Happy birthday Robert Zimmerman

[Dave the Brave]

75 today.

DtB

[davis]

1. Dylan renamed himself after poet Dylan Thomas.

“Straighten out in your book that I did not take my name from Dylan Thomas,” Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman, told Robert Shelton, the New York Times critic who wrote the 1961 review that propelled him to fame. “Dylan Thomas’s poetry is for people that aren’t really satisfied in their bed, for people who dig masculine romance.”

By the time he arrived at the University of Minnesota, he was calling himself Bob Dillon, claiming that it was his mother’s maiden name, which was actually Stone, or that it was a town in Oklahoma — home state of Woody Guthrie. Fellow students remember him by that name, most likely after Matt Dillon of the TV series “Gunsmoke.”

When he arrived in Greenwich Village he called himself Bob Dylan, though he didn’t change his name legally until August 1962, when he signed his first management contracts. In a 1978 Playboy interview, he said he hadn’t read that much of Thomas: “I just chose that name and it stuck.” He may have taken a leaf from Ethel Zimmerman, better known as Ethel Merman: “Can you imagine the name Zimmerman in bright lights? It would burn you to death!”

[Vic2012]

Happy Birthday Bob.