Robert Zimmerman Changed His Name to Bob Dylan, but Why Did He Make That Change?

As the title of A Complete Unknown suggests, Bob Dylan is a bit of an enigma. In fact, he's such a mystery that even his name isn't what it seems to be. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman and changed his name to Bob Dylan prior to finding success.

With the arrival of the new movie about Dylan and continued interest in his legendary career, many people want to better understand what made Dylan change his name. Here's what we know.

The conventional wisdom has long been that Bob changed his name because of his love for the poet Dylan Thomas, but the singer has been denying that theory for basically as long as it's existed.

"Straighten out in your book that I did not take my name from Dylan Thomas," he told The New York Times in 1961. "Dylan Thomas's poetry is for people that aren't really satisfied in their bed — for people who dig masculine romance."

While the idea that he was paying tribute to Dylan Thomas doesn't appear to be true, it seems like the poet's name might have influenced the name he chose for himself.

In terms of why Bob chose to change his name at all, it seems like he made the decision to afford himself some anonymity on stage. If he picked a new name, he could become a whole new character while he was performing, and that shiftiness has long been part of the singer's enduring appeal.

“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 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 it. There was little of my identity that wasn’t in it.”

While he wound up going with Bob Dylan, Bob went through a number of different name variations before landing where he did. In 1959, he briefly went by Bob Dillon when he was just 18 years old.

“The first time I was asked my name in the Twin Cities,” he said in Chronicles, “I instinctively and automatically, without thinking, simply said: ‘Bob Dylan.’ Now, I had to get used to people calling me Bob.”

One of the undercurrents of the name change, though, is that Dylan is a lot more conventionally "marketable" than Zimmerman, and doesn't necessarily indicate that the person behind the name is Jewish. While Bob has never said that explicitly, it certainly seems like something that could have been part of his decision at some subconscious level.

The main reason for the name change, though, seems to have been more disassociative. It's easier to become someone else on stage if that someone else has a different name. Of course, that different name eventually became Bob's entire identity, which is one of the reasons so many people are fascinated by him.