Product Description

A Freewheelin’ Time is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand, eyewitness, participant-observer account of the immensely creative and fertile years of the 1960s, just before the circus was in full swing and Bob Dylan became the anointed ringmaster. It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him.

A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists. Growing up at the start of the Cold War and during McCarthyism, she inevitably became an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. Her childhood was turbulent, but Suze found solace in poetry, art, and music. In Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, she encountered like-minded friends who were also politically active. Then one hot day in July 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, a rising young musician, at a folk concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were young, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.

Suze Rotolo’s story is rich in character and setting, filled with vivid memories of those tumultuous years of dramatic change and poignantly rising expectations when art, culture, and politics all seemed to be conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and more equitable life. She writes of her involvement with the civil rights movement and describes the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, before women’s liberation changed the rules for the better. And she tells the wonderfully romantic story of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressures of growing fame.

A Freewheelin’ Time is a vibrant, moving memoir of a hopeful time and place and of a vital subculture at its most creative. It communicates the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3166 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-13
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In July 1961, Rotolo, a shy 17-year-old from Queens, met an up-and-coming young folk singer named Bob Dylan at an all-day folk festival at Riverside Church in Manhattan, and her life changed forever. For the next few years, Suze and Bobby lived a freewheeling life amid the bohemians in the emerging folk scene in Greenwich Village. Rotolo offers brief glimpses of the denizens populating the new music scene below 14th Street in the early '60s and recalls the excitement as writers and musicians like Dylan wandered in and out of each other's lives and apartments, trading music and lyrics to produce a new sound that would change American music. Yet as the woman who's clutching Dylan's arm on the cover of his second album Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Rotolo doesn't give us a very freewheelin' memoir. She offers shallow, almost schoolgirl-like reflections on the man she loved and lived with for three years. In a dull and plodding manner, Rotolo provides no new insights into Dylan, claiming, as have so many, that he is mysterious and enigmatic. In an excerpt from one of her journals, she writes ambivalently that she believes in his genius and that he is an extraordinary writer, but that she doesn't think he's an honorable person. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Face it: The art -- or is it more of a science? -- of dissecting Bob Dylan is a man's game. Most of the Dylan scholars (both the smart and the lame ones), the rock critics who have collectively spent several lifetimes wrestling with his lyrics, the civilian gasbags who hold forth at dinner parties whenever his name is even mentioned, are men. I used to have an officemate who, whenever he wanted to take a break from doing actual work (which was shockingly often), would march into my office singing some random Dylan lyric and challenge me to name which song it came from. I know women who love Dylan's music as much as anyone else does, but I've never met one who felt the need to be a walking, talking sack of trivia.
So whether she knows it or not -- and I suspect she does -- Suze Rotolo has taken something of a risk in writing a memoir of the time she spent in the early '60s as the girlfriend of the Great Man. There are going to be people out there who think she's just cashing in on her role as a handmaiden to genius. But "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" is only partly about Dylan. Rotolo has written a perceptive, entertaining and often touching book about a remarkable era in recent American cultural history, about a way of living, of making art, that couldn't have happened at any other time or in any other place.
This is about as far from a juicy tell-all as a memoir can get: Rotolo does share some private details of the story of her romance with Dylan -- the two met in 1961, when Rotolo was 17 and Dylan was 20, and were a couple for some four years -- but her approach is so sensitive, discreet and affectionate that she never comes off as opportunistic. This is an honest book about a great love affair, set against the folk music revival of the early 1960s, but its sense of time and place is so vivid that it's also another kind of love story: one about a very special pocket of New York, in the days when impoverished artists, and not just supermodels, could afford to live there.
Rotolo writes about Dylan's sudden and rapid ascension, but she doesn't underplay her own story, which is engaging in itself: When her mother and stepfather offered her the opportunity to go to school in Italy for six months, she made the wrenching decision to leave her boyfriend behind. (Rotolo includes quotes from some of Dylan's letters to her, which are deeply moving both for their unapologetic silliness and their unvarnished lovesickness.) She also details, conscientiously and without bitterness, some of the issues that led to the couple's eventual breakup. Rotolo, an artist herself, was completely clued in to the sexism of the folk scene (a feature of '60s counterculture in general). She began to shrink from the idea of being a musician's "chick" or, worse, his "old lady." She writes only glancingly of Dylan's romance with Joan Baez, which began when she and Dylan were still a couple: The episode was obviously painful for her, but she doesn't treat it as a major feature of her story. It's possible for women as well as men to be chivalrous, as Rotolo proves.
"A Freewheelin' Time" doesn't begin and end with Dylan: Rotolo also talks about her life after Bob, including an illegal trip she made to Cuba in 1963, as a way of protesting the State Department's travel ban to that country. (Rotolo, raised in a fervently communist household, was sympathetic to communist ideas only to a point; her ongoing questioning of those ideas is a recurring feature of her memoir.) And as the book's title says outright, Rotolo knows that the story of Bob Dylan is inseparable from that of a specific New York neighborhood. In one of the loveliest passages she describes the genesis of the famous photograph that graces the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," an image whose visual and emotional simplicity made it revolutionary, for album-cover art, at the time.
Rotolo describes how Columbia Records sent a photographer to the couple's apartment on West Fourth Street. For the occasion, Rotolo writes, "Bob chose his rumpled clothes carefully." When it was time to go outside for more pictures, he wore a suede jacket, even though it was an extremely cold day. Rotolo wrapped herself in a green coat, which she belted tightly for more warmth. "I felt like an Italian sausage," she writes.
The cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" shows an almost unbearably young-looking couple striding toward the camera -- toward the future -- through a corridor of parked cars and tallish buildings laced with fire escapes. There's slush in the street; this is New York in midwinter, after all. The guy in the picture, a skinny, nervous-looking kid, his head topped with a tall pile of curly hair, is instantly recognizable. But the girl, attractive and thoughtful looking, with a wide-open smile, holds the camera's gaze just as intently. Dylan fans, thanks to their stockpile of important trivia, have always known that this woman's name is Suze Rotolo. Now we know more than just her name. -- Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

"One of the most recognizable album-cover images of the 1960s shows a young man, underdressed for the winter in a light suede jacket, leaning into a young woman. Rotolo was that young woman, and in this uneven, overlong, still fascinating memoir, she tells the story behind that photo and her love for Bob Dylan. Rotolo met Dylan in 1961; she was 17, he 20. While Dylan is the bedrock of her memoir—without him, would there be a book?—he isn’t the whole story. Rotolo discusses her own background (Italian heritage, Communist parents, inability to fit in growing up in Queens, the craziness and sexism of the era), but the dominant setting is the Greenwich Village folk scene. In informal, conversational style, Rotolo recalls those who made that scene, many of them famous but none more so than the complicated Dylan. Given his formidable presence, Rotolo’s adamant refusal to be more than “a string on his guitar” in the book is admirable. The moments when she comes most alive in its pages are the most compelling."
—June Sawyers, Booklist


“Suze Rotolo and I must have crossed each others' paths countless times on those downtown New York streets during the post-Beat years when the area was a Mecca for the young and the quirky and the gifted. This was a magic era. Now the last of its funky monuments are being leveled by condo-ization, but its spirit persists strongly in Suze Rotolo. What a wonderful kid she must have been—brave, openhearted, keenly observant and preternaturally wise, able to rise to the challenge of loving a genius like Bob Dylan and knowing when to let go. I'm glad I finally got to meet her in these pages.”
—Joyce Johnson, author of Minor Characters

“Suze Rotolo digs hard and deep. Then she strolls, frets, and paints a gorgeous picture of a singular place and a time that was simpler but all tangled up. Best of all, she’s a natural writer who puts the beguiling voice, skeptical brow, shining eyes, and conductor’s hands I know right before you on the printed page. What’s her secret?” —Sean Wilentz


"A welcome, page-turning perspective conspicuously absent from the plethora of books on Dylan and the folk era of the 1960s: that of a woman witnessing it all from its cultural and political epicenter." —Todd Haynes, screenwriter and director of I’m Not There


“There have been a lot of books written about Greenwich Village in the sixties,and I've probably read all of them. What makes Suze's story so special is that she grew up in this neighborhood and she still lives here. She knows these crooked streets intimately, and they know her.” —Steve Earle

About the Author

Suze Rotolo (aka Susan) is an artist who lives in New York City with her family.

Customer Reviews

New perspective on an often told tale
I've been a Dylan fan since 1970 and have followed his career through all of its ups and downs, the good albums and the bad (yes, there have been more than a few of the latter), and along the way I've also read many of the books that have been written about the man. Most have been utterly forgettable; some have been insightful; and a rare few have actually been enlightening.

Suze Rotolo's A Freewheelin' Time is, if nothing else, enlightening. More than just the story of a life -- or in this case two lives, Rotolo's and Dylan's -- it is an insider's account of a time and place that now seems strangely distance from our own. For more than being just Bob Dylan's girlfriend, or the girl in the picture on one of the most iconic album covers of the 1960s, Rotlo was also someone who, raised by radical, working-class parents in the 1950s, was steeped in the counterculture ethos that defined the early Civil Rights and Anti-War movements that Dylan ultimately gave voice to. In fact, fascinating though her insights into young Bob Dylan are, some of this book's most interesting passages deal not with Dylan himself, but rather with Rotolo's efforts to find her own true identity as a woman in pre-feminist America, and with her struggle to define herself as a non-conformist in a country that even in the do-your-own-thing '60s valued conformity above all else.

Finally, I don't know what Publishers Weekly was talking about when it took Rotolo to task for her having described Dylan as a genius who at heart isn't very honest--as if it isn't possible for someone to be both brilliant and dishonest at the same time. Give me a break. This isn't the first book to suggest that Dylan has often been less than decent (to say the least) in dealing with others. Stories about Dylan putting people (often old friends) down in public are both ubiquitous and legendary. And you only have to listen to some of the more caustic songs on Blonde and Blonde (and let's not forget Positively 4th Street) to know that the man can wield a song like an ax when he really wants to hurt someone. But that's all part of what makes Dylan -- the man of many masks -- so fascinating. Right? I guess some people (the reviewer from Publishers Weekly no doubt being one of them) prefer having their heroes depicted cookie-cutter neat and without any warts.

Bottom line: This is a fine book that will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about Bob Dylan, about American on the verge of social and political upheval in the early 60's, or who might simply enjoy reading about a young girl who survived a prolonged encounter with greatness and came out all the stronger for having experienced it.

Nice deposit in the nostalgia bank
This was a well written depiction of the 60's. I was a Bob Dylan fan at this time and he was always quite a mystery to me. This could have been one reason, other than his music which I loved, that he infatuated me. Having never been to the village I'd always been curious about the life style there and Suze Rotolo put it together beautifully. I particularly enjoyed how she linked so many of the folk era greats together and their personal dynamics with each other. The book would be worth reading even had she not been the girlfriend of Bob Dylan. Her story was mesmerizing and without a great deal of empty sentiment.

INTERESTING SOCIAL HISTORY BUT NOT ENOUGH DYLAN
A bit repetitive and poorly edited, but still a fun social history reaffirming a great time in American musical development...