All the greatest artists have a muse from The Beatles to Bob Dylan. The iconic folk singer’s love history is as tumultuous and intricate as his music. As a biopic based on the singer, A Complete Unknown, hits the big screen, we dive into the true story of the muse behind Bob Dylan’s music: Suze Rotolo.
It was love at first sight. “I met Bob Dylan on a hot day at the end of July 1961 at a marathon folk concert at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan,” Suze Rotolo wrote in her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time.
“I thought he was old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way. His jeans were as rumpled as his shirt and even in the hot weather he had on the black corduroy cap he always wore. He made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly.
“As inexperienced as I was in the ways of love, I felt a strong attraction to this character. It was as if we knew each other already; we just needed time to get better acquainted. And so we did over the next four years.”
How Bob Dylan and his muse Suze Rotolo began their relationship
Bob Dylan, then just 20, had arrived in New York from the Midwest the previous January. He hoped to be a folk singer in the style of his idol Woody Guthrie. Carla Rotolo, who worked in the folk scene, introduced her sister Susan (who called herself Suze), then only 17, to the new boy in town.
The pair hit it off. Theirs was a passionate, tempestuous love affair that would change both their lives and completely change popular music.
Bob wrote in his memoir Chronicles: “Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair-skinned and golden-haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin.”
A so-called red-diaper baby, both Suze’s parents were Communists. Her mother worked for an Italian-language Communist newspaper L’Unità del Popolo (The Unity of the People); while her Sicilian-born father was a radical union organiser who died when Suze was 14. The family was enmeshed in left-wing politics and radical culture. Suze was deeply involved with the civil rights movement and contemplating a career as a visual artist. She also worked with Off-Broadway theatre companies and was intensely interested in all the arts.
The early days of Bob Dylan’s music
In 1960, Greenwich Village in downtown New York buzzed. The undeveloped area was a mecca for beatniks, anarchists and oddballs of all stripes. The folk scene was very close to the civil rights and the union movements. There was, as Bob noted, “music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air”.
The young folk singer arrived in town with a story of having grown up in the circus — in fact, his father sold electrical appliances. While he was writing his own myth, Bob wasn’t penning many songs. His repertoire was the standard folk song catalogue but delivered with charisma and that raw, expressive voice. The “unwashed phenomenon”, as one lover put it, made waves very early on.
Within a year of arriving in New York, Bob had a record deal, something his friends dreamed of. His first album had only two original songs but he was now writing, mostly about civil rights issues, and it’s hard to ignore Suze’s influence there. She introduced him to French poetry and to painting. An early ‘protest song’, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, was written during the Cuban missile crisis when atomic war seemed terrifyingly possible.
Bob said to Suze, “If the world did end that night, all I wanted was to be with you.”
They moved in together, into a tiny flat on 4th Street, even though Suze was still technically under legal age.
Suze influences Bob’s work
Suze was a major impetus in Bob Dylan’s transition from folk troubadour to Nobel Laureate. She worked on a production of plays by German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, which included the song “Pirate Jenny”. According to Bob, seeing that performance was the catalyst for him to change his own work. As he wrote in Chronicles: “I could see that the type of songs I was leaning towards singing didn’t exist and I began playing with the form, trying to grasp it — trying to make a song that transcended the information in it, the character and plot.”
Within a year, Bob recorded a second album. This one, of almost all original material, included classics such as “Blowin’ In the Wind”, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” and “Girl From the North Country”. It was the Freewheelin’ album that cemented Dylan’s reputation as the voice of a generation.

The album that cemented Bob as a music icon
The cover of the Freewheelin’ album is as iconic as the songs. We see Bob and Suze, arm in arm, walking down a snow-covered 4th Street just near their apartment. As Suze noted, Bob was in fact freezing because he preferred the look of his light suede jacket to something more weather-appropriate. Inexplicably, she wrote that “every time I see that picture I think I look fat”.
The relationship between the two lovers was sometimes as volatile as it was passionate. Suze writes that “”Mr Tambourine Man” was written one night after an argument and Dylan went prowling the streets in a huff.”
So much of their relationship was played out in that album. “If you listen to all the songs, they couldn’t be more clear,” she explained. “Anything about our relationship, and about our life together, is very clearly in the songs.”
How Suze saw Bob
Suze found the folk urchin to be funny and tender when he wasn’t arrogant or self-absorbed. They were both strong-willed and completely devoted to each other. He insisted she tuck him into bed at night. She illustrated his songs when they were published in local magazines. She overlooked his lack of dental hygiene but struggled under the weight of the pressures of Dylan’s growing fame. The last thing Suze wanted was to “be a string on Bob Dylan’s guitar”.
Bob was a complex guy. He’d changed his last name, and Suze nicknamed him Raz, based on the initials of his given name (Robert Allen Zimmerman). As ambitious as he was, he was mistrustful of his own talent. He craved fame but feared it as well.
Suze wrote: “Bob was charismatic, he was a beacon, a lighthouse, he was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself.”
Suze’s mother and sister never approved of the affair. At her mother’s insistence, Suze moved to Italy to study art for a year. The separation prompted some of Bob Dylan’s most affectionate and also bitter songs (“Tomorrow Is a Long Time”, “Boots of Spanish Leather”).

Joan Baez and Bob begin a public liaison
Although a famous wordsmith, Bob never fully understood the word faithful. He sincerely wanted to marry Suze, but he pursued other affairs, especially when on the road.
The one person who Suze never felt threatened by was Joan Baez. The elegant, beatific Mexican chanteuse was then the queen of the folk scene. Joan had released popular albums and performed sold-out concerts around the country. Suze thought that Bob would never love someone more famous than himself.
Bob underwhelmed Joan Baez the first time she saw him at Gerdes’ Folk City nightclub. As she wrote in her memoir, And A Voice to Sing With: “He was not overly impressive. He looked like an urban hillbilly, with hair short around the ears and curly on top. His eyes were as old as God and he was fragile as a winter leaf.”
What Bob did have were songs. He was on a roll, producing a classic a day — sometimes more. For a singer like Joan, who needed to move on from old ballads, it was a marriage, if not made in heaven, at least of convenience.
Joan took Bob with her on tour and introduced him each night to her audience. Together they appeared next to Martin Luther King on 28 August 1963, as he delivered his “I Had a Dream” speech.
One thing of course led to another and by the time Suze returned from Italy, Bob and Joan were having a very public liaison.

Suze returns from Europe
Nonetheless, Bob was ecstatic at Suze’s return. They moved back in together, but the old issues resurfaced.
“I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed,” she admitted. Suze wasn’t “able to find solid ground. I was on quicksand and very vulnerable.”
Suze felt smothered by Bob’s rapidly growing fame. He was increasingly anxious about his work. During this fiery period, Suze became pregnant but had a termination. She remained political, even joining an activist tour of Cuba, contravening the government blockade. But the process of uncoupling from Bob led her to a breakdown and a suicide attempt.
One night, in 1964, matters came to a head in a massive argument in Carla Rotolo’s tiny flat. Things were said that couldn’t be retracted. Dylan recorded the event in the cruel, bitter song, Ballad in Plain D, blaming Carla. Decades later, he wrote: “I must have been a real schmuck to write that. I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”
If Bob’s personal life was a mess, his career was the opposite. Peter Paul and Mary had a #1 hit with “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Other cover versions of his songs by the Turtles, the Byrds and Sonny and Cher topped the charts. Meanwhile, his palette expanded. The first side of his Bringing It All Back Home album included electric instruments, while the flip side was all acoustic.

Bob’s romantic life becomes more complicated
The relationship between Bob and Joan blossomed. Not overly generous, Bob did give his lover a blue nightgown. She gave him blue cufflinks. He also invited her on his 1965 tour of Britain but conspicuously never brought her on stage to return the favour that she had done him when he was hungry and needed help.
The weeks of humiliation were captured in the film, Don’t Look Back. It was on that tour that Joan blundered into Bob’s room and met a striking dark-eyed woman, Sara Lounds, whom Bob had been seeing for some months. She was soon to become his first wife.
Decades later, when Joan and Sara became friends, Joan mentioned the nightgown she had been given. “So that’s where it went,” Sara laughed. It was hers. Meanwhile, Bob was still seeing Suze occasionally. She writes about being in the studio when the classic song “Like a Rolling Stone” was recorded.
Bob Dylan shifts his sound
All hell broke loose in Bob Dylan’s world in 1965. At the Newport Folk Festival, on the spur of the moment, he decided to perform a set with an electric band. The older folk crowd were assaulted by the sheer noise of Bob and the band slamming through these new songs at full volume. One folk music legend tried to take an axe to the PA system and had to be physically restrained. Half the audience booed and the other half cheered wildly.
The Newport Festival was a line in the sand — Bob Dylan slammed together the electric excitement of the Beatles with his literary skill and popular music was never the same after that. At the age of 24, Bob changed music and established himself as one of the great artists of his time. Did it make him happy? Yes and no.
Bob put the topical songs to one side. It had never been his intention to remake the world. He embarked on a world tour and was both booed and cheered at every venue. The music each night was spine-tingling and raw. The effects of recent years had taken their toll and by the time he reached Australia, on the final leg, he was emaciated and living on amphetamines. It fell to Sara to pick up the pieces.

Bob on Suze: “She took one turn in the road and I took another”
Bob Dylan and Sara Lownds were married from 1965 to 1977 and raised five children together. Sara has never given an interview. Joan Baez continued to be the queen of folk music and remains popular to this day. Her biggest hit was the song “Diamonds and Rust” which she wrote about Bob Dylan. Joan married and divorced and had a son Gabriel. Suze Rotolo married Enzo Bartoccioli in 1967. They had a son, Luca, and lived for a time in Italy before returning to the US where she made jewellery and art of various kinds until her death from lung cancer in 2011.
And Bob? According to his estranged friend Victor Maimudes, “he’s doing the best he can with his life. He is forced to live a weird kind of life because of the impact he’s had. All his fears and phobias are enlarged by the success. It didn’t help him overcome them, it made everything worse.”
Those early, carefree years were always with Bob Dylan. There are traces of Suze Rotolo in so many of his love songs, through an extraordinary career.
As Bob wrote in Chronicles: “The alliance between Suze and me didn’t turn out exactly to be a holiday in the woods. Eventually, fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop. It had to end. She took one turn in the road and I took another.”
And Suze too came to terms with their history. “He changed the world,” she said. “I did something else.”
This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest issue from your local newsagents or subscribe so you never miss a new issue.
A Complete Unkown is in cinemas now.