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More than a muse

1/3/2011

3 Comments

 
The death of Suze Rotolo was a terrible shock. I didn't know she was suffering from lung cancer - but then few people did. She shunned the limelight and celebrity status which her relationship with Bob might have earned for her, and got on with her life as an activist, an artist, a teacher, a mother.

Of course, as she said, Bob was the "elephant in the room of life". And elephants don't come much bigger than Bob. But even in those heady four years back in the day, it is clear - both from Bob's version in Chronicles and Suze's in A Freewheelin' Time - that the relationship was never one-way.

It was Suze who introduced Bob to Rimbaud and Verlaine, to Brecht and Kandinsky. It was Suze who first drew Bob's attention to the story of a young Afro-American named Emmett Till. It was with Suze that Bob first saw Picasso's Guernica. As a 'red diaper baby', she gave Bob's instinctive hatred of injustice a political focus.

I've compiled a playlist of songs about Suze or inspired by Suze. It includes Don't think twice, Tomorrow is a long time, Boots of Spanish leather, Down the highway, All I really want to do, Restless farewell and many more.

But these are not enough to do her justice. She was, clearly, "the could-be dream-lover of my lifetime" as Bob wrote in Ballad in plain D. But she was so much more.

Bob fans of my generation, haunted always by that iconic album cover, will want to claim her and her memory. But she belongs, first and foremost, to her husband and their son. And it's with them that my thoughts are this morning.

Today's listening: My Suze playlist, but without Ballad in plain D.





3 Comments
myers
1/3/2011 07:45:42

Irish lament
"May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.”

Anon lament
O do not go
For I shall hate all women so when thou art gone
That thee I shall not celebrate
When I remember thou waste one

Mine for Bob

You were the first women I met
We had hardly kissed
And yet
You were my type
So something grew
You were the first woman I met
And
The last women I knew

Reply
Max
3/3/2011 01:14:01

With thanks to Rick Hough, a link to an interview Suze gave on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/01/134158270/remembering-suze-rotolo-dylans-freewheeling-muse

Reply
Doctor Dark
9/3/2011 00:54:55

Max,

Oh, where have you been....

You and your readers will appreciate the entirely heartfelt 'goodbye' to 'Susan' penned by Jim Hoberman in the Village Voice a couple of weeks back....

CD

Reply



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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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