Bob Dylan (38 page)

But perhaps one can draw a deep breath, wipe the sweat from one’s brow, and leave Hajdu’s career-and-relationships reconstructions; his utter credulousness when it comes to anyone who, having been left behind, might resent the fact that Bob Dylan, having entered history, still writes and sings songs people want to hear; his feats of research (the unpublished or unexpurgated 1960s interviews by the late Dylan biographer Robert Shelton with Dylan and others, now archived at the Experience Music Project in Seattle); his ability to get people to speak in ways that hardly cast themselves in a favorable light (“When I started, I used a lot from Debbie’s act,” Baez says of the Cambridge singer and guitarist Debbie Green. “She was modestly talented, but not ambitious. I was going someplace, she wasn’t. I didn’t hurt her. I only helped myself”); and his inability to dramatize, which is ultimately his inability to convey any sense of why his story is of any import at all, and listen again to how, for the country at large, the story took shape.

“Fair young maid, all in the garden,” begins the probably 17th century English ballad “John Riley” as it appears on the 1960 album
Joan Baez.
It’s the quieting of the tale as Baez moves it on, a little melodic pattern on her guitar flitting by like a small bird as a hushed bass progression follows it like a cat, even more than the voice—the voice of someone departed, but walking the earth to warn the living—that told the listener then, and can tell a listener now, that he or she has stumbled into a different country. It was like waking up as an adult, or nearly so, to discover that all the fairy tales of one’s childhood were true—and that, if you wished, you could, instead of the career or the war awaiting you, live them out. In a few old songs, making a drama of hiding and escape, material defeat and spiritual conquest, investing that drama with the passion of her voice and the physical presence of the body that held it, she beckoned you toward a crack in the invisible wall around your city. What would it mean, people all across the country asked the music they were hearing, as the music asked them, to feel anything so deeply?

Bob Dylan, whose fellows in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing would have been unable to say just what it was a suburb
of, appeared on
Bob Dylan,
in 1962, as a tramp. That is: as someone who had slept in hobo jungles, seen men go mad from drinking Sterno, and forgotten the names of people who, one night, seemed like the best friends anyone could ever have. Though in Hajdu’s book there is not a hint that Dylan ever evinced humor beyond a private joke, many of the songs are funny (“Been around this whole country,” he says of the place name that in 1962 was a folk talisman, “but I never yet found Fennario”), but shadowed. All in all, the album is a collection of old songs about death. They dare the singer—can you sing me?—and he dares them—can you deny me what is mine? It was a time when almost everyone assumed that nuclear war would take place, somewhere, sometime, if not everywhere for all time; it was a time when black Americans risked their lives, and sometimes had them taken, whenever they raised their voices, or took a step outside of the country into which they had been born and into a new one, the country they and everyone else had been promised. Death is real, the twenty-year-old singing on
Bob Dylan
said; knocking on a door perhaps built especially for that purpose, the sound Dylan made was not ridiculous because he was right.

This is the public drama that, in Hajdu’s book, is only a figment of private life, and, as its players followed that drama over the next years, Fariña added nothing to it. Fulsome accounts of the 1965 Fariñas albums
Celebrations for a Gray Day
and
Reflections in a Crystal Wind
cannot hide the fact that Mimi Fariña could not sing, or that with the exception of “Reno Nevada,” Fariña’s most noticeable compositions were stiff, shallow imitations of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and other Dylan songs. Because the case for Fariña as a cultural innovator cannot be made—his novel, despite its blazing encomium from Pynchon, is a sixties curio—Hajdu spends far more time on Fariña as a movable feast, as a boundless spirit, as the man who already was what, in the better world Baez and Dylan seemed to be singing about, everyone would be. Hajdu quotes a letter from married Fariña to teenage Mimi: “Things is, Mishka mine, I’m weary of hopping around the cities of this tired world & not knowing what was happening ’fore I got there. For me alone I
guess it’s all right but I’m not me alone anymore . . . Take my hand a little, baby, and squeeze it some.”

Why are we reading this? Because Mimi Fariña gave the letter to David Hajdu? It’s creepy, and not just because the posing style of 1963 doesn’t travel well, but because you are violating someone’s privacy by reading other people’s embarrassing letters, and when you do that, you are made to violate your own privacy. But because Fariña did not live long enough to prove the truth or lie of his life, that is what Hajdu is left with.

“Richard never started the next book he planned to write,” Hajdu says. “It was to be a memoir of his experiences with Mimi, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan.” Those are the last words of Hajdu’s book. Fariña’s torch has been passed, one is to understand, but the music and the writing that remain, Baez’s, Dylan’s and Fariña’s, give the lie to the notion that it was ever really lit.

 

David Hajdu,
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

Winter 2001

 

I live in Berkeley, California. Almost every day for nearly twenty years I’ve walked up the same steep, winding hill, up a stretch of pavement named Panoramic Way, which begins right behind the University of California football stadium. A few years back, when my fascination with Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music
—a fascination that began around 1970—was turning into obsession, I began to imagine that Smith had lived on this street.

I knew that Smith was born in 1923 in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in and around Seattle; that as a teenager he had recorded the ceremonies and chants of local Indian tribes, and in 1940 had
begun to collect commercially released blues and country 78s from the 1920s and 1930s. In 1952, in New York City, when his collection ran into the tens of thousands, he assembled eighty-four discs by mostly forgotten performers as an anthology he at first called simply, or arrogantly,
American Folk Music:
a dubiously legal bootleg of recordings originally issued by such still-active labels as Columbia, Brunswick and Victor. Released that year by Folkways Records as three double LPs—two each for “Ballads,” traditional or topical story-telling numbers, “Social Music,” from dance music to the church, and “Songs,” where the singer presents whatever commonplace tale he or she is telling as if it’s his or her story alone—what was soon retitled the
Anthology of American Folk Music
became the foundation stone for the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and the 1960s.

Slowly at first, Smith’s set found its way into beatnik enclaves, collegiate bohemias and the nascent folk scenes in Greenwich Village, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, Berkeley, Detroit, Wichita—wherever there might be an odd record store or an imaginative public library. By the early 1960s the
Anthology
had become a kind of lingua franca, or a password: for the likes of Roger McGuinn, later of the Byrds, or Jerry Garcia, founder of the Grateful Dead, for folk musicians such as Dave Van Ronk, Rick von Schmidt and John Fahey, for poet Allen Ginsberg, it was the secret text of a secret country. In 1960, Jon Pankake and others who were part of the folk milieu at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis initiated a nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan into what Pankake would later call “the brotherhood of the
Anthology
”; the presence of Smith’s music in Dylan’s has been a template for the presence of that music in the country, and the world, at large. From then to now verses, melodies, images and choruses from the
Anthology,
and most deeply the
Anthology
’s insistence on an occult, Gothic America of terror and deliverance inside the official America of anxiety and success—as Smith placed murder ballads, eruptions of religious ecstasy, moral warnings and hedonistic revels on the same plane of value and meaning—have been one step behind Dylan’s own music, and one step ahead.

As Smith said in 1991, with fifty years of experimental film-making, jazz painting, shamanistic teaching, and most of all dereliction behind him, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the ceremonies of the American Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, he had lived to “see America changed by music.” He died in 1994.

Three years later, when his anthology was reissued as a six-CD boxed set by Smithsonian Folkways Records, its uncanny portrayal of the American ethos would unsettle the country all over again. But that event had yet to take place when I started musing about Harry Smith and Panoramic Way. I knew that Smith had lived in Berkeley in the mid- to late 1940s, and that he’d done most of his record collecting there. Well, he had to live somewhere, and Panoramic, I decided, looked like where he would have lived.

It’s a crumbling old street, with unpredictable, William Morris- inspired Arts and Crafts touches on the brown-shingle and stucco houses—a weird collection of chimneys on one, on another a fountain in the shape of a gorgon’s face, sculpted out of a concrete wall, so that water comes out of the mouth, drips down, and, over the decades, has left the gorgon with a long, green beard of moss.

Most of the houses on the downside of the hill are hidden from view. You almost never see anyone out of doors. No sidewalks. Deer and wild turkey in the daytime; raccoon, possums, even coyotes at night. Berries, plums, loquats, wild rosemary and fennel everywhere. Woods and warrens, stone stairways cutting the hill from the bottom to the top. An always-dark pathway shrouded by huge redwoods. The giant curve of the foundation of a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A street where, you could imagine, something odd, seductive, forbidden, or unspeakable was taking place behind every door. Absolute Bohemian, absolute pack rat—where else would Harry Smith live if he lived in Berkeley?

I’d read that Harry Smith had lived for a time in the basement apartment of Bertrand Bronson, professor of anthropology at the University of California, ballad scholar and record collector, so I looked for basement apartments that seemed right. I settled on one, in a dramatic house that looked as if it had grown out of the ground, surrounded by a wild garden dotted with ceramic monsters and a replica of the Kremlin, just off of one of the stone stairways. Then I forgot the whole thing.

A couple of years later I was in a San Francisco bookstore, doing a reading from a book I’d written that had a chapter on Smith’s
Anthology
at its center. Afterwards a man with a long white beard came up to me and started talking about Harry Smith, record collecting, a warehouse in Richmond that closed just days before they got the money to buy it out, the Bop City nightclub in the Fillmore district, one of its walls covered by Smith’s giant bebop mural, a painting of notes, not performers—I couldn’t keep up.

I barely caught the man’s name, and only because I’d heard it before: Lu Kemnitzer. “That little apartment,” he said, “that’s where we were, on Panoramic Way in Berkeley—” “Wait a minute,” I said. “Harry Smith lived on Panoramic?” It didn’t seem real; Kemnitzer began to look like the Panoramic gorgon. I got up my nerve. “Do you
remember,
” I said to Kemnitzer, who now seemed much older than he had appeared a minute or two before, “what the
number
of Harry Smith’s apartment was?” Kemnitzer looked at me as if I’d asked him if he remembered where he was living now—if he could, you know, find his way home. “Five and a half,” he said.

By then it was late—on Panoramic, much too dark to look for a number. I could hardly wait for the next morning. And of course there it was: a dull, white door in grey stucco; tiny windows; a cell. Maybe ten steps across from the place I’d picked out.

Every day since, as I’ve walked up the Panoramic hill past Harry Smith’s place and then down past it, I’ve wanted to knock on the door and tell whoever is living there—in four years, I’ve seen no one, typical for Panoramic—who once lived there. Who once lived there, and who surely left behind a ghost, if not a whole
crew of them. “Wanted,” ran a tiny ad in the September 1946 issue of
Record Changer
magazine:

They were still in that little room—they had to be. They sounded like ghosts on their own records, long years before Harry Smith began looking for them; deprived of their black 78 rpm bodies, they were certain to sound more like ghosts now.