Freewheelin’ with Dylan – A Sixties Memoir

by Bob Bembridge in Honoring Lives, Literary / Publication Reviews, Musician Reviews, Reviews

Mention folk music today, and many Americans would think of the 2003 movie spoof, A Mighty Wind.

Yet the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a powerful influence on American youth. Folk music nourished college kids who rejected the mainstream pap offered by Frankie Avalon and Connie Francis.

Greenwich Village was the center of that folk revival, and Bob Dylan became the greatest artist to emerge from that movement. Dylan changed the face of popular music by encouraging rock and roll songwriters like John Lennon and Paul McCartney to tackle serious themes.

Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend and muse, Suze Rotolo, describes her life with Dylan in her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo is the young woman pictured on the cover of Dylan’s 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The daughter of working class Communists from Queens, Rotolo was the inspiration for many of Dylan’s early songs such as Don’t Think Twice and Boots of Spanish Leather. Rotolo influenced Dylan, son of a Midwestern businessman, by introducing him to avant-garde artists such as Picasso, Rimbaud, and Bertold Brecht.

The folkies took themselves all too seriously, a trait lampooned in A Mighty Wind. Greenwich Village folk singers saw themselves as troubadours for civil rights and the working man. This was the political and creative milieu Dylan eagerly embraced when he arrived in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961. Many of these folk artists later felt betrayed when Dylan rejected his assigned role as the Left’s spokesman and embraced more personal themes and electronic music.

Rotolo’s memoir intertwines her personal history with recollections of the Village folk scene and her relationship with the young Bob Dylan. Dylan was madly in love with Rotolo, but as his fame grew, she resented being known merely as Dylan’s “chick”. It was the age of the sexual double standard, and left-wing folkies weren’t immune. Rotolo and other folkie girlfriends were expected to support and nurture their artist boyfriends, even when they were having numerous affairs with other women. Dylan’s bad behavior, his personal dishonesty, and his refusal to take responsibility for his actions led to their permanent break-up in 1965.

Rotolo’s vignettes about Dylan and early sixties Greenwich Village make this book a worthwhile read. Time has softened Rotolo’s judgment of Dylan, and her book has little of the negative dish set forth in Bob Spitz’s 1991 Dylan biography. Rotolo walks the reader through ancient folkie haunts such as Washington Square Park, Gerde’s Folk City, the Bitter End, and the Kettle of Fish. The reader meets Village folk artists such as Peter Yarrow, Phil Ochs, the Clancy Brothers, and the young Dylan’s mentor, Dave Van Ronk.

Rotolo describes how the success of the folk revival helped ensure its demise before the sixties ended. Every music producer began searching for the next Bob Dylan. The experimental atmosphere which nurtured folk artists like Dylan and Van Ronk gave way to commercialization which yielded pale imitations of the real thing. Rock and roll musicians, influenced by Dylan, made rock a serious art form. Folk music was no longer the only game in town.

Rotolo sagely defines the difference between the early sixties folk scene and popular music today:
“The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell.”