Suze Rotolo

It´s been Dylan´s 80th birthday this week, so this is the time.

When I first heard of Bob Dylan his first LP had been out a couple of years but I hadn´t heard of it. I was working in Clacton as a "dish wash machine operator", sharing a rental with a Canadian aspiring folk singer called Jim Van Dyke. Jim in turn was sharing our already-limited space with a geordie blonde bombshell called Doreen, who claimed that in "real life", aka Newcastle, she was the girlfriend of Eric Burden. So - let´s call that a maybe.

Anyway I had saved enough money to be able to buy an LP and was all set to go out and buy the first Dylan LP. Jim stopped me. He persuaded me Dylan was a passing fad and I should instead buy a Peter Paul and Mary LP. So I did. Bad advice, Jim...  I bought every other Dylan LP that came out up to Self Portrait. 

Starting of course with Freewheelin´   

The girl on the cover of Freewheelin´was Suze Rotolo, who met Dylan when she was 17 and stayed with him for 3 years till she found out about his relationship with Joan Baez. After Dylan, she left his world behind and practiced art and taught for a living, not going public about their time together, till she found out that she was terminally ill and decided to go on record. She contributed to a Scorsese flm about him and in 2008 produced this book. She died in 2011. 

I found it on ABEbooks for a few euros, and bought it. I didn´t have high expectations. In some ways, that was correct, but it is interesting (to me at least)  about the life of the immigrant community, and the communist community, and the growth of the folk scene in New York, and the mental world they lived in. And it has some poignancy.