Much to Hajdu's credit, he has no patience at all with Dylan's folkie associates or Dylan's own fake anthems like "Blowin' in the Wind" -- finger-pointing music that points at nothin'. "Positively Fourth Street" isn't just about Dylan, either. It's about the glamorous quartet of Dylan and Joan Baez ("the Liz and Dick of the self-righteous set," as Mort Sahl dubbed them), her sister Mimi and brilliant and enigmatic Irish-Cuban novelist and songwriter Richard Fariña. Fariña's 1966 death in a motorcycle accident at age 29, just as his only novel, "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me," was about to be published, caps off the narrative.

Hajdu nails the time and place beautifully, lavishly using quotes from the characters who lived the scene to sum it all up. ("If there was a party in the village," said Oscar Brand, "it was 'You bring the folksinger, I'll bring the negro.'") But if only because we know what came after, Dylan's thread dominates our attention. Hajdu is smarter than Sounes about the music. He points out early on that "folk" music -- that is, the work of the seminal singers included in the fabled "Anthology of American Folk Music" -- was never meant to be "noncommercial." All those songs were presented as popular music in their own time and place. He zeroes right in on the essential difference between Dylan and the pristine folky style of Baez and her acolytes. The latter were self-conscious followers of Harvard-educated Pete Seeger, while Dylan was the illegitimate spiritual child of Woody Guthrie, in whom the lower-middle-class, Jewish college dropout from the Midwest found a role model who was "Hank Williams, James Dean and Buddy Holly -- a literate folksinger with a rock and roll attitude."

The rest of the story, as we all know, is history. But history can sometimes be pretty boring, so if you haven't been enthralled by Dylan since the Jimmy Carter era, you should stick with Hajdu's book, which leaves Bob Dylan where we want to remember him -- stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again. For God's sake, and for Bob's and ours, let's leave him there.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"