NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Susan “Suze” Rotolo, who inspired some of Bob Dylan‘s most intense songs and later spent much of her own life trying not to be known as Dylan’s former girlfriend, died Friday night after a long illness. She was 67. Rotolo lives in Dylan lore as the inspiration for some of his most bittersweet love songs, including “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Tomorrow is a Long Time” and the razor-edged “Don’t Think Twice.” She also became permanently engraved in Dylan lore as the girl on the cover of his 1963 “Freewheelin’ ” album.It was shot by photographer Don Hunstein on a freezing February afternoon on Jones Street. The two are clinging together for what Rotolo later said was just basic warmth. MORE
VILLAGE VOICE: Suze Rotolo was a talented artist (the maker of artist books and delicate book-like objects), as well as an illustrator, a sometime activist, an erstwhile East Village Other slum goddess, a devoted wife, a proud mother, a poet’s muse, a good comrade, and late in her too-short life, a published author. She was intensely private but as the radiant young woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, she became a legendary figure and even a generational icon. Just writing that I can hear her annoyed chortle–although she did humorously allow, after years of dodging rabid Dylanologists, that she was some sort of “artifact.” MORE