Life Bookazines - Bob Dylan - 2020

22 LIFE BOB DYLAN

album was released early the following year. A collection of

mostly covers of traditional songs (there were two Dylan

compositions: “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody,”

which featured a melody based on Guthrie’s own “1913

Massacre”), the record initially sold fewer than 5,000 cop-

ies. Folks at Columbia thought that their Svengali of a pro-

ducer had, in a rare act, stubbed his toe. They called the kid

from Minnesota “Hammond’s Folly.”

Dylan was unfazed. He was writing songs a mile a minute

now, several of them based on tunes that had been blowing on

the breeze long before Bobby Zimmerman’s birth. (Adding

to his reputation as a pilferer along Bleecker Street, he had

taken claim on his first album for an arrangement of “House

of the Risin’ Sun” that was Van Ronk’s, something Van

Ronk would joke about—sort of—for decades.) The original

material fell into two categories: message, or protest, songs

and then that old standby, the love song. A young woman

named Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo was an influence on

both kinds. She was the daughter—born in Brooklyn, raised

in Queens—of two card-carrying American Communists

and was, while in high school, working as an activist for

both the Congress of Racial Equality and the anti-nuke

group SANE. She had met Dylan at a concert at Riverside

Church in the summer of 1961, and Dylan would later write

in his memoirs: “Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes

off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was

fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air

was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking

and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled

past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and

NOW THE ALBUM HAS COME OUT, THE

fame game is in force, and soft moments

lounging in the apartment are fewer, while

formal photo sessions are more frequent.

These photographs, most obviously the

charming shot of Suze and Bob at right,

are all from the session that produced the

famous cover of his second album, The

Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

DON HUNSTEIN (2)

DON HUNSTEIN

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