Suze Rotolo was a talented artist (the maker of artist books and delicate book-like objects), as well as an illustrator, a sometime activist, an erstwhile East Village Other slum goddess, a devoted wife, a proud mother, a poet's muse, a good comrade, and late in her too-short life, a published author. She was intensely private but as the radiant young woman on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, she became a legendary figure and even a generational icon. Just writing that I can hear her annoyed chortle--although she did humorously allow, after years of dodging rabid Dylanologists, that she was some sort of "artifact."

Growing up in Queens, a few years later than Suze and a few neighborhoods east of hers, I knew her name (although not how to correctly pronounce it) long before I met her, just a mom in the park. Our kids, Luca and Mara, went to the same Sullivan Street playgroup; our families were friendly, both in New York and on Cape Cod where, thanks to a network of her late parents' leftwing associates, she and Enzo always managed to find the most amazing Wellfleet Woods cabins or ocean-overlooking shacks.

Susan, as we called her, was intensely loyal. She retained many childhood friends, even while guarding her personal life. She was a woman of strong opinions and fierce standards (a demanding connoisseur of inexpensive table wine, a cook whose pasta was never less than perfect). She had no use for religion and deeply appreciated political theater--not just Brecht but the Billionaires for Bush, with whom she was affiliated during the 2004 election. She had a healthy sense of the absurd. She listened to jazz on WKCR and was delighted by her son's career as a musician and luthier.…

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/02/suze_rotolo_194.php

Broadway Books

Backstory

I met Bob Dylan in 1961 when I was seventeen years old and he was twenty. This book is a memoir of my life as it intertwined with his during the formative years of the 1960s.

I've always had trouble talking or reminiscing about the 1960s because of my place close to Dylan, the mover and shaper of the culture of that era. The kind of adulation and scrutiny he received made that conversation awkward for me. He became an elephant in the room of my life. I am private by nature, and my instinct was to protect my privacy, and consequently his.

I was writing a bit before we met—poems, little stories, observations—and I kept at it while I was with him. The writings served the same purpose as the sketchbooks I kept—except that these were verbal drawings:

Memory

It isn't you baby, it's me and my ghost and your holy ghost.

There is a saying about one's past catching up with them

mine not only did that, it overran the present.

So tomorrow when the future takes hold

I'll be sitting in the background with the Surrealists.

Though I no longer remember what triggered those thoughts, recorded in January 1963, reading them in the present gives me an eerie feeling of prescience. In so many…

In 1976 I was 17 years old. Two friends and I had read about Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue coming to Orlando, FL to the Orlando Sports Stadium. Orlando was a sleepy orange orchard back then. Disney had only arrived 4 years earlier in 1972. From what I understand the OSS was torn down years ago and a residential community sits on the site.

We were 3 kids from Savannah, GA and the thought of seeing Dylan live was a near impossibility to us. He hardly ever played in the South and he surely wasn't ever going to come to Savannah. So, we found out about the RTR and Orlando and I immediately called and ordered tickets long distance (remember that) directly to the OSS ticket office. We bought 3 and we couldn't believe. WE WERE GOING TO SEE DYLAN, LIVE! So we were on our way to south FL.

We get there and immediately go get our tickets. It was 35 years ago so I don't remember it that well but we finally found the venue. (If you want to call it that.) It was a metal warehouse with no windows! We thought "this can't be the place". Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, etc.. wouldn't play this dump. It was in the middle of no-where. Well, lo and behold this warehouse actually had a ticket office. It was more like a window in the wall. I walked up and asked "am I at the wrong place or is Bob Dylan playing here tomorrow night?"  

The lady in the window asked me for my claim check for $32 (yep 32, for 3 tickets). I forked it over and thought "man, I have been screwed on this one". Oh well, we were here. We'll play it out. 

The next night we show up and the (of course) grass parking area was full. OK, so far so good. We hand over our tickets wondering what we were walking into. This place was an indoor rodeo with dirt floors! We had driven 400 miles to see a friggin' rodeo!?

I have to describe the inside of this place. It looked like something out of a…