Together they went to see Picasso's Guernica and François Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist. She introduced him to the work of Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Thoroughly familiar with the leftwing Greenwich Village scene and already active in the civil rights movement, she acted as a cultural guide to Dylan, who had arrived in New York a few months earlier from rural Minnesota with a head full of Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie. She was just my type.'ĭuring their time together, Rotolo became much more than a passive muse. We started talking and my heart started to spin. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. 'She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. 'Right from the start I couldn't take my eyes off her,' Dylan wrote of their first encounter. Their relationship lasted from the summer of 1961, when they met at an all-day folk music concert in a New York church, until a protracted and painful break-up three years later. Rotolo, who has died of lung cancer, aged 67, was destined to become part of the Dylan legend: the girlfriend who inspired some of his finest early songs, including Boots of Spanish Leather, One Too Many Mornings, Tomorrow Is a Long Time and Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. Suze Rotolo was the girl on the cover of the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan – a long-haired 19-year-old strolling down a snow-covered Greenwich Village street on the arm of a 21-year-old folk singer whose words and music would shortly be affecting the worldview of a generation.

A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo