Dáithaí C: Suze Rotolo

Wednesday, 2 March 2011

Suze Rotolo

I was saddened to hear of the premature death from Lung Cancer at the age of 67 of Suze Rotolo (1943-2011) in NYC. The principled daughter of two American Communists she inspired Bob Dylan’s radicalism and worked for Civil Rights during the period they were together. She appeared with him on the cover of his breakthrough album “Freewheelin' Bob Dylan” walking down a snowy Greenwich village street and he wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." about her.

She was a 17-year-old art- and poetry-loving civil rights activist from Queens when she met the 20-year-old folk singer from Minnesota at an all-day folk concert at Riverside Church in Manhattan in the summer of 1961. "Right from the start, I couldn't take my eyes off her," Dylan wrote in "Chronicles: Volume One," his 2004 memoir. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen."

After the sudden death of Rotolo's father in 1958, her mother took to drinking. The teenage Suze began to take Sunday trips to Washington Square in the Village, joining the folk musicians, poets and political activists who took on the establishment in verse and propaganda. At 17, she caught the subway from Queens to the Village for a final time, "without looking back".

While still in high school, Rotolo volunteered for the Congress of Racial Equality, marching on Washington for civil rights and desegregation. At the age of 20, she made national news when she and four other students stood up for the "free travel of free Americans" by, in defiance of the government travel ban, heading over to Cuba. The group spent two months touring factories and schools and met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. It was an incredibly brave thing to do.

Rotolo later wrote that Dylan "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." So began a four-year relationship that was immortalised on a wintery day in 1963 when photographer Don Hunstein captured the young couple walking down a snowy Greenwich Village street, Dylan's hands thrust in his pockets and Rotolo's hands wrapped snugly around his arm.

"It was freezing out," she recalled in a 2008 interview with the New York Times. "He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage."

The photo became the cover of Dylan's breakthrough second album, which includes the songs "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Masters of War."

Suze Rotolo in 2007

Rotolo was born in Queens, N.Y., on Nov. 20, 1943, a so-called red-diaper baby whose parents were members of the American Communist Party. Her father died when she was a teenager, and she traded Queens for Greenwich Village after graduating from high school. She was working in the office of the Congress of Racial Equality — and had seen Dylan perform at a small club in the Village — when she met him at the folk festival. Rotolo, who moved into a tiny apartment on West Fourth Street in the Village with Dylan when she was 18, is credited with introducing him to modern art and poetry, avant-garde theatre and civil rights politics.

She worked on the production staff at a local Greenwich Village theatre and when Dylan visited there to pick her up one day, he was introduced to the theatre work of Bertolt Brecht, the German poet, playwright and theatre director. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan recalled Brecht on Brecht, a musical revue he saw there. He said Brecht had an enormous impact on his development as an artist. "My little shack in the universe was about to expand into some glorious cathedral, at least in songwriting terms," Dylan wrote, describing his reaction to the music. "They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated." Dylan was struck in particular by Pirate Jenny from The Threepenny Opera.

Requiescat in pace.

via daithaic.blogspot.com