Bob Dylan Was ‘Mortified’ to Be Caught in an Obvious Lie About His Upbringing 

Bob Dylan grew up with his parents and brother in Minnesota, but he once told a blatant lie about his upbringing. Some suspect that lying about his past is a pattern for the musician, but he got caught in a lie about his family life. A reporter made the relatively easy discovery, and Dylan was humiliated.

The musician grew up in Minnesota

Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941.

“Minnesota has its own Mason Dixon line,” Dylan said in an interview on his official website. “I come from the north and that’s different from southern Minnesota; if you’re there you could be in Iowa or Georgia. Up north the weather is more extreme — frostbite in the winter, mosquito-ridden in the summer, no air conditioning when I grew up, steam heat in the winter and you had to wear a lot of clothes when you went outdoors. Your blood gets thick. It’s the land of 10,000 lakes — lot of hunting and fishing.”

Though he claimed to have run away from home seven times as a child, he remained in Minnesota until he moved to New York to pursue music.

A reporter caught Bob Dylan in a blatant lie about his upbringing

Dylan lived with his two parents and his brother. When speaking to a reporter, though, he mythologized his upbringing. In a 1963 interview with Andrea Svedberg of Newsweek, Dylan said that he didn’t know his parents. Svedberg was able to easily disprove this, though. 

Dylan was playing a show in New York, and his parents would be in attendance. Dylan had even put them up in a hotel nearby. Svedberg called Dylan’s brother, David, and confirmed it: his story about his family was entirely fictional.

After building himself up as an authentic American artist, the article’s publication humiliated Dylan. According to the book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait by Daniel Mark Epstein, Dylan was “mortified” to get caught in the lie.

Though some were upset with Dylan, his friends didn’t seem to mind much.

“All of us were reinventing ourselves to some extent, and if this guy wanted to carry it a step or two further, who were we to quibble?” his friend Dave Van Ronk said.

Some believe that Bob Dylan lied about more than just his upbringing

Dylan was humiliated to have someone expose him as a liar. According to some, though, that didn’t stop him from continuing to lie in the future. One biographer believes that much of Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, is fictional.

“Jesus Christ, as far as I can tell almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction,” Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin said, per Rolling Stone. “I enjoy Chronicles as a work of literature, but it has a much basis in reality as [Dylan’s 2003 film] Masked And Anonymous, and why shouldn’t it? He’s not the first guy to write a biography that’s a pack of lies.”