Who is on the cover of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ alongside Dylan himself?
The second album that Bob Dylan released was the that turned him from Gaslight Cafe cover singer to the voice of a generation. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan hit the top of the UK album chart in the summer of 1963, and sparked the kind of reaction in the United States that suggested the coming of a prophet.
The record opens with the timeless sigh of wartorn weariness that is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ before the scathing ‘Masters of War’ rails against the US establishment two songs later. And its first side reaches a crescendo with the sprawling meditation on humanity’s day of reckoning with the atom bomb, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.
There’s room for love, too. Most notably on ‘The Girl from North Country’, a sensitive reimagining of the traditional ballad ‘Scarborough Fair’, and the scornful ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’. Dylan the entertainer appears in other places, but the album is dense and downcast at its grandest moments, and even in a nostalgic recollection of carefree childhood friendships called ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’.
That is why the album’s cover artwork is even more disarming in its understated and cheerful humility. There’s something joyful and life-affirming about seeing two young lovers huddled together in the crisp New York air as they walk down a snow-covered street in Greenwich Village. A boyish Dylan is shyly averting his gaze from the camera, concentrating on not slipping over. But the girl clinging to his arm is wearing a big grin, staring straight at the lens.
So, who is she?
This is the subject of Dylan’s melancholy love songs on the album. A 19-year-old civil rights activist named Suze Rotolo, who was the first love of his life. Her absence during a six-month period studying abroad in Italy, the country of her heritage, crushed him. But it fuelled the first creative burst of prolific songwriting in his storied career.
Rotolo was drawn to full-time activism immediately after high school, having been raised in a family of communists. She worked at the racial equality campaign group CORE, as well as the anti-war organisation that evolved into Peace Action. But it was music that brought her and Dylan together. The moment they met at a folk concert in Morningside Heights, he was entranced.
Rotolo’s political work brought Dylan into the civil rights movement for the first time and transformed his songs into weapons against war and black oppression. She returned from her studies in Perugia just in time to see her boyfriend become a star singing the most overtly political work he would ever produce.
Little more than a year later, their relationship was over. Dylan had already transferred his romantic affections to another activist of the folk scene, the celebrated singer Joan Baez, and he was busy reshaping his own persona. His break-up with Rotolo was immortalised in the spiteful song ‘Ballad of Plain D’, which he’s since admitted to regretting.
Dylan never lost his feelings for his first love completely. He later wrote in his autobiography, “She had a smile that could light up a street full of people.” On the cover of Freewheelin’ she does just that. The photo was taken just weeks after her arrival back in New York, which might partly explain how inseparable the pair look.
Suze Rotolo died in February 2011 at the age of 1963. Yet beyond the fleeting passage of young love and brief lifetimes, she will forever take pride of place alongside Bob Dylan on the cover of a work of folk artistry which only grows more significant with age.
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