienced his poetry, or for those of us who were lucky enough to see Mimi and Richard perform at the Newport Folk Festival, one can still hear the faint echoes of their haunting guitar harmonies and vocals, and we truly know that he is still with us. We know that he has truly left us a present, his evocative "reflections in a crystal dream".

Although set in a time before the changes of the sixties started to roar, one soon recognizes teh signs and spirit of the times in his words and the storyline. Enter Gnossos, soul of the road, keeper of the eternal flame, and a pilgrim on an endless search for the holy grail of cool, and the college town of Athene (read Ithaca, NY, home of Cornell) will never be the same. Nor will you after digesting this wild, extremely readable parable. So, friend, don't hesitate; buy it, read it, but do so slllllloooooowwwwwllllly, savoring every gorgeous moment of it. It's all we have left of him, the only legacy of an incredible talent and a wonderful spokesperson for the otherwise indescribable sixties.

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.

One of the nice things about a quadruple biography is that you don't have to bear the foibles and character defects of any one of its four subjects for too long. The interplay of personalities--the supersized egos of Bob Dylan, Richard Farina, and Joan Baez as well as the more humanly-proportioned ego of Mimi Baez Farina--is fascinating. Author David Hajdu is thorough in his research (extensive interviews with many people, some now deceased), unbiased in his assessments, and reasonably skeptical when quoting the subjects as they reflect on themselves and on one another. Hajdu seems well-informed on music in general and presents the phenomenon of the 60s folk revival in a way that seems true and fair (I speak as someone who has owned and still owns most of the vinyl ablumns mentioned in the book). Long before Madonna became the daring of academics for her ability to shed skins and transform herself annually, Dylan, Farina, and the elder Baez were conciously and single-mindedly crafting their personae to meet audience expectations and assure their own success. The competition among the four is extreme. But so is the affection and loyalty (distorted and self-serving though it may have been at times). One finishes the book with a sense that the key to success is wanting it deperately; talent and good luck, though nice in their own way, are less essential. Overall, the Baez women come off better than the men. The pacifist Joan was capable of incredible cattiness in her personal relationships, but could be generous professionally (for instance, she continued to promote Bob Dylan even after he dumped her as his lover and publicly mocked her, sometimes in song). Aside from Mimi's somewhat saintly aura, there are no villains or heroes here. Unlike the writers of the protest songs of the folk revival, Hajdu does not see things in black and white. His subjects live quite colorfully on these pages--and without apology for their shortcomings and inconsistancies. This is an intriguing story told with aptly chosen and fascinating details.

I was totally excited when the release of the book occurred for several reasons, but the main one was that the interesting lives of Richard and Mimi Baez Farina would be discussed.

Hadju, as he did in his excellent look at Billy Strayhorn ("Lush Life"),weaves a wonderful portrait of 4 young artists, all with immense talent,(the Baez sisters and Dylan as musicians, Farina as a novelist and musician) who all converge on the thriving Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960's. From there, the book, (complete with hundreds of wonderful interviews) begins to read like a modern soap opera- complete with torrid affairs, opportunism, deceipt, and lust. Whether it was Dylan's affair with Joan Baez to further his budding career, or taking on the bohemian personna that Richard Farina naturally had; Farina's courtship with Mimi Baez by letters, but all the while having a secret love for Joan; Dylan's very public breakup with Joan after his star had risen well beyond anyone's expectations- it's all in this book.

The book tactfully takes on the tangled web that these 4 people created for themselves, makes sense of it all, and while not pointing fingers in any one particular direction, does showcase both Dylan and Farina's overt opportunism, both at the expense of the Baez sisters. One can only conjecture what may have occurred had Richard Farina not died..would he have pursued Joan? and what would have become of Mimi at that point?

While the music is well documented on any number of cds- Dylan's early folk works are exquisite, Joan's politically active folk even more so, and Richard and Mimi's works, including one of my favorite folk songs in "Reno, Nevada," also on cd, the book takes off the golden dome of the era and shows the true underbelly of 4 starving artists trying to make it. They all did, to varying degrees. The book charts the early days, the struggles, the open deceipt, trials and tribulations. A riveting book.

I review this as a fan of Richard Farina and as an aficionado of the "Great Folk Scare" of the mid-1960's, when the folksingers of Cambridge and Greenwich Village gave voice to a lonely high school kid in suburban LA. Not as good as "Been Down So Long, etc.", but it gives insight into Richard. Along with the aforementioned book, this is best read in conjunction with his music, and possibly even David Hajdu's recent "Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of...etc," (What is it with this Dylan, Farina, thing and the Long titles, anyway?)
The book is a collection of short fiction, poetry, and magazine articles which act as a great frame for discovering this all-too-early-lost talent.
My personal favorite is the narrative "The Monterey Fair". Framed around a dialogue between an incognito Joan Baez and the attendants of a John Birch Society Booth at the fair about their views on peace, Is an amazing portrait of the U.S. in the sixties.
His late wife Mimi has written introductory notes to each piece, helping the book give a portrait of the artist in the context of his work.