'A Freewheelin' Life' by Suze Rotolo
BOOK REVIEW
A memoir of life at Bob Dylan's side, in the crucible of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.
THEY were cherub-cheeked kids when each landed in Greenwich Village in early 1961, drawn like moths to the flames of art, music, theater and ideas that burned so brightly in every cranny of the Big Apple's most bohemian quarter.
She was 17. He was 20. An iconic image of the lovers, huddled, red-nosed against the winter cold, walking a slushy New York street, would herald a new generation, unimpressed by Madison Avenue -- and the arrival of a major new talent -- when it appeared on the seminal album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" in May 1963.
By then, Suze Rotolo and Dylan had broken up and gotten back together again. She'd introduced him to Picasso, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Rimbaud, Brendan Behan, commedia dell'arte and Modernist artist Red Grooms. And he -- already infused with the lyrics and rhythms of generations of balladry, blues and social commentary -- had stormed the citadel of the great American Folk Revival movement.
Suze Rotolo: In some copies of Thursday's Calendar section, a review of the book "A Freewheelin' Time" said that Suze Rotolo was writing about her life in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village after a quarter century. It was nearly half a century ago. The review also said that Bob Dylan married two women who were pregnant when he exchanged vows with them. One of them, Sara Lownds, already had given birth when she married Dylan.
Suze Rotolo: A correction in Friday's paper on a review of Suze Rotolo's memoir, "A Freewheelin' Time," said that Sara Lownds had given birth before she married Bob Dylan. In fact, it was his second wife, Carole Dennis, who had given birth to their daughter before they exchanged vows.
"He became an elephant in the room of my life," Rotolo, now 64, writes in "A Freewheelin' Time," her "reliquary" of an "amazing . . . eventful time of protest and rebellion."
But this memoir is more -- and in some ways less -- than a full accounting of life with the man she calls "the mover and shaper of the culture of that era." It is a vivid insider's portrait of Greenwich Village, ground zero at the cusp of a new era, a place "people like me went -- people who knew in their souls that they didn't belong where they came from."
Rotolo, a self-described "red-diaper baby" raised by cultured union activist parents, came by subway from Queens. She was eager to leave her widowed mother with her drinking problems, and to make a new life in art.
She painted theater sets, waitressed and tended the office for the Congress of Racial Equality, already a veteran of youth marches on Washington in 1958 and '59. By night, she haunted the clubs where Dave Van Ronk, Victoria Spivey, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and John Lee Hooker passed the hat.
