How to judge a book by its cover - Positively 4th Street

How to judge a book by its cover - Positively 4th Street

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By David Shaftel
Published: September 13 2008

David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street tells the intertwining stories of
two couples: Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and Mimi (Baez's sister) and
Richard Fariña, who performed together as a folk duo. For the cover,
the folksinger and illustrator Eric von Schmidt adapted a poster,
inspired by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, that he created for a Bob
Dylan/Joan Baez concert tour in 1965, at a time when the two singers
were drifting apart.

As a template, von Schmidt, who died last year, chose a photograph of
Dylan and Baez on stage together shortly after a quarrel: a gloomy
Baez is sitting behind Dylan, her hand on the small of his back, as
he strums a guitar and sings through a cigarette. Hajdu notes that
von Schmidt was given instructions to give both artists equal billing
on the poster. "His solution," writes Hajdu, "was an off-kilter
design whereby Joan's name and image appear first from left to right
but Bob's came first from top to bottom." Dylan rejected the poster,
though, according to Hajdu, believing that Baez's face occupied too
much of the foreground and that von Schmidt had made Dylan's nose too big.

As on the original poster, the front cover of Positively 4th Street
shows von Schmidt's rendering of Dylan and Baez on stage together
(Dylan sans cigarette) set against an orange background, with the
title and author's name above in French art nouveau lettering. The
back cover shows an image of Mimi and Richard Fariña in similar
poses, as if mimicking the original, set against the same orange
background. Here Mimi Baez-Fariña, shown in profile, is standing,
playing guitar and wearing a blue flower print dress with a loaf of
bread in one pocket. Richard Fariña is seated, clutching a dulcimer
in his left hand while he pecks at a typewriter in his lap, an image
that suggests the duality of his talent as a writer and folksinger.

Hajdu's narrative follows the couples until 1966, the year when
Fariña was killed in a motorbike accident shortly after publishing
his first novel. A few of the early posters of Dylan and Baez
survived as collectors' items but it was not until von Schmidt was
commissioned to adapt it for Positively 4th Street in 2001 that the
image reunited the foursome and finally saw a wider audience.

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