She's the reason he traveled on

Rotolo first saw the "raspy"-voiced Dylan playing harmonica with another singer at "the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue" Gerde's Folk City. It was spring 1961. He'd arrived a few months earlier, by car from Minnesota, on a quest to find Woody Guthrie during "the coldest winter in 17 years" (he wrote in "Talkin' New York"). Rotolo and Dylan met officially on a hot July day at a marathon music festival at a church in Upper Manhattan to launch a radio station. In his book, "Chronicles," he says her sister introduced them. She says only, "Whenever I looked around, Bobby was nearby. . . . He made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly." By the time the musicians were packing their gear, "Bob and I were pretty much glued to each other."

Rotolo was there when New York Times critic Robert Shelton put Dylan on the musical map on Sept. 29, 1961, when Columbia Records signed him and when he stayed up all hours writing some of the era's best songs. And when she left for Italy in June 1962, pressured by her mother, who disliked Dylan intensely, she was the subject of some of his sweetest and most bitter songs ("Boots of Spanish Leather," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right").

Much of this has appeared elsewhere, but Rotolo corrects the record and offers other angles on the prismatic artist that is Dylan. We see his October 1962 letter to her showing his horror over the Cuban missile crisis -- "the maniacs were really going to do it this time" -- and how it was the seedbed of the now familiar anthem "Masters of War."

Like others in the Village, Rotolo doubted Dylan's stories of his origins, but she was deeply hurt to discover he was really Robert Allen Zimmerman when his draft card spilled from his wallet in their 4th Street walk-up. "I called him Raz now and then, taken from his initials, just to annoy him."

It is that sort of deception by the love of her young life, and the liaisons with Joan Baez and numerous other women he tried to keep secret, that helped drive them apart as his fame soared.

In that pre-feminist era, Rotolo also had stirrings of a desire to live her own life. "I couldn't handle being 'one step closer to God.' I was being pecked at because of my proximity to the end of the rainbow. Expected to focus entirely on his needs, I was invisible -- downgraded from chick and guitar string, no less. . . . I felt lost, confused, and betrayed." Rotolo discovered she was pregnant, but rejected Dylan's pleas to marry. (She says they both decided on an abortion. He eventually married and divorced two women, both of whom were pregnant when they exchanged vows.)

After the final breakup -- famously told in "Ballad in Plain D" and "One Too Many Mornings" -- she wrote in a 1964 notebook entry, displaying a characteristic generosity in her despair: "I believe in his genius . . . [but he] doesn't necessarily do the right thing. But where is it written that this must be so in order to do great work in the world?"

Rotolo, mother of a 28-year-old son with her Italian-born husband, has few regrets. She also holds things back. "Their traces go deep, and with all due respect I keep them with my own," she writes, in one of many phrases in the book borrowed from Dylan's songs, past and present -- potent evidence that his music remains part of the soundtrack of her life.

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kris.lindgren@latimes.com