“I believe in his genius. He is an extraordinary writer, but I don’t think of him as an honorable person. He doesn’t necessarily do the right thing. But where is it written that this must be so in order to do great work in the world?“

- Suze Rotolo, notebook entry, 1964

People grow old in different ways.

Some grow roots and others grow wings.

And some people, well, they just grow apart.

But pictures don’t lie. And it’s a helluva thing to look back on a picture years later and realize how much things have changed; that there’s no accounting for the many detours life takes along the way; that today is—in fact—a crooked highway, and there’s no way of knowing what’s waiting round each bend.

Just ask Suze Rotolo. Back in February of 1963 she appeared in a series of publicity photos with her then-boyfriend—an aspiring young folk singer named Bob Dylan. Three months later one of those photos ended up gracing the cover of Dylan’s second LP—an album that would help secure his reputation as Grand Poobah of the folk universe.

In the years since, TheFreewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover photo has taken on an even greater significance—representing both the birth of a counterculture and the coronation of one of its most unique voices. In the picture, Dylan—a wiry, 21-year-old kid in a suede jacket and blue jeans—is linked arm-in-arm with Rotolo, an 18-year-old girl he’d later refer to as “the fortuneteller of [his] soul.” The couple is walking in the West Village, north on Jones Street toward 4th. Both are leaning into one another for warmth, bracing themselves against the oncoming breeze.

They seem carefree. Confident. Two grains against the tide.

But those were different times. And, in a sense, those were different people. Defiant. Idealistic. Unfettered by a world that grinds young dreams to dust. They embodied the spirit of a place and time that would change pop culture forever, rendered all the more poignant considering who (and what) Bob Dylan would eventually become.

But what if you were the person in that picture who didn’t go on to become Bob Dylan? What if you didn’t even go on to become Mrs. Bob Dylan? What if Bob Dylan slowly began to drift away, and you made a conscious decision to let him go? What if you were Suze Rotolo—four and a half decades removed—and you’d built an entirely separate life for yourself only a stone’s throw away from the West 4th Street apartment you and Dylan once called home? What if the world still identified you as “the other person” in that photograph?

What kind of lasting impact might that picture have on you?

“The girl on the cover became my identifier, but it was never my identity,” Rotolo tells Crawdaddy!. “I fought against the image for years, probably a little too defensively [laughs]. I saw it as a parallel existence, something that had to do with the past, but remained forever present because of Dylan’s lasting impact as a significant artist. Over time I learned to be more at ease with the holy fascination people have for him and realize that yes, I had lived through an amazing time, and I did so in my own right.”

Rotolo is the author of A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties.The book, which was published by Broadway (a division of Random House) in May of 2008, provides a vivid, firsthand account of Greenwich Village during its heyday—before downtown railroad flats were converted into corporate condos, before the section south of Houston morphed into SoHo, before sky-high rent forced struggling young artists to migrate to Williamsburg.

It was the age of Ginsberg and Seeger and Dave Van Ronk; the Gaslight, Gerde’s, and the Café Wha. It was a time when the Morningside beats were making their way south, when the record industry was discovering new ways to mass market folk. It was a time when musicians had to purchase a cabaret card before they were permitted to play in bars, when backdoor bakery workers slipped fresh loaves of bread to their bohemian brethren in the wee hours of the morning. It was a time when the true measure of a poet was whether or not he ‘had something to say.’

It was a time when Greenwich Village went from section to scene, when young people descended upon the area in droves to be a part of what was happening.

Suze Rotolo, a teenager from Queens, was one of them.

“The curiosity I had in my youth made the search inevitable,” Rotolo explains. “My arrival in Greenwich Village was like the world opening up. It was like finding life. [The book] is about a period that was special because of the cultural changes not only in music, but in all the arts, and maybe more importantly for the upheavals in society overall. Coming out of the 1950s lockdown on anything that deviated from the ‘norm,’ it seemed inevitable that things would change.”

Suze Rotolo first met Bob Dylan at a Manhattan folk festival in July of 1961. She was 17 years old. He was 20. And for the next three years—with the exception of a summer trip Rotolo took to Italy in 1962—the couple was inseparable.