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32 NOVEMBER 2017 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
This image adapted from an invitation to the
Long Island City Athletics 33rd Annual Masque Ball, 1909.
Legends
“I once loved a girl” –
a Dylan lyric
BY GREATER ASTORIA
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
It was an iconic
image – a mu-sician
walks
through slush and
fading winter light
down Jones Street
towards West
Fourth in the Vil-lage
with a pretty
girl at his side.
Upstairs his $60 a
month apartment
has a few pieces of second hand furni-ture,
on his back, a coat too thin for the
cold, on his arm his first great love. At
the corner a Volkswagen bus.
Say hello to 21-year-old Bob Dylan
of Hibbing, Minnesota, and 19-year-old
Suze Rotolo of Sunnyside, Queens.
This image, from the cover of ‘The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,’ was an icon-ic
moment from 1963, the year that
launched an iconoclastic age. More
than five decades have passed. There
is scarce a person, who is young and
brimming with excitement, who is ready
to explore the future at their feet, and
who does not see themselves reflected
in that couple.
Wikipedia states the facts: Susan
Elizabeth Rotolo was Dylan’s girlfriend
from 1961 to 1964. Her parents, mem-bers
of the American Communist Party,
moved from Brooklyn to Sunnyside. In
June, 1960, she graduated from Bry-ant
High School in Astoria. About the
time she met Dylan, she was working
as a political activist in the office of the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Describing their meeting in his mem-oir,
‘Chronicles, Volume One’, Dylan
wrote: “Right from the start I couldn’t
take my eyes off her. We started talking
and my head started to spin. Cupid’s ar-row
had whistled past my ears before,
but this time it hit me in the heart and the
weight of it dragged me overboard... she
had a smile that could light up a street
full of people and was extremely lively,
had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin
sculpture come to life.”
Columnist Nat
Hentoff wrote that
“at the time of this
album’s release,
Dylan is growing at
a swift, experience-hungry
rate.” Dylan
later acknowledged
Suze’s strong influ-ence
on his music
and art during that
period. Elizabeth
Mitchell, of the New York Daily News,
reveals that it was Suze who played a vital
role in developing Dylan’s career, and the
seeds it sowed leading to its ultimate de-struction.
“It was not until they met,” states
Ms. Mitchell, “that Dylan’s writing began
to address issues such as the civil rights
movement and the threat of nuclear war.”
Decades later Ms. Rotolo disclosed
that “Bob was charismatic: he was a bea-con,
a lighthouse, he was also a black
hole. He required committed backup and
protection I was unable to provide consis-tently,
probably because I needed them
myself. ... I was unable to find solid ground.
I was on quicksand and very vulnerable.”
After living together for several years,
they started to drift apart. Shortly after
moving into her sister’s apartment on
Avenue B, Suze discovered she was
pregnant with Dylan’s first child. She
and Dylan agreed to abort the child,
an operation that was performed at a
time when such procedures were illegal.
Ms. Mitchell writes that “the build-ing
where Dylan once lived for $60 a
month was sold in 2015 for $6 million.
The album cover image has vanished
as the original photo negative disap-peared
from the Columbia files. And what
of the eyewitnesses to that February
day? Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer
in 2011. Photographer Don Hunstein
died in March, 2017 after suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease.
And Dylan? He’s not talking.”
