Was Bob Dylan a completely unknown writer at the U’s Minnesota Daily?

With mementos from Bob Dylan’s early years now a hot commodity in the wake of the new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” a noteworthy artifact discovered by some Twin Cities journalists has caught attention.

“It can happen to you,” reads an ad that ran in the University of Minnesota’s student newspaper in 1971-72 featuring a photo of an underclassman who bears a strong resemblance to the future Bob Dylan. He’s even wearing Dylan-style sunglasses as he rocks a typewriter.

Purportedly taken in the basement of Murphy Hall — then home to the Minnesota Daily newspaper and other U journalism school activities — the ad’s purpose was to recruit new reviewers to the university’s student newspaper.

“Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., got his big break while writing for the Daily’s arts and entertainment section several years ago,” reads the copy underneath the photo.

Fifty-three years later, the unearthed ad confirms that the infamously poor-performing U student at least did something while attending the school — but it’s not clear if he actually wrote anything for the Daily.

The originator of the advertisement was none other than Jon Bream, the Minnesota Star Tribune’s loooooongtime music critic and a Dylan biographer. Bream cut his teeth as an arts editor at the Daily in the early ‘70s before he would spend the next five decades writing around the real meaning of “Little Red Corvette” to prudish Strib editors.

“We never determined that he published any stories,” Bream now admits.

He offered this for a backstory on how the photo was found in the first place:

“One day, I was rummaging through the lone desk in the grungy A&E office in the basement of Murphy Hall. Among the ephemera in the wooden middle desk drawer were three black-and-white photos. One was a fuzzy-focused Spider John Koerner and Bob Dylan performing. One was Dylan, again a grainy photo, playing guitar in the window of the Ten O’Clock Scholar in Dinkytown. The third was a man in shades and a polo shirt at a typewriter. It sure looked like Bob Zimmerman banging away in what appeared to be the Daily office, in probably his freshman year, 1959-60.”

The original photographer’s name was written on the back of the photos, but he could never be tracked down; not surprising, given it was John Anderson, and this is Minnesota.

Another longtime Twin Cities music critic and fellow rock biographer, Jim Walsh, is the one who dug up this Daily Dylan ad again, resulting in it being widely shared on Facebook this past week.

“Found it! This 1961 photo of Bob Dylan in the basement of Murphy Hall, taken just before he lit out for NYC and the tale told in ‘A Complete Unknown,’” Walsh wrote in his post, which features an updated version of the ad that he ran in the late 1980s when he, too, worked at the Daily.

Another journalist and academic researcher, Blake Gumprecht, said he searched the Minnesota Daily’s archives for the year that Dylan went to the U, but he did not come across anything written by Robert or Bob Zimmerman.

“Maybe he wasn’t good enough to get a byline as a freshman?” Gumprecht theorized. However, he also acknowledged the archives from that era are incomplete.

Another former Daily arts writer from the mid-2010s, Jackie Renzetti, said there might have been pushback against those ads at some point formally refuting its claims.

“There was a bit of lore about the Daily getting in trouble for claiming Bob Dylan worked there and then not being able to prove it,” Renzetti said. “It became kind of a joke like, ‘You can’t prove he didn’t work at the Daily.‘"

Asked what he thinks of the Daily Dylan mystery now, Walsh came to the same conclusion as nearly everyone else who has tried to dig into the Nobel Prize-winning rock icon’s past — now including “A Complete Unknown’s” factually playful filmmakers.

“Only Bob knows for sure, as usual,” Walsh said.