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The Same Ol’ Situation Observed from a distance, and with VH1-style hindsight, Bob Dylan’s first few years as a popular musician were rather generic: He came to New York from a quiet small town, and bonded with like-minded souls. A small slice of the public discovered them. The music moguls and the media latched on. He and others experimented with sex, drugs and their self-images. They unwittingly helped to foster a musical fad and were well compensated. They were shoved into positions as public figures, spokespeople, role models and sex symbols. Later, self-importance, carelessness and/or arrogance pushed some to defy death. Some made it out alive; others did not. David Hajdu doesn’t exactly push a "Behind The Music" story-arc in Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina, which pinpoints Dylan’s relationships with Joan Baez and others in the ever-shifting folk scene of the early ’60s. And Hajdu isn’t a cynic, either. But his copious details and his eye for context ultimately prove that Dylan’s genius was a weak antidote for the greed and pomposity that surrounded him in Greenwich Village and eventually chased him out.
Baez, her sister, Mimi, and Mimi’s husband, Richard Fari”a, are equal players in Hajdu’s tale, which traces their wanderings from New York to California and elsewhere. The sisters’ middle-class roots and Fari”a’s Ivy League education never get short shrift: Although hearing Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie might have changed all of them, their version of folk music was less than organic. Dylan’s comfortable upbringing in Minnesota also is fleshed out by interviews with old acquaintances. As has been reported in at least five other major bios of Dylan — including Howard Sounes’ new Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan — they all used each other well. To those outside the Village, their relationships produced hype, commerce and sex appeal. Dylan became a Seventeen magazine pinup; the Baez sisters, though self-conscious, were the dolls of the scene. "Folk would accommodate them and their ambitions, no matter who they really were, as long as they could create the illusion of artlessness, and Bob did so giftedly," Hajdu writes, noting that in the early ’60s, folk was both "a fashion trend and a business opportunity." Hootenanny candy bars, television folk revues, millions of records sold — it all sounds familiar. Dylan made the most of that swirling commercialism, though. Positively 4th Street drives home the point that the former Robert Zimmerman, a garage band kid who loved Buddy Holly first, only ever wanted to make music that people liked, and that he liked. He penned social protest hits for Baez and others because that’s what worked. His break with Baez wasn’t smooth or tactful, but he found her audience boring. Her audience, of course, famously found him boorish when he plugged in for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Hajdu gets an interesting section out of what exactly happened in the crowd that night: Some prominent folklorists and audience members say the music itself was great, but the boos came because the sound system was so poor. Others hold the more traditional idea that the majority of the crowd wanted no part of Dylan’s electrified sound. Fari”a, meanwhile, weaves in and out of the story like a swashbuckler, opportunistically trying on different hats: singer, dulcimer player, writer, loverman, raconteur, party boy. Where Dylan was shy and cranky, Fari”a had the charisma and looks of a rock star. And as a foil, Fari”a couldn’t be better: His 1966 death in a motorcycle crash came after a joyous day celebrating the release date of his only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. (The book had the blessing of Fari”a’s Cornell mate Thomas Pynchon, who communicated with Hajdu by fax for Positively 4th Street.) Dylan’s infamous crash near Woodstock, N.Y., later that year seems more like punctuation. He’d released three classic albums (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde) and needed to refuel. He got the time, but after the crash, though, his public persona was a little less interesting. Positively 4th Street stops there, before the Summer of Love made folk music a hippie cliche and a predictable genre. Dylan, to his credit, saw it coming before anybody else. :: :: ::
The sleazy rock ‘n’ roll book was perfected years ago with the Led Zeppelin chronicle Hammer Of The Gods. By the time M’tley Cr”e formed in the early 1980s, the world already had seen rock flamboyance codified by The New York Dolls, Alice Cooper and Kiss. The Cr”e perhaps wasn’t the craziest or most original band in existence, but the front cover of Neil Strauss’s The Dirt might be correct when it calls Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars "The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band." It’s this simple: They just didn’t care. And M’tley Cr”e’s four original members make no bones about reaffirming that for the reader. Instead of trying to make a narrative out of the mess, Strauss, a New York Times rock critic, collects the foursome’s first-person stories into pithy chapters that are built for subway rides and other times of brief solitude. At more than 400 pages, though, shoveling through The Dirt gets to be a chore after awhile. But it’s a pop-culture necessity, nonetheless, from the rampant hedonism of the 1980s Sunset Strip to the band’s substance-fueled downfall and reemergence in the 1990s as a font of tabloid fodder. The final fifth of the book goes deeply into Lee’s relationship with ex-wife Pamela Anderson, to the point that it’s almost easy to sympathize with the love-struck rocker, who got to cool off in jail after a domestic dispute. Anderson, if Lee is to be believed, was as immature, as volatile and as unfit for marriage as he was. (The drummer, by the way, hit the news again soon after the book’s release because a 4-year-old boy drowned in his pool during a birthday party.)
Elsewhere, the devil, as can be expected, is in the details. Neil, the singer, tells of losing his young daughter Skylar to cancer, and drinking with the likes of Kelsey Grammer at night to kill the pain. Lee, the drummer, relates how childhood ballet lessons kept him from getting dizzy during his drum solos in a rotating cage. Sixx, the bassist, finds out he has more siblings than he ever realized. Mars, the guitarist and reflective senior member of the band, must live with a degenerative bone disease and doctors who can’t figure out whether to numb his pain or cure his clinical depression. And don’t forget the endless groupies, hookers, drug dealers, greedy record label representatives, deadly car crashes, doomed marriages, bar fights, hangovers, detoxifications, lamentations on broken childhoods, and gross practical jokes. The tales from M’tley Cr”e’s tour with Ozzy Osbourne are, well, amazing. VH1 viewers have already heard the story about how Osbourne snorted a line of ants off the sidewalk. There’s more where that came from. The band’s bombastic sound and its influence are secondary. Other bands are mentioned only in passing, or as part of crazy tours. The Dirt wisely avoids trying to make a case for M’tley Cr”e’s musical significance. Strauss lets the boys do all the bragging. A few bit players get their own chapters, too, including singer John Corabi, who replaced Neil for an album after the band couldn’t take him anymore. The lone sympathetic character might be Mr. Udo, the beleaguered Japanese promoter who put a martial-arts-style clamp onto the necks of Lee and Sixx during a chaotic bullet-train ride from Osaka to Tokyo. After Sixx hurled a bottle of Jack Daniels at an unsuspecting commuter, Udo "didn’t bat an eyelash," Sixx said. "I returned to my seat and he pushed a thumb into the back of my neck. A rush of some kind of fluid or blood ran through my body, and I slumped in my seat, completely mellow," Sixx said. "Sitting there, we realized that we hadn’t been funny at all. We had really upset everyone." It’s a lesson that M’tley Cr”e’s members learned repeatedly. Have they learned it permanently? The adult problems (and occasional solutions) that plague the end of The Dirt could be proof that old headbangers can’t learn to act like real people. But then again, this is M’tley Cr”e we’re talking about. Joe Warminsky is a writer and editor in the Washington, D.C., area.
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