Bob Dylan Facts That Make Him Even More Legendary

While Dylan doesn't seem like a man who has many regrets, he will cop to one. Andy Warhol once gave him a painting of Elvis Presley that would have been worth millions today. Instead, Dylan traded it... for a couch.

He later confessed to Spin in 1985, "I always wanted to tell Andy what a stupid thing [I'd] done, and if he had another painting he would give me, I'd never do it again."

Early on, Bob Dylan knew the name Robert Zimmerman wasn't going to take him far. While working as a busboy after graduating high school, he conned his way into singer Bobby Vee's band, The Shadows, by claiming he'd toured with Conway Twitty. He told Vee his name was Elston Gunn. (Some accounts claim he even used a third N in "Gunnn.") He later dropped that pseudonym and left for college in Minneapolis.

As he later explained in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One:

The Elston Gunn thing was only temporary. What I was going to do as soon as I left home was call myself Robert Allen. As far as I was concerned, that was who I was - that's what my parents named me. It sounded like the name of a Scottish king and I liked that. 

Dylan was ejected from his high school talent show for being too shocking for sensitive '50s ears. The principal closed the curtain on Dylan and his band, the Golden Chords, during their raucous cover of the Danny & the Juniors song "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay."

According to Howard Sounes in Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan:

Principal Pederson was appalled. "He and the others were carrying on in a terrible way, right on the stage, and it got out of hand," he says. "I couldn't tolerate it." He cut Bob's microphone and, when Bob persisted in hollering, he pulled the curtain. It was not so much the noise, it was the way Bob was behaving. "He got so crazy."

Dylan attended the University of Minnesota, and though he didn't last long, he reportedly pledged Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity while he was there. Imagine going through Hell Week hazing alongside the future beatnik icon.

Dylan spent a year playing guitar and performing at coffee shops before chucking it all and relocating to New York City. He later wrote about his brief collegiate career in a 1962 poem, "My Life in a Stolen Moment:"

I's kept around for kicks at a fraternity house
They let me live there an' I did until they wanted me to join
I moved in with two girls from South Dakota
in a two-room apartment for two nights
I crossed the bridge to 14th Street an' moved in above
     a bookstore that also sold bad hamburgers
     basketball sweatshirts an' bulldog statues
I fell hard for an actress girl who kneed me in the guts
     an' I ended up on the East Side a the Mississippi River
     with about ten friends in a condemned house underneath
     the Washington Avenue Bridge just south a Seven Corners
That's pretty well my college life

When Dylan signed his first recording contract with Columbia Records, he was only 20 and technically still a minor at the time under New York law. The young singer had lost communication with his parents since dropping out of college a year earlier. Rather than have his parents co-sign the contract, he instead lied to the label and told them he was an orphan. Legendary producer John Hammond waived the clause and allowed Dylan to sign the contract himself.

In the bio he submitted to Columbia Records for his debut album, he claimed to be an orphan from New Mexico who hopped a train to New York City.

Dylan's father, Abraham Zimmerman, was a gifted athlete and played semi-professional baseball. Sadly, the elder Zimmerman contracted polio and had to cut his sports career short. He relocated the family to Hibbing, MN, where he sold appliances.

Dylan, while not a sports fan, later wrote a song about Hall of Fame pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter. Dylan also followed the career of Roger Maris as the Yankee approached Babe Ruth's home run record in 1961. Dylan explained in Chronicles: Volume One:

I didn't follow baseball that much, but I did know that Roger Maris who was with the Yankees was in the process of breaking Babe Ruth's home run record and that meant something. Maris was from Hibbing, Minnesota, of all places. Of course, I never heard of him there, nobody did. I was hearing a lot about him now, though, and so was the rest of the land. On some level I guess I took pride in being from the same town.