David Hajdu
Robert
Birnbaum speaks with the author of Positively 4th Street: The
Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and
Richard Fariña
Posted: (Date Unknown), 2001
Copyright 2001 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Print this interview.
Author David Hajdu has written for numerous publications and currently
writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review
and Vanity Fair. His first book, Lush Life: A Biography
of Billy Strayhorn won a number of awards and is being adapted
for a feature film. His latest book is Positively
4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez
Fariña and Richard Fariña. David Hajdu lives in
Manhattan and is working on his third book (of which he will only
give us hints).
Robert Birnbaum: You broke ground with your book on Billy
Strayhorn; there was no biography on him before yours...
David Hajdu: That’s right, that’s pretty true...
RB: Strayhorn was relatively obscure or unknown in mainstream
pop culture. Then your next book is on someone who's seemingly been
well-documented — a lion of pop music for as long
as he has been performing. How did you do that?
DH: You are not describing my book. You are describing a
biography of Bob Dylan, which I didn’t write. Other people
have written those books, I didn’t. My book is not a Bob Dylan
book. I wish that I were a little faster writer. That I weren’t
so exhaustive in researching — I don’t want
to sound self–aggrandizing — but I wish I were
more efficient. Were I, I might have finished this a year ago, when
it was due. And it wouldn’t have been caught in the slip stream
of the Dylan birthday mania. And now it’s being mistaken as
a Bob Dylan thing. He’s one fourth of the quartet of people
who are the heart of this book. In actual pages he is not even fifteen
or twenty percent of the book. You can’t extricate Dylan or
any of the four figures from this book and come away with anything
close to a viable portrait of any of the four individuals. It’s
not the intent of the book.
The book is an exploration of the relationships and the nature
of creative relationships. And the importance of personal relationships
on creative relationships, and in that regard it comes directly
out of Lush Life. Also, it’s window into the collaborative
process — which comes right out of Lush Life.
It’s an attempt to come to terms with prominent music of the
second half of the century — post-war music, pop,
rock era music. Just like Lush Life was an attempt to explore
jazz, the prominent music of the first half of the century, through
a pair of its most important voices. I didn’t start with Dylan.
I wanted to do a study — an exploration of how post-war
music got its identity and developed its identity — and
how the post-war generation came of age. That drew me to the mid
Fifties, this period when a number of people, including Bob Dylan,
came together and got tangled in a web of collaboration and rivalry
and passion and creativity to change popular music. So it’s
not a Dylan book.
RB: I thought that the not-so-subtle hidden agenda was to
lionize Richard Fariña. In the book he comes off as the most
interesting, the most compelling of all and he has the added patina
of the young artist nipped in the bud.
DH: Well, Richard Fariña is somewhat the Strayhorn
of this book — the forgotten or little-known artist
who deserves more recognition. I don’t claim that he is an
artist on the same plane as Strayhorn or even Dylan or Baez. I would
say in response to your specific question, ‘lionization’
is too strong. It’s not a glorification...I wanted to bring
him to light but in a full-bodied way that’s a warts-and-all
way. I set out neither to lionize nor to degrade any of the four
people, but portray them as full-bodied figures.
RB: Your portrayal is very fair and very decent and there
is clearly good research and fine writing. In your doing that, I
must say, I found it hard to see the good aspects of Dylan. Even
as you end this book you have Dylan talking to Mimi Fariña,
"Hey that was a drag about Dick. It happened right around my
thing, you know. Made me think."* Or the things he said about
Baez around the time she was recording the never-released rock album.
Terrible things.
DH: You can’t measure a great artist by his virtues
as a human being, on moral standards. You have to judge an artist
on aesthetic standards, not on moral standards. I don’t know
what kind of song writer the Dalai Lama is or Gandhi was. I’m
sure I’d rather listen to Dylan’s music than theirs.
RB: Getting back to how to accurately describe your book.
I know, for instance, you are doing three or four T.V. appearances...Aren’t
those coming about because of the Dylan birthday mania?
DH: It’s impossible, absolutely impossible. I tried
to do...it’s difficult to even explain it to you without, again,
seeming self-aggrandizing. I wasn’t trying to do something
better than conventional scholarship or better biography or better
than conventional cultural history. I was just trying to do something
different. I wanted to do...I was drawn to the idea of two major
people and two minor people by the fact that they gave me a full
view of the era in the way just doing the central people doesn’t.
The smaller people, the smaller voices are lost to history. But
they are important as counterpoint and frequently important in their
own right. It helps us to understand Joan and Bob when we see two
other people setting out to do the same thing who don’t succeed.
And it gives us a deeper understanding of what goes into success.
And I don’t mean success just in careerist terms but in aesthetic
terms. Narratively, we have in this book four talented people setting
out to change the world or at least setting out to make it. By the
end, two of them do, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. They literally
do change the world. And two don’t. So I think the book casts
some light on that process, on what goes into success.
RB: Thematically, you are working the material in the way
you approached the Strayhorn story. What did you start with? Did
you have a working title? Did you know these were the four subjects?
You conducted over two-hundred interviews...
DH: Um huh, about three-hundred interviews, close to three-hundred
interviews. I had a working title, Children of Darkness,
which was a Richard Fariña song. I knew very early on that
it would be a group portrait. I had in my mind for a long time to
do something on Fariña, frankly. We have the same birthday.
I’ve always been interested in him. I proposed to Rolling
Stone to do a story on Fariña on the event of the tenth
anniversary of his death in 1976. Unfortunately, I was twenty-one
and I didn’t have enough of a track record at that point to
get that assignment. I think it’s all the better that I didn’t
because I don’t think I would have done him justice then. I
think I would have done the lionization then. I have also always
been interested in Bob and Joan. When I was in college. I came to
New York, I moved to New York to go to NYU in 1974. It’s not
that long after the folk boom. There was still kind of the last
breath of the charm and the glamour of the folk era still kind of
wafting around the Village.
RB: Then, it was the singer-songwriter thing...
DH: That’s right. But Gerde’s was still open.
The Bitter End was still open, the Kettle of Fish was still open.
In ’75 Joan and Bob were playing at Gerde’s Folk City
(snorts/gasps). He gathered together a group of his old folk buddies — Bobby
Neuwirth, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Joan Baez and took on the road
the Rolling Thunder Review. Gerde’s Folk City still
conferred legitimacy on young people who sought folk as a way to
do something interesting musically. It’s really not done anymore.
David Byrne played at Folk City, Patti Smith played at Folk City,
and it’s all gone now. It’s all gone. The Village Vanguard
still confers authority in jazz and the Carnegie Hall still does
in classical music, the Apollo Theater is still there for R and
B. But the whole folk thing is gone.
RB: We’ve seen the last remnants?
DH: There are a few other clubs around the country. Very,
very few. There is still a place called Freight & Salvage in
Berkeley. There is still Passim.
RB: There is no Gate of Horn or Quiet Knight in Chicago...
DH: No. There’s something in Washington. Most of them
are gone. It’s all gone from the Village. It’s kind of
ram shackle...it hasn’t even been themed. I would expect it
to have been themed by now...for there to be a theme Folk City.
That hasn’t even happened. I came to the Village at the same
age that Bob did when he came to the city. And there was still a
little bit of that aura, still a little of that mystique in the
Village. It was still connected to folk.
When I was still in college, I had a screenwriting class, and I
did a screenplay called Electric, that was about Bob Dylan
going electric and it was about how it affected the relationship
between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I read it recently and it’s
quite atrocious, but I was interested in the subject matter and
for a student film I made I did a film about Bob Dylan coming to
New York. And I found a buddy of mine that looked like Dylan and
we dressed him up and we filmed it. So it’s always been an
interest of mine and when this book came out I got a call from an
old college girlfriend — that I hadn’t talked
to in twenty or twenty-five years — and she said,
"I saw you finally did that book." So it was always something in
the back of my mind to do. Now I’ve run out of ideas. I don’t
know what I’m going to do for the third book. (laughs)
RB: Well, yeah sure...In looking over who you have talked
to, there are two questions that pop up. One, did you in fact, talk
to Thomas Pynchon directly or by fax?
DH: It was by fax. It’s funny this is another thing
that nobody asks me about. I interviewed Thomas Pynchon, I’d
like a little bit of credit for that...
RB: Right, right.
 DH:
He’s never talked to anyone. I mean he’s so reclusive
he makes Salinger look like Madonna for goodness sakes. We did an
epistolary interview. At first by fax and then there was an exchange
of letters, three letters. I was shocked. I never requested an interview
with him because I knew he would say no. So, instead I did all of
my homework, spent a few months and fashioned all the questions,
everything I’d ever want to ask him and just sent them. In
the hope that he’d be so intrigued by the questions that I
might catch him at the right moment.
He then proceeded to read my first book and he requested through
his agent a copy of my proposal for this book. And he read it. (snorts)
Then he responded. I knew from my editor (who did not send the proposal
without my permission) that Pynchon was poring this over in his
mind. So I keep my fingers crossed and I actually said a couple
of prayers. I made some promises to God, "Just give me Pynchon,
God." I’m not going to tell you what I promised God, but I
have not delivered yet. (laughs)
RB: Perhaps the subject for your next book.
DH: Anyway, one the day the fax comes over and it’s
the answers. I was so shocked...I went into such a tizzy over it
that I had to just leave the house and just pace around the streets.
He couldn’t have been better, really. I must say that I don’t
suffer any delusions that this a testament to the grandness that
is me or any such thing. I am convinced by the nature of his answers
that his regard and love for Richard Fariña runs very, very
deep.
RB: Don’t sell yourself short. That is an endorsement.
DH: Well, he did say some nice things about Lush Life
in his note. And he’s read this manuscript and didn’t
ask for significant changes. He did ask that I soften one matter
that dealt with his personal life and had no bearing on my subjects.
I thought I could give him that. It just had to do with his life
at Cornell and his own background.
RB: Do you think about what this book would have been like
without what he gave you?
DH: Oh, I could have done it.
RB: Sure, you would have done it...you were prepared to
do it...
DH: I would have done it. Sure, of course, I was prepared
to do it. But, geez, he was Fariña’s best friend, his
roommate in college, he was his best man at his wedding to Mimi,
he was a pall bearer at his funeral. He was there. It wouldn’t
be the same book without him.
RB: Well, something shined down upon you...Another name
that struck me in its absence — though I can’t
think it made much of a difference — is it telling
Robbie Robertson isn’t in this book?
DH: Oh. Rick Danko is in the book. Yeah, no he didn’t
respond at all.
RB: He was nominally the leader of the Band...
DH: Yeah, I would have liked to talk to Robbie. I don’t
think I lost much. There is another one along the same lines. I
didn’t get to Bob Neuwirth, who was one of Dylan’s best
friends. I did have instead Victor Maymudes. He was Dylan’s
bodyguard and went everywhere with him and he was there and saw
it all. He hadn’t done an interview before. I think somebody
else doing a book specifically about Dylan did talk to him. I think
he is quoted in the Sone’s book. I’m not sure, I haven’t
read it.
RB: Is that the extent of whom you didn’t get to talk
to?
DH: I never — you didn’t ask me about
Bob — I never expected to talk to Bob but have no
regrets about that. First of all I just know that it would have
been a nerve-wracking and frustrating experience to sit down with
him. He has used the interview process to add layers and layers
of obfuscation...
RB: Ron Rosenbaum in The New York Observer recounts
a Playboy magazine interview he did with Dylan which presents
pretty much what you just described...
DH: Right. I know that I would have never gotten anything
of substance out of him. He’s used the interview process as
a kind of performance art for decades. What I did instead (I don’t
know if you picked this up), I arranged for this even before I wrote
the proposal for this book — because I knew I needed
good source material from Dylan. I arranged through the executor
of the estate of Robert Shelton (who gave Dylan his start and spent
four years interviewing Dylan extensively) to see his original research
materials.
Shelton had utterly unique access. Dylan submitted to four years
of long probing interviews with Robert Shelton. He felt indebted
to Shelton because Shelton gave him his start. He discussed personal
matters as well as his music and matters of the connection between
the two in much greater depth than he ever did anywhere else. But
Shelton misused the materials because somewhere along the line he
got the ideas that his role as a biographer was to glorify Bob rather
than to characterize or portray him. So I arranged through his sister,
the executor of his estate, to see the interviews. They’re
incredible. They’re incredible. Most of the quotes from Dylan,
in my book, have never been published before. Or they were bastardized.
He took little bits from one sentence and little bits from another
sentence and stuck them together and rewrote and made some things
up too, actually.
 RB:
You quote Dylan rejecting the title ‘rock and roll,’ disparaging
‘folk rock’ and coming up with the name ‘vision music.’
Sounds like something that could have been marketed.
DH: (laughs) It’s not too late. Vision music, it sounds
a little too grand. It also doesn’t have the connection to
sex that every other word for popular music has in the last hundred
years.
RB: Folk?
DH: Not folk. But rock and roll meant sex. Jazz meant fornication.
RB: Hip hop?
DH: Not quite. All right there goes that theory, so much
for my sexual theory of...
RB: Ordinarily as we came to the end of our conversation
I would have asked what’s next, but since you suggested or
confessed that you are out of ideas...
DH: No, I actually have an idea. I was being coy. But my
wife has sworn me to secrecy because unlike the first two books
it’s a topic that someone else could come along and do. I’ll
be the first to do it unless someone else gets the idea. But there
was an event — and it’s outside of music for
the first time for me since I’ve been writing seriously — in
the early Fifties that is completely forgotten. National news, parallel
to McCarthyism but not related that ended something. Ended careers,
ruined lives and the effect of it as a result had enormous cultural
impact. There’s this thing that happened that I’m going
to write a book about.
RB: Not the black list?
DH: No. So I’m going to write about this event...
RB: Thank you David, from now until you publish this book
I be calling you asking for more clues, "I think it’s this.
I think it’s that."
DH: Call me every now and then. So that’s what I’m
going to do. It’s a different challenge.
RB: There is a writer I am acquainted with who has been
watching a family of ospreys every summer up on a remote island
in Maine and intends to write a book about that. I saw him recently
and mentioned that I noticed that I had seen a book recently published
on ospreys. I thought about it later and thought, "So what."
DH: So what. I am convinced from my own experience that
it’s doom to follow the market. You have to follow your heart.
For the eleven years I was working on Lush Life people were
dumb struck when they heard I was writing about this guy Billy Strayhorn.
People would actually say to me, "Why?" And now it seems like the
most natural thing in the world to have done. This thing is already
finding enough of an audience that I am gratified already. And now...look
at the case of Sea Biscuit, for goodness sakes! Somebody decided
to write a book about a racehorse from the 1920’s. Number one
bestseller, huge phenomenon, what? I talked to my agent about that,
he said, "I would have never taken that book on... You just
really never know." It’s not true that you never know.
Sea Biscuit and what I tried to do both have something in common,
in that they both come out of fierce passions. This person really
wanted desperately to write about Sea Biscuit.
RB: Ultimately, you wrote a very good book. That does count
for something, I hope.
DH: I hope so too. Thank you.
RB: It’s a well-written book, but it gets attention
because Dylan’s name is on the cover...
DH: It’s a source of frustration for me in a way. It
does help in that introduces the thing to people. I hope they are
not disappointed. I really try to use these resources to do a work
of non-fiction literature — even though that’s
a little pretentious. That’s what I tried to do. It’s
not an accident that it has the novelistic feeling that it does,
though it is rooted rigorously in non-fiction standards. I don’t
fabricate dialogue. There are no internal monologues and all that
nonsense. It’s still rigorous non-fiction. I really tried to
do something novelistic and literate with it, with these pop-culture
resources.
RB: I know this isn’t the point of your book, but is
there any way to measure Bob Dylan’s effect on pop music?
DH: Oh geez, his significance is immeasurable. Joni Mitchell
said, after she heard the song "Positively Fourth Street": "Oh,
I see now we can write about anything." So he broadened the palette,
he broadened the scope of popular music. He deepened popular music.
I think, to get at what you are really getting at with this question
is, is what’s he doing now, and what’s it matter now that
he’s out there now looking like Mephistopheles, writing these
very long cryptic songs and singing them night after night after
night? It’s a very powerful statement to everyone but especially
to young people that there are reasons for making music beyond fame
and what drove him at the beginning.
Now he’s out there like Doc Watson or Bill Munroe or like
a jazz artist. Out there every night on the road...obviously he
doesn’t need the money. I don’t think he’s seeking
fame and glory. He doesn’t do interviews. He ‘s not reveling
in that side of it. He’s out there making the music. That must
be what drives him. That’s a very powerful statement. He’s
making great music...
RB: Sometimes.
DH: Oh yeah, he’s hit-and-miss...
RB: I think it’s great that he never likes to play
the same thing the same way. I remember a few years ago on the Grammies,
he sounded like a goat or a sheep.
DH: I gave him devastatingly critical reviews in the 80’s.
He was so doped up...he seemed to be terribly doped up. He was off-key.
His guitar wasn’t tuned. It was humiliating, but I think he’s
cleaned up and he’s very musical these days. He’s become
an incredible guitar player. He didn’t used to be. He’s
all over the neck of that guitar and he’s really learned music
theory and how to play the guitar and not just strum it. As his
voice diminishes technically I think he’s learned how to use
it expressively. He’s never had much of a range, but he now
has one quasi note.
RB: Dylan presents himself as having done the social activism/consciousness
music because it would sell. Do you believe him?
DH: Not entirely. Evidence to the contrary is the music
itself. It’s too compelling and powerful to be works of artifice.
I think to a degree there’s some truth to that. On the other
hand he continued to return not only to folk music, but to themes
of social consciousness later in his life. He came back with "George
Jackson," he did "Hurricane" in the 70’s. And
then he did two folk albums in the 90’s, just with acoustic
guitar singing folk songs again. It wasn’t entirely a pose.
He’s a great American improviser following his heart and his
whims or whatever.
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