A Freewheelin' Time
A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “perceptive, entertaining, and often touching” (Salon) memoir of one woman’s love affair with an up-and-coming Bob Dylan, and an intimate reflection of 1960s subculture at its most creative
“[A] rollicking homage to a revolutionary age.”—Vogue
“Through [Rotolo’s] eyes, we see Dylan as a unique artist on his way to greatness.”—People
A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists, growing up at the dawn of the Cold War. It was the age of McCarthy and Suze was an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. She found solace in poetry, art, and music—and in Greenwich Village, where she encountered like-minded and politically active friends.
One hot July day in 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, then a rising musician, at a concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were both vibrant, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.
A hopeful, intimate memoir of a vital movement at its most creative, A Freewheelin’ Time captures the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future in a time when everything seemed possible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In July 1961, Rotolo, a shy 17-year-old from Queens, met an up-and-coming young folk singer named Bob Dylan at an all-day folk festival at Riverside Church in Manhattan, and her life changed forever. For the next few years, Suze and Bobby lived a freewheeling life amid the bohemians in the emerging folk scene in Greenwich Village. Rotolo offers brief glimpses of the denizens populating the new music scene below 14th Street in the early '60s and recalls the excitement as writers and musicians like Dylan wandered in and out of each other's lives and apartments, trading music and lyrics to produce a new sound that would change American music. Yet as the woman who's clutching Dylan's arm on the cover of his second album Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Rotolo doesn't give us a very freewheelin' memoir. She offers shallow, almost schoolgirl-like reflections on the man she loved and lived with for three years. In a dull and plodding manner, Rotolo provides no new insights into Dylan, claiming, as have so many, that he is mysterious and enigmatic. In an excerpt from one of her journals, she writes ambivalently that she believes in his genius and that he is an extraordinary writer, but that she doesn't think he's an honorable person.
