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Loading... A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (2008)by Suze Rotolo
None. Okay, I'm nostalgic about the Sixties. I enjoyed this memoir of Greenwich Village in the early 1960's--despite the cover photo and Rotolo's well-known status as Bob Dylan's girlfriend at the time, she writes about so much more than Dylan. This book covers, among other things, the Red Scare and its effect on left-wing families; the folk revival; experimental theater; the Cuban Revolution and the ban on travel to Cuba; and Rotolo's childhood and early adulthood. It's very engaging, and near the end she states a truth that needs to be stated now more than ever: the Sixties wasn't just about sex drugs and rock and roll, it was about making a better world. (  ) nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |  I know better. I really do. This was less awful than these things usually are. (  ) satyridae | Apr 5, 2013 | I enjoyed reading this book. I'm not a Bod Dylan fanatic or anything of the sort. Luckily, this book wasn't about him. It was about love, folk music, being young, and NYC in the 60s. I really liked Suze Rotolo's description of the 1960's and her approach to different life-events. Also, I loved that I was able to feel her as a real person throughout the book (which is one of the many great things about memoirs, they don't have to try to be authentic, they just are). I would most definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes both NYC and music. You will like it. (  ) idranksometea | Feb 17, 2012 | This book's about the Village in the sixties, and about Suze Rotolo's youth. Since Bob Dylan was important to both, this memoir talks a lot about his early career, but even that's usually more about the Dylan/Rotolo relationship than about Dylan's work. And that's OK. If this were any other author, looking back at that time and place, we'd expect lots of context and little Dylan. Here we've got Rotolo doing something similar. The book reads like the author made a list of things she wanted to say, arranged that list more or less chronologically, then wrote a few paragraphs about each topic. The result is unpolished, but generally successful and even charming. That she glosses over entire aspects of Dylan's character is occasionally obvious and sometimes frustrating, but it's her story to tell. She tells it well enough. There's lots of non-Dylan material that historians and others will find interesting and/or useful: A sense of the Greenwich Village geography in the 60s, including descriptions of the most important venues. It's a fine portrait of her social sphere, which included many folks who became somewhat important in music and the arts--some in large ways. Her family history is absolutely fascinating, which is really unusual in such a volume. She was a good observer, and an adequate writer. You can easily understand why Dylan found her attractive. There's an odd recurring theme, by the way. One of the reasons Rotolo's relationship with Dylan ended was her resistance to subsuming her identity in his (she tells us three times that she didn't want to be just "a string on his guitar," an image that's interesting once). I certainly don't doubt her sincerity about this, in the sixties or when she was writing, but the fact is that the book's selling point is her Dylan relationship. I'm sure she recognized the irony. Anyway: A fine book. Worth your time if you're interested in that time and place, or the musicians who worked there. This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal. (  ) joeldinda | Sep 24, 2011 | A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties is Suze Rotolo's memoir of her life during that decade. Four years of that time she was Bob Dylan's girlfriend so an inside look at the early Bob Dylan is a major draw of the book. It's more than that, though, for she lived an interesting life herself and rubbed shoulders with multitudes of legendary figures of that time. The book is written in a somewhat disjointed style, taking various threads forward in time and then going back to pick up another. It feels true to the chaotic exciting time and place it describes. ( ) snash | Jun 5, 2010 |
 One night in the early 1960s, when Dylan came home drunk, she writes, he accidentally dropped the contents of his wallet on the floor. Rotolo, then a teenager, picked up his draft card and was shaken. His last name wasn’t Dylan; it was Zimmerman. And even though they were essentially living together in a tiny walk-up on West Fourth Street, he hadn’t told her the truth, too committed to maintaining his mysterious persona.
References to this work on external resources.
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