Suze Rotolo: Bob Dylan's muse in a freewheelin' time

By Philip Pullella

NEW YORK (Reuters) - It's not easy living with having been the muse and lover of any great artist, let alone someone with demigod status like Bob Dylan.

But that's the baggage that Suze Rotolo, who lived with Dylan in the 1960s and was a major influence in his early work, has been carrying for nearly half a century.

Now she has broken her silence with a book, "A Freewheelin' Time - A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" published by Broadway Books, an imprint of Doubleday.

"He's the elephant in the room of my life," said Rotolo, now 64, as she discussed her book and her life over iced tea in a restaurant near the Greenwich Village loft where she lives with her family.

"I'm glad I came out," said Rotolo, a soft spoken woman with an easy smile who works as a visual artist.

She unwittingly became an icon of the Sixties in 1963 when Columbia records chose a picture of her walking arm-in-arm with Dylan on a snowy Greenwich Village street for the cover of his groundbreaking second album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."

A nearly identical picture from the same publicity shoot graces the cover of her nearly 400-page memoir.

It tells the story of a shy young Italian-American girl from Queens who moved across the East River to Greenwich Village to find herself, and got caught up in the whirlwind of the early sixties folk music scene and civil rights movement.

"It felt good to tell these stories, to tell stories that my son can read and so people of other generations can know what that period was like. What I wanted to show is that we were all human, young, had fun and produced something."

CREATIVE CRUCIBLE

She met Dylan, who had moved to New York from Minnesota, at a concert in 1961 when she was 17 and he was 20. The two fell in love and became inseparable in the years when he underwent a transformation from folk singer to spokesman for a generation.

The book describes the creative crucible that Greenwich Village was at the time, with its music clubs and cafes serving as magnets for artists, musicians and poets seeking to breathe in a heady new air after the socially suffocating 1950s.

Rotolo and Dylan lived together in a two-room walk-up on West 4th Street and their love story and break-up inspired songs such as "Tomorrow Is a Long time," "One Too Many Mornings," "Don't think Twice, It's Alright," and "Boots of Spanish Leather."

The four-year relationship was at once tender and turbulent.

She was raised as a free thinker by working-class communist parents who suffered during the McCarthy era. He soaked up her political activism and social awareness, which found expression in some of Dylan's early anti-war and anti-racism songs.