Category: All Posts

Suze (the muse) Rotolo

He had been working on the second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and he had a Columbia photographer [Don Hunstein] take a picture of him and Suze, walking arm and arm along West Fourth Street. [It was actually Jones Street.] “The cover’s the most important part of the album,” he told friends as he passed around advance printings of the album jacket. It shook up everyone. “She was the envy of every folk singer’s chick in the Village,” Terri Thai says. “It was a big ego trip being on a record jacket.” Some friends believe Dylan was deliberately trying to affect Suze’s ego, “to give her some of the taste of what he was getting, and to make his hold on her a little tighter,” one of them says.

Dylan, An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto, 1973, p. 157

One of the more important women in the history of music wasn’t a musician. Suze Rotolo is gone. I was fascinated by her when I read Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan biography in high school. She wasn’t a great beauty, but she was the right girl at the right time for Bob Dylan, and her influence was significant. But it’s curious how many of Dylan’s greatest non-protest songs from that period, and into his time with Joan Baez, seem to have an almost negative attitude towards women.

This is a great outtake shot from the photo session for the cover of Freewheelin’. I found it on old fashion is lovely fashion.

Spider-senseless

Last weekend D.F. Rogers was in NYC, and he saw Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, a musical that’s still in previews, but has been playing longer than many past Broadway shows.

Denro got a copy of the program book for me, and I’m flipping through it right now, and OUCH….! Paper cut. Darn, I dropped it on the floor. I’ll pick it up and OW!!! Hit my head on the desk.

So the reports are true. The Spider-Man show is dangerous!

Surfer white-out

Monday, while Denro and I were hanging out with Joe Sinnott, on the Kirby Dynamics blog Robert Steibel happened to post a nice piece about Joe’s inking on a classic Jack Kirby splash page, and today he posted a follow-up. This is a scan of the page from a copy of the original 1968 comic book that you can click to enlarge.

What isn’t obvious on the printed page, but can’t be missed on the original art, is the white-out and re-inking that was done on Alicia Masters’ hair.

My vote is this work was not done by Joe, but in the Marvel bullpen by somebody else, and I’m tempted to say Dick Ayers. Although it isn’t easy keeping a consistent line when inking on top of dried white-out, the brushwork doesn’t look like Joe’s “feathering” technique. It would be helpful to see a scan of the original art for page #2, because Alicia’s hair appears to have been partially reworked there, too, especially in the second panel, although the pen lines are definitely Joe’s.

Joe’s perfectionism might have led him to go over his work again, but when more than one panel is involved it’s more likely that Stan decided he wanted changes made. And if the finished art were already in Stan’s hands in the city, he wouldn’t have sent it all the way back up to Saugerties, he would have had somebody in the office do it.

Here is a short interview with Joe that confirms something I’ve always assumed — Joe met Jack Kirby for the first time in 1972, and not in 1975 as has been repeated many times.

The reason why I have always thought that Jack and Joe met in ’72 is because I know they were both at Phil Seuling’s 1972 Comic Art Convention in New York, as was I.

I wonder what the Statler-Hilton management thought when they saw the huge, broken mirror on a hallway wall? Did they write it off, or make the con pay for it? They should have charged the convention, because Seuling broke it. I saw it happen when he jumped up on a table that was placed against the mirror. He was with some other guys, and they all ran off like school kids who had broken a window while playing baseball. I was only 16 years old, and I wasn’t going to get blamed for it and try to convince hotel security it was broken by the guy who organized the convention, so I took off too!

Follow-up: The Kirby Museum has just posted photographic proof that Jack and Joe met in ’72, and here it is.

The Sinnott Inner Sanctum

I’m back home from my visit to Saugerties, and I sure hope I didn’t give Joe Sinnott my cold! Today I had the great pleasure and honor of spending time with Joe in his studio.

Here’s a rarity — Stan Lee original art! Stan sent this hand-made card to Joe for his birthday some years back.

My thanks to Mark Sinnott for the invitation to Joe’s open house at the Dutch Ale House, and thanks to Joe, Mark, and the Sinnott family for their hospitality this weekend.

New York’s finest

Sir Tim Rice is getting closer to Massachusetts in his American Pie series on BBC Radio 2. This week he’s on New York, and after rattling off a long list of great American songwriters, who does he open with? The Ramones!

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Feb/TimRiceAmericanPieNY.mp3|titles=Tim Rice’s American Pie: New York]

Tech note: I recorded that audio clip using Wavosaur, set up to monitor the Realtek High Definition Audio Stereo Mix device. As with using Windows Live Movie Maker to capture video, there’s a lot of misinformation about the Realtek stereo mixer, which doesn’t appear by default in Windows 7. There was even some speculation that it’s gone because Realtek was concerned about Digital Rights Management. Without the mixer you can’t record audio while it’s playing on the sound card but, no, there’s no conspiracy. The mix device does appear in Windows 7, if you know the trick.

A bad day to get a good computer

Most of yesterday was not good. I fell very ill, very fast in the morning, and you don’t want the details. By the time my new computer was delivered, about 4:30 in the afternoon, I was sufficiently recovered to try getting it working, assuming it didn’t give me any trouble; and, thankfully, it didn’t. I installed the cards taken from the old computer, started Windows 7 Professional, it found drivers for the cards, and everything worked. After that, only 117 security updates were needed to make the system ready. I’ll install Service Pack 1 when it’s released to the public on the 22nd.

My only complaint about the new system — an Acer Veriton M275-UD7600W — is that the CPU is an Intel E7600, which is a dual-core processor. I noticed the difference in performance when testing multi-threaded MP4 encoding with WinFF. The quad-core Q6600 on the now-dead Dell Inspiron could process over 140 frames per second. The E7600 managed only 80 fps.

But the good news is, I had no trouble capturing video to run the test. Before getting the system I had read about complaints that Windows Live Movie Maker doesn’t have a capture option. Not true, at least with my video capture board. As seen in the screen shot, it’s listed as a webcam. In fact, Windows Live Movie Maker works much better than XP Movie Maker, which sometimes had audio/video sync problems and frequently locked up on me. Here’s the test video I caught in a single take.

[media id=231 width=512 height=408]