Positively 4th Street was written soon after Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan had fallen out, the circumstances of which are recorded as follows:

The singer songwriters that hung about Greenwich village at that time were in the habit of trying out new songs on each other, (as you would) and Dylan seemed to value Phil's judgement when it came to his own songs. In fact the first time Dylan played 'Mr. Tambourine Man, it was on an occasion when he Phil and David Blue were having an exchange of songs session. Phil had nothing but praise for this new Dylan composition.

However, the following year on a similar occasion Phil had been critical of a new song Dylan had written with, for Phil, unforeseen consequences. Later that evening as some of them were headed uptown in a limousine, Dylan told the driver to pull over and ordered Phil from the car. As Phil stepped out of the car, Dylan is alleged to have shouted to him "You're not a folksinger, you're a journalist!"

This concluded good relations between Dylan and Ochs.

The irony was that earlier in the year when Dylan had been castigated by the audience at the Newport Folk Festival for going electric, Phil had been the first one to come to his defence.

Anyway, Dylan wrote Positively 4th Street shortly after.

I have a recording made on wbai NYC 1965 of Phil singing a four line parody of Positively 4th Street in which he mimics Dylan's singing. It goes like this:

You've gotta lotta gall
To say you are my pal
I used to be
Among the crowd you're in with.

So there you have it.

What was the song that Phil criticised? Well according to Michael Schumacher in 'The Life Of Phil Ochs' it was 'Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window', but Marc Elliot in 'Death of a Rebel' says that in an interview in 1972 Phil had insisted the song was 'Sooner or Later'. In any event Phil's prophecy that it would never be a 'number 1' came to pass.