• Books Home
• Features
• 
• 
• Bookmark this site

Suze Rotolo was Bob Dylan’s first love: she’s the pretty blonde huddling up to him on the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. You can tell a lot from that cover: these bohemian New Yorkers are clearly very much a couple, but Dylan’s gaze is inward, while Rotolo smiles out at us; she is sensibly belted into a thick green coat while Dylan, who she says was always image-conscious, is plainly freezing in a suitably ‘folkie’ suede jacket.

Rotolo has been trying to ignore readings of their relationship since it ended in the mid-1960s; she appears to have changed tack out of the desire to be seen as a person not a picture, since she can’t avoid being seen. It’s a good move – if anything can rescue her from being perceived as ‘a string on Dylan’s guitar’ (her words), then it’s this fresh, balanced and involving story of life among the folkies in early ’60s Greenwich Village.

Rotolo, a ‘red-diaper baby’ (i.e. the daughter of Communists), was cultured and politicised when she and Dylan met in 1961, even though she was only 17 (he was 20). An artist and set designer alight with intellectual curiosity, Rotolo introduced Dylan to Byron, Rimbaud and the Beatles, and her drawings decorated his published songs. It was a freewheelin’ time, all grotty flats permanently full of friends drinking, smoking and debating the important questions; it was also a socially restrictive, pre-feminism era in which a girl was expected to ditch her own life to follow her man.

Rotolo is unfailingly generous about Dylan, whether praising his talent or mourning his infidelities, but that kind of self-abnegation was never going to work for her. The love affair crumbled under the pressures of his growing fame and of certain facets of his personality that made that fame possible; clearly both were devastated. It’s always been pretty clear why a girl would mind losing Dylan; now at last, it’s equally obvious why he minded losing this girl. Nina Caplan