Bob Dylan’s freewheelin’ first love

An influential presence during four formative years of Bob Dylan’s career, his former long-term girlfriend Suze Rotolo has never talked about their love affair – until now. She tells Charlotte Heathcote about their bohemian Sixties romance in the vibrant community of New York’s Greenwich Village

Suze Rotolo s story is no kiss n tell memoir Suze Rotolo's story is no kiss'n'tell memoir

It’s 40 years since Suze Rotolo’s intense four-year relationship with Bob Dylan ended and ever since their break-up, the artist, pictured arm-in-arm with the singer on the cover of his breakthrough album Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, has stubbornly resisted pleas to tell her story. A major cultural influence upon Dylan at a pivotal point in his career, she has finally acquiesced.

Not that Rotolo’s story is any tawdry kiss ‘n’ tell memoir. The relationship is placed firmly in the context of the times when the couple shared a home in bohemian Greenwich Village, soaking up the climate of fertile creativity and political activism that fed into Dylan’s music and paved the way for him to shape the decade.

So why has Rotolo chosen to break her silence now? For all her obvious affection for her first love, she partly feels that Dylan has been overly mythologised: “I wanted perspective, to let people know that Bob Dylan was a working artist who was discovering himself in those years, discovering his voice.” Ultimately though, this New York artist was inspired by her son Luca (also a guitarist).

Suze and Bob in wintry Greenwich Village Suze and Bob in wintry Greenwich Village

“The clincher was my son who told me: ‘People have been writing their version of you for years, it's time you told the real one.’”

When the young couple first met, Dylan, 20, was an unsigned musician. Rotolo had seen him playing harmonica onstage at Gerde’s Folk City but, when they were finally introduced at an all-day folk concert at a church in July 1961, both were instantly conscious of the chemistry between them.

“There was something about him,” says Rotolo now. “There was definitely this sensation that we already knew each other, we just had to get better acquainted. It was very intense very early on and we were very much attracted to each other.”

There was something about him. There was definitely this sensation that we already knew each other, we just had to get better acquainted.

Dylan’s Chronicles show that the feeling was mutual: “Right from the start, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled by my ears before but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard. Outside of my music, being with her seemed to be the main point in life.”

In her eloquently written book, Rotolo adds, “He was funny, engaging, intense and he was persistent. These words completely describe who he was throughout the time we were together, only the order of the words would shift depending on mood or circumstance.”

The couple quickly became inseparable with Rotolo showing Dylan her favourite paintings by Picasso or Kandinsky at the Museum of Modern Art; sharing her favourite poems by Lord Byron or taking him to see plays by Bertolt Brecht. The couple also saw performances by Judy Collins, Jose Feliciano, Charlie Mingus. The boy from Minnesota was entranced by this savvy, stimulating New Yorker.

That September Dylan was signed to Columbia Records. Now able to afford his own apartment, Rotolo moved in with him as soon as she turned 18. In those days, cohabiting wasn’t something an unmarried couple could get away with in many places outside Greenwich Village.

A Freewheelin’ Time paints a vivid picture of a dynamic era for young people eager to overturn what they perceived to be the strait-laced repression of the Fifties. An active civil rights campaigner, Rotolo’s political engagement also informed Dylan’s half-formed beliefs.

As the civil rights movement gained momentum and folk music became the voice of the Greenwich Villagers, it became a profound influence on Dylan, as songs like Blowin’ In The Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’ attest.

“It made no sense that black performers who were very famous, like Ella Fitzgerald, could not stay in the same hotels as the white people in their band. Everybody who had gone to the Village had this sense of what was wrong with the country so Bob certainly had the interest and the instinct but I’d participated in marches on Washington when I was still in high school. So if anything, I introduced him to the details of what was going on.”

In February 1963, the loved-up couple were photographed walking the snowy streets of New York for the cover of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Released in May of that year, the record made him a star.

Many people would pounce on this moment of glory but Rotolo was uncomfortable with becoming public property. “It was nice to be identified with that cover and those times. It just made me wary because I’m very private.” That private nature means she’s reluctant to talk about the Dylan songs she inspired.

“The way someone who’s writing fiction takes the sentiment and the joy and the pain and the turmoil, Bob used that for his art. I can privately listen to songs and know what they are. I felt those songs were more personal at the time, very much. Certain songs seemed so blatantly naked and I would react back then ‘til I couldn’t listen to them.

“There is one song called Tomorrow is a Long Time which is a beautiful love song and I know where that came from. I like to listen to that one.”

Written during an eight-month period that Rotolo spent studying in Perugia, it contains lovelorn lines like: “Only if she was lyin’ by me / Then I’d lie in my bed once again”. She is also widely believed to have inspired Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.

Still, being Bob Dylan’s muse was nowhere near enough for a woman as independent-minded as Rotolo, so what attracted Dylan to her was also what would ultimately drive a wedge between them. At the same time, Dylan’s growing success made Rotolo feel more invisible than ever.

“It was hard when he got more and more famous and had more people around him all the time. As long as we were together he’d be fine. What made me unhappy was that I was supposed to wait and to be there at his beck and call, all tied up with that problem of being ‘the folk singer’s chick’. We females would just have to wait and that didn’t sit well with me.

“It was this strange feeling of not being a whole person. I’d be referred to as ‘Bob’s chick’. I couldn’t go and sit in a café and draw and write poetry like men could. I had no other word for it but jealousy. It was taken for granted that women weren’t part of society and the idea of women being equal to men wasn’t even thought of.” The campaign for equality was focused on race. No one had considered gender equality.

Meanwhile Dylan’s fame meant he became increasingly withdrawn, paranoid and needy and that made her feel suffocated. Ultimately, Rotolo felt taken for granted. She can see now that she and Dylan were too similar for their romance to last.

“We were both so young and very vulnerable and highly sensitive and neither one of us had skin growing over our nerve ends.”

Then in the summer of 1964, she heard a mutual friend talking to Dylan about his affair with folk singer Joan Baez. Rotolo describes her reaction as “Sadness so overwhelming it takes the breath away… We talked a lot but told little.”

While this was obviously a factor in the couple’s eventual split, Rotolo is irritated by a general assumption that it was the sole cause: “That was just one of many things that went wrong. That was a catalyst, I could find a way out.”

The couple were already in the midst of a prolonged, confused and painful break-up when Rotolo discovered she was pregnant. She eventually made the difficult decision to seek an illegal and extremely dangerous abortion, subsequently sinking into depression.

Still, over the course of four decades, the pair have never lost touch, meeting from time to time after going their separate ways, although Rotolo says they only speak occasionally. “Although he’s off in the stratosphere, it’s respect for those times and what that relationship meant for him and me, a significant time and a coming of age.” The growing Dylan legend became a source of frustration as the years passed, though.

“If you mentioned Bob Dylan’s name, a lot of people would genuflect. My instinct is to go against the Dylanologists who dissect every line. The Dylanologists make you crazy! He is not a god!” She laughs. “So I kept very private. I’ve been too defensive about talking about those days. When I was asked to write this book, I could suddenly see that these were wonderful stories in a wonderful time.”

***BUY: A Freewheelin' Time***

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