Suze Rotolo: in memory of Bob Dylan's muse

No one but Dylan himself can be certain which songs his first great love affair inspired. Some say Rotolo is the idealised object of his desire in ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, and the wistfully remembered lost love in ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’. She could be the girl remorsefully spurned in ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and more cruelly turned down in ‘Don’t Think Twice Its Alright’ (“I once loved a woman, a child I’m told”). The one song in which she undoubtedly features is the angry, vindictive ‘Ballad In Plain D’ from 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song Dylan later admitted, “wasn’t very good. It was a mistake to record it, and I regret it.” The lyrics lash out cruelly at Rotolo’s interfering family (who counselled her against the relationship) but nonetheless the final verses make a suitable epitaph for an intense love affair that helped set Dylan’s career (and, in a sense, the Sixties) in motion, and remains a romantic touchstone in popular culture, its essence held eternally captured in one vivid snapshot:

All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight
I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight
My love it was mangled, I ran into the night
Leaving all of love’s ashes behind me
The wind knocks my window, my room it is wet
The words to say I’m sorry, I haven’t found yet
I think of her often and hope whoever she’s met
Will be full aware of how precious she is
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
via Telegraph Blogs