Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu

Author:David Hajdu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2001-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

WITH THE HELP of her secret husband, who wrote her book reports, Mimi graduated from her high school correspondence course in early June 1963. She put her new free time to use, practicing the guitar in earnest again. Joan occasionally mailed some albums that record companies had sent to her, and Mimi looked forward to receiving the latest batch to hear what American folk musicians were doing, learn songs, and pick up riffs. One of the records her sister sent her that month was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which had been released on May 27. Joan had clipped a note on the sleeve: “My new boyfriend.” The announcement seemed to Mimi like a competitive taunt; when she had met Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, he had flirted with her, not Joan. It was puzzling, too; if Joan was Bob’s girlfriend, who was the cute brunette on the album jacket, walking arm in arm with Dylan through the snow?

If the cover photograph of Dylan and Suze Rotolo on Jones Street the previous winter was out of date, the album captured Bob well in his most recent incarnation, a socially conscientious composer. The follow-up to Bob’s unsuccessful Columbia debut had been a long time coming. Recorded over a period of twelve months, it began under John Hammond’s supervision as a collection of traditional songs and Guthrie-influenced apprenticeship pieces (“Sally Gal,” “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie,” “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”) on April 24, 1962, and it ended under producer Tom Wilson (sent in by a frustrated David Kapralik) as a portfolio of mature original songs (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” and seven more, plus one adaptation of a romantic blues by Henry Thomas, “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance”) on April 24, 1963. It is a thoroughly persuasive declaration of Dylan’s seriousness of purpose—ambitious, musically varied and nuanced, and literate, a demonstration of Dylan’s ability not only to change but to grow. Could the singer and musician executing the delicate melody and graceful, intricate guitar patterns of “Don’t Think Twice” really be the same one who scratched out “You’re No Good” a year earlier? Could the author of the dense, impressionistic lyrics of “Hard Rain” really be the kid who used to keep singing, “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song”?

Disciplined and pointed, the album is “freewheelin’” mainly in its approach to genre. At least two of the tracks make nods to rock and roll (past and future): “Corrina, Corrina,” in its use of rock instrumentation, a full band with piano and drums; and “Masters of War,” in its driving beat and ranting lyrics, spewed out. Lyrically, the songs are personal (“Girl from the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice”) as well as social and political, although reviews of the album tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the protest material. (“He stands outside his problems and writes a credo for people to live by,” wrote Linda Solomon in The Village Voice.

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