On August 2, 1962 — 60 years ago — Robert Allen Zimmerman, then 21, legally changed his name to Bob Dylan.
Zimmerman’s decision to change his name wasn’t the first time that he had performed under a different alias. He first gained a notable reputation while going by the name of Elston Gunn as well as variations on his birth name such as Robert Allen. However, it was on Bob Dylan that he would eventually settle.
The pseudonym allowed him the mask of anonymity. It allowed him to change into a brand new character that he created.
“The Elston Gunn name thing was only temporary,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles. “What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just called 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 it. There was little of my identity that wasn’t in it.”
Before the name Dylan, he tinkered with different variations, including Bob Dillon, which originated in 1959 when Zimmerman was only 18-years-old.
“The first time I was asked my name in the Twin Cities,” he noted in Chronicles, “I instinctively and automatically, without thinking, simply said: ‘Bob Dylan.’ Now, I had to get used to people calling me Bob.”
Contrary to frequent rumor, Dylan’s name did not come from the late Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Dylan has repeatedly denied this link. “I didn’t change my name in honor of Dylan Thomas, that’s just a story,” he told Jules Siegel in 1966 before brutally adding. “I’ve done more for Dylan Thomas than he’s ever done for me.”
Thomas did, in fact, have a part to play in the creation of the name but as Dylan wrote himself in Chronicles it was more of a subconscious influence that came from him reading a lot of his work when he created the moniker, rather than a tribute.
“I had suspected that the musician changed the spelling of Allen to Allyn,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles. “I could see why. It looked more exotic, more inscrutable. I was going to do this too. Instead of Robert Allen, it would be Robert Allyn. Then, sometime later, unexpectedly, I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thomas,” he added.
Soon after Dylan changed his name, he signed a management agreement with Albert Grossman. The rest is music history.