Book review: A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

by Suze Rotolo

This book was published in 2008, and the author died in 2011. However, the film "A Complete Unknown" has created a resurgence of interest in Bob Dylan and the 1960's Greenwich Village scene.

I could reduce this review to one sentence by writing, if you liked "A Complete Unknown", you will like this book.

Still reading? Then, let's start with who Suze Rotolo was. She was on the cover of Dylan's second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", and the songs "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Ballad in Plain D" were written about her. However, the book doesn't have all that much to say about her relationship with Dylan, other than her mother didn't like him, and she broke up with him because she got fed up with the lying and cheating. However, Rotolo was a political activist, and was definitely an influence in the social conscience songs that Dylan was writing at the time.

But, as was the case with "A Complete Unknown", the real value is her extensive description of New York City in the 1960's, except that a lot of "A Complete Unknown" is fiction, and this book is factual, written by someone who was right in the middle of it. She crossed paths with pretty much all the major players. She was a good friend of Sylvia Tyson, and knew Albert Grossman, Alan Lomax, Dave Van Ronk, Peter Yarrow, John Lee Hooker, Phil Ochs, Jack Elliott, Izzy Young, Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Judy Collins, José Feliciano, and Bobby Neuwirth. She was an employee of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and made a living designing and building theatre sets, and making jewelry. She did some off-Broadway acting. To me, the key lesson of this book is, it was possible in those days for artists to live cheap in New York City, that that's the reason why it became such a centre of activity for them.

Now, about that movie; the character Sylvie Russo (portrayed by Elle Fanning) looks a lot like Rotolo, and is obviously based on her. However, the name change was deliberate. Rotolo and Dylan broke up in 1964, and she wasn't present at the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965. (Neither was Johnny Cash.) In the film, Russo tells Dylan that she's going to Italy for a month. It was actually six months, and the trip was organized by Rotolo's mother as a means of separating Rotolo and Dylan.

The book includes a lot of black-and-white photographs which I haven't see anywhere else.