Good Night to The Muse

These days I understand Ernie Gammage is a Very Important Person with the Parks and Wildlife Commission, but I will always remember him fondly as the bass player and a vocalist for the Austin-based Mother of Pearl back in the 1970s. At one point, just about half his bandmates were getting married around the same time and I asked him if this fact concerned him at all. He said "No. I'm looking forward to all the great songs they will write when their marriages break up."

I thought of what Ernie told me when I learned today that Suzan "Suze" Rotolo died at the age of 69 following a long illness. If you are not familiar with the name you might be familiar with the songs she inspired, songs like Boots of Spanish Leather, Tomorrow Is a Long Time and Don't Think Twice. Yes, for a short time in the early 1960s, she was Bob Dylan's lover and muse. She was also a class act, never once capitalizing on her association with Dylan. In fact, in his book Chronicles, Dylan talked more about Rotolo than she ever did about him.

She is probably best known as the answer to the question "Who's that girl with Bob Dylan on the cover of the Freewheelin' album?". She and Dylan met backstage after one of his concerts. The moved into an apartment together on Fourth Street (the Freewheelin' picture was taken on Jones Street in February 1962.) Just a few months later, she broke with Dylan to spend the summer with her parents in Italy. She returned to him however, but the romance ended when he began seeing fellow folksinger Joan Baez.

Rotolo led her own life after her brief but passionate affair with Dylan as a teacher, painter and illustrator. In 1970 she married Italian filmmaker Enzo Bartoccioli and they had one son Luca. She lived in Greenwich Village her entire life.

She was the child of extremely left-wing parents and she herself engaged in many civil rights activities in the early 1960s. She is credited with introducing Dylan to those causes which led to the writing of some of his most inspired early folk songs.