When Martin Scorsese's documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story came out a few years ago, it included interviews with the fictional filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp and digital fabrications of photos of Dylan with Sharon Stone, and it ignited a debate about the elusive nature of biography and Dylan's predilection for making up stuff about his past. But this was just par for the course for the man formerly known as Robert Zimmerman, who has been fictionalizing his own biography for as long as he's been in the public eye—because 60 years ago today, he was already spinning tall tales about himself in one of his very first interviews.

On October 29th, 1961, then 20-year-old Dylan made his radio debut being interviewed by Oscar Brand for WNYC's Folksong Festival (this occurred three days after he was signed by Columbia Records). Dylan was just starting off in his musical career, and was gearing up to play Carnegie Chapter Hall on November 4th—tickets cost $2, and only 53 people would be in attendance—but the boy from Duluth, Minnesota was already turning his early life into mythology.

He told Brand he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico (he never lived there), and claimed he travelled with a carnival from the age of 13 to 19. “I got a lot of cowboy songs there, Indian songs, carnival songs, vaudeville kind of stuff," he claimed before launching into a cover of Woody Guthrie's "Sally Gal." You can listen to it below.

Suffice to say, Dylan was most definitely not hanging out with a traveling carnival for five years—by all biographical accounts, he had a pretty normal suburban adolescence in Hibbing and St. Paul before coming to New York. This was just one of several lies and half-truths Dylan spun during the first year or so of his career—in other interviews, he claimed he was "a descendant of the Sioux Nation and that he turned tricks in Times Square to make ends meet." To his credit, Dylan kept at least some of those lies straight: he told multiple local newspapers he hailed from Gallup in those early days, and even included the biographical lie in the liner notes of his debut record.

Brand reflected on the interview many years later, noting that Dylan kept fidgeting and strumming his guitar during the interview, which surprised the host: "I was, I will admit, a little flabbergasted," said Brand. "He didn't follow any of the rules. While that was terrific for Bob, and made him a great star, for me it was a little daunting."

You can listen to the full interview, which includes Dylan also singing "The Girl I Left Behind," as well as Dylan's first radio broadcast from July 1961 (he was part of a 12-hour radio broadcast from Riverside Church, but was not interviewed), below.

Soundcheck host John Schaefer spoke to Dylan biographer and former LA Times reporter Dennis McDougal in 2014 about the WNYC interview and Dylan's penchant for making up stuff about his biography: "He told his friends in the coffeehouses back in Minnesota that what he had to do to be a star is create a character that sells," said McDougal. "And that is precisely what he set out to do. When you create a character that sells, you can't say, well, I'm a Jewish kid from upstate Minnesota. But if you embellish just a little, say you joined a carnival when you were 13 and ran away form home six times and the last time they didn't catch you and bring you back, people's ears perk up and pay attention."

If you're hankering for more Dylan content now, check out our piece about Dylan's longtime love affair with NYC here; read our ranking of every Dylan album ever; check out a brief history of Dylan selling out for ads; get the stories behind iconic photos of him taken at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and for his Greatest Hits album; and learn about the lost protest song he wrote about Robert Moses. Also, consider this: What if we stopped making movies about Bob Dylan for a sec?