Unknown Bob Dylan Facts That Timothée Chalamet's Movie Skipped Over

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. 

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."

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."

His grubby, tramp-like style might have endeared him to young beatniks and rebels, but it did not impress one Tommy Smothers. Before either Dylan or the squeaky-clean Smothers Brothers were famous, Dylan opened for them at the Satire in Denver, CO. The audiences didn't take to Bob, and the gig was cut drastically short.

According to Bob Spitz in Dylan: A Biography:

Tommy Smothers would stand at the back of the club and cringe with each rasp of Bob's astringent voice. "Aw, jeeze," he'd complain to [singer] Walt Conley, "this guy is awful. Can't you do something about him?" Patrons pleaded with Conley to cut Dylan's set short, and finally he concluded that Bob was "too rough around the edges and too ethnic" for the Satire.

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.