Seven Oaks Magazine.

“So much has been written about the Sixties,” Suze Rotolo observes in Greenwich Village memoir entitled A Freewheelin’ Time (Random House of Canada, $25.95), “that the more distant those years become, the more mythic the tales and the time seem to be.” Rotolo was the long-haired, chubby-cheeked teenager holding tightly on to Bob Dylan’s arm as they walk down Jones Street in lower Manhattan in one of the most memorable and evocative photos from early in the decade. The image appeared on the sleeve of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album. No one who ever contemplated it at the time will forget it, as it was a picture showing the redemptive power of human warmth in the middle of social and political chaos. Rotolo was the great love of the young Dylan’s life, and he of hers, once he completed his transcendent and much analysed escape from Minnesota to New York City, losing his innocence and confronting the bigger world as he travelled, not down the Mississippi River like Huck Finn, but across the upper Midwest.

These facts are common knowledge from the large number of Dylan biographies published over the years. Rotolo herself, a familiar figure in the avant-garde theatre scene as well as an enthusiastic hanger-on in the period’s folk music revival, was understood to still be around in New York. But though occasionally interviewed by some fresh biographer, she kept out of the spotlight, respectably so, until she turned up two years ago in No Direction Home, the acclaimed documentary by Martin Scorsese. She was on screen for only a few minutes but she stole the show with the sincerity and level-headed compassion and hints of the honesty and hard-won simplicity she shows more fully here. I finished A Freewheelin’ Time with two conclusions. That Rotolo is somebody one would dearly enjoy to know and that Dylan was a young fool for letting her slip away as he pursued Joan Baez. But then the memoir reveals much about Dylan’s needs and the emotional and social price he always has had to pay in order to protect the sources of his art. When Rotolo at one point compares him to Picasso we know exactly what she means. He is a very great artist indeed and a revolutionary one. He is a figure whose sweep, depth, fecundity and artistic integrity incline people to say he’s a genius if anyone is and who, simply put, taught his contemporaries what being an artist means. Which is not the same as always being a fine fellow.

He was twenty and she was seventeen when they met “on a hot day at the end of July 1961 at a marathon folk concert at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan, a big, all-day music festival organized to launch a radio station dedicated to folk music”. In the rapidly expanding folk music universe, this was a major event, filled with big-name performers. “Whenever I looked around, Bobby was nearby”, she writes. “I thought he was oddly old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way. His jeans were as rumpled as his shirt and even in the hot weather he had on the black corduroy cap he always wore. 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.” She uses impish at another point as well: “Bobby had an impish charm that older women found endearing, though my mother was immune.” An even greater degree of non-susceptibility characterised Suze’s elder sibling Carla, a much less bohemian personality though one who was also interested in folk song (and indeed was for a time an assistant to Alan Lomax, the famous folk-musicologist or musical anthropologist). Carla simply couldn’t stand the strange young man who was soon living with her kid sister, a dislike that Dylan reciprocated, just as he did the mother’s. Two or three times in the book Rotolo hints how certain early Dylan songs came about. “Mr Tambourine Man”, for example, was “written about a lonely night Bob had spent wandering the streets after the two of us had quarrelled.” But she never refers specifically to “Ballad in Plain D”, an astonishingly insolent screed that gives his own version of why the sister and the mother were so accusatory. It is by far his longest song, taking up one half of Another Side of Bob Dylan. She remarks only that this, his third album, “made for tough listening. Bob sure knew how to maul me with crazy sorrow…” That phrase “crazy sorrow” from “Mr. Tambourine Man” is only one of a number of Dylan’s images she uses in recalling those years. Then, not wishing to sound harsh herself, she adds “…but I loved the sound of his voice.” Later, even what’s perhaps her most biting comment ends more softly than it begins: “He had an uncanny ability to complicate the obvious and sanctify the banal—just like a poet.” That she loved him deeply, then and a long time afterwards, is apparent throughout the book, though the two of them, as is so often the case with even the most successful couples, represented different styles of being—something that people believe about others without admitting that the paradox is a universal one that they themselves most likely epitomise to their friends.

Rotolo was what used to be called “a red-diaper baby”. In the 1930s, her father, an Italian immigrant, and her Italian-American mother, were members of the American Communist Party. Their belief in its doctrines were probably (Rotolo doesn’t specify) cut out from under them by Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Her father died in 1958 and her mother, as was commonly and perhaps usually the case, continued to work hard for progressive causes even if this meant living with the threat of persecution and even prosecution. As for Dylan, he was the child of a totally apolitical and perhaps unworldly lower-middle-class Jewish appliance dealer and his homemaker spouse in a small city not far below the border with Manitoba. Iron ore mining was the dominant factor in the life of Hibbing, Minnesota, a place without much room for culture. Visitors who make pilgrimages there today to see Dylan sites are greeted by a boastful sign proclaiming the town as the birthplace of—wait for it—the Greyhound Bus company.

Dylan’s family made quite a contrast with the Rotolos, “economically challenged but culturally sophisticated people [in a household where] there was more talk of fine wines than actual buying and drinking of them. I don’t think Bob thought about it much, but he certainly recognized good quality when it came his way. In all things, he was a fast learner.” And one of the teachers was Rotolo herself, as she “was passionate about civil rights, banning the bomb, and any kind of injustice. Growing up in a politically conscious home during the Cold War and under McCarthyism, I had struggled through the issues of Communism, socialism, and the American way. I brought those interests out in Bob. I was exposed to a lot more than a kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, was, especially with my upbringing amid books and music and interesting, albeit difficult, people.” Her political awareness, however, was separate from, though of course variously connected to, her life as a visual artist and occasional actor. She was a person fascinated by Brecht, and she cobbled together a very modest living by designing stage sets, making props and selling her homemade jewellery. In a way, then, her priorities were the opposite of his.

Reading the book in the context of everything else that we know about Dylan makes it clear that Rotolo was his acoustic girlfriend. When they broke up, slowly, he was getting beyond so-called protest songs. As she says at one point, he wanted to write music, not preach to a congregation. His extraordinary talent for sophisticated poetic expression (yes yes, we know all about the lyrics) went together with his even more remarkable gift of melodic invention to make a body of work that, as it blossomed, seemed to hover over the entire culture. But in moving on he left an understanding of just what the folk revival, which declined once he withdrew, had been: a phenomenon of the Eisenhower-Kennedy cold war years. Similarly, he did much to create the distinction, since erased, between rock and pop. The former, an expression of outlawry, became the lingua franca; the latter, with the change of a single vowel, became pap—suitable for preteen AM radio.

Dylan made this cross-fade the law when he shocked audiences by going electric. The folkies felt especially marginalised by his appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. This annual venue had been an important showcase for him and, as we learn now, an important turning point for Rotolo as well. She recalls the 1963 edition of the festival when Dylan shared the stage with Joan Baez. The two singers’ “professional appearances together were exciting and provoked gossip about an affair. At first it was just gossip—then, of course, it wasn’t. What was especially hard for me was dealing with what was private becoming public.” Until this point in her narrative, Dylan is either “Bob” or “Bobby”. Then he becomes “Dylan”. Yet the couple go forward, though Rotolo got a place on her own in August 1963, the month after the festival. Once settled in, she learned that she was pregnant. In consultation with Dylan, the former Bobby, she had an abortion, an especially scary decision in 1963. Later, she lost most everything she owned in an apartment fire. She writes of herself as having been emotionally fragile and prone to depression.

A vivid slice of what happened next is what you get from watching Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of Dylan and Baez’s tour of the UK in 1965. One thread in the film is the way the first performer keeps shunning the latter. As for Rotolo, who appears to have been at least in touch with Dylan through some or much of 1965, she continued to be a soldier in the army of art and a fighter for progressive causes. One of the most vivid parts of the book describes her second trip to Cuba in defiance of the Kennedy’s administration’s declaration making travel there by US citizens illegal. She met both Fidel Castro and Che Guevera. Predictably, her passport was revoked. She also became a person of interest to the FBI, of whom, fortunately, she had no particular fear, as many “children of Communists […] had lived through early-morning FBI visits to our homes when we were children. We had all been schooled about the FBI—their tactics and our rights—at a young age. We knew we weren’t obligated to respond in any way. And who else would knock of my door at 7:00 a.m.? I just ignored them and after a while they didn’t bother me anymore.”

That this is clearly Rotolo’s own book, produced by the same part of her that works at arts and crafts, seems beyond a doubt. A ghost or a high-powered commercial editor would not have let her turn the middle stretch into a kind of biographical dictionary of early Sixties New York folksingers, or the last one into a mosaic of short anecdotes and scenes, while keeping the first part in chronological narrative form. One of the book’s pluses is that it isn’t really malicious, though few women would blame her if it had been, and doesn’t appear to have been written for the purpose of cashing in. In fact, it doesn’t seem self-serving at all, except in the psychological sense. One of its most telling moments comes in 1962 when she learns that Dylan’s family name is Zimmerman. She was hurt that he had kept such a secret from her, but reports that he became “more forthcoming [after] he learned how well I could keep secrets”: her old anti-FBI training once again. And the memoir has numerous flashes of fine conversational-style writing. For example, she explains the choice of the word freewheelin’ in the name of the work whose title she echoes in her own: “the spelling, with the dropped g at the end, is all Bob. During the early years, he was adamant about writing down words as spoken by everyday people. He chopped off the ends of words like a hiker hacking a path through the woods, machete in hand.”

For the most part, she kept the details of their relationship private for four decades, until being persuaded to appear in the Scorsese film. “It has taken me many years to allow my parallel lives to converge”, she writes. “But there will always be a space between the image and reality because ghosts live there and they cannot be contained under glass. Over time I have learned to be more at ease with the holy fascination people have with Bob Dylan […] I see history as a reliquary—a container where relics are kept and displayed for contemplation.”

Coming round again to Rotolo’s remark about all that “has been written about the Sixties” naturally leads one to observe not only how many such books still appear each publishing season but also how many of them have a Dylan connection—and how many are, like hers, the long-delayed testimony of people who were there.

The effects of Dylan’s electrification on just about everything cover nine pages in The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade by Gerald DeGroot (Harvard University Press, US$29.95). Dylan plays a large role even in ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky—Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Simon & Schuster Canada, $29.99), a full biography by David Henderson, a poet and jazz musician (who’s most interesting, however, on the FBI’s hard work at trying to discredit Hendrix as a dangerous radical). Numerous histories and memories of the Weather Underground, the mostly non-violent movement that bombed facilities of the US government and its defence contractors during the Vietnam War, have appeared in the years since then. So have most of the relevant memoirs. But one of the last blanks in the first-person testimony has been filled now with Flying Close to the Sun (Publisher Group Canada, $33.50) by Cathy Wilkerson. She was one of the two women who survived the destruction of a Weatherman safe-house on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village in 1970 when a bomb went off accidentally. For the past twenty years she’s been a math teacher in New York City schools. Such whatever-became-of information about Sixties figures is often surprising or ironic this way. The two men who founded the Black Panther Party (whose full name, significantly, was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) were Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The former died in 1989, long after the excitement of those days. He was shot to death not by the white cops as so many Panther leaders and other Black activists had been, but by a drug dealer with whom he had a business disagreement. Seale, for his part, became a spokesman for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and is now a different kind of pitchman in his role as a university professor. A new essay collection, Comrades: The Local History of the Black Panther Party edited by Judson L. Jeffries (Indiana University Press, US$24.95 paper) brings them to mind, though the book is focused on the community-building the Panthers considered an essential part of their mandate. The book compares their street-level good works in the ghettos of seven American cities.

Other than Rotolo’s, the recent book on the period that has struck me the most simply by its existence is The Music of Joni Mitchell by Lloyd Whitesell (Oxford University Press Canada, $22.95 paper). Dylan, clearly, always has been frustrated by the abundance of attention paid to him as a lyricist and the near absence of books discussing him as a composer. This was the unstated message on every page of his memoir Chronicles. Whitesell, who teaches music history at McGill University, does for Mitchell what others (or he himself) must begin doing for Dylan, analyzing the structure of the music: how and why it’s put together this way and not that, and how it changes. Of course Mitchell is a perfect subject for this type of criticism, given the way she slowly moved away from folk-like melodies and towards jazz, to take advantage of her swooping vocal range, which easily leapfrogged over octaves.

George Fetherling’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway Books). His “Books This Week” column appears exclusively in Seven Oaks.