Two pages of Bob Dylan's lyrics have sold for more than half a million dollars
The 83-year-old singer was the subject of a sale from Julien's Auctions in Nashville on Saturday (18.01.24), with over 60 items - including photos, music sheets, a guitar, and art work - going under the hammer, generating almost $1.5 million in both in-person and online bidding and sales
25 January 2025
And the typewritten two pages of Dylan's drafted lyrics to 'Mr. Tambourine Man' accounted for one third of the total sales, with the winning bidder agreeing to fork out $508,000.
The yellow sheets of paper also included the folk legend's handwritten annotations to the three drafts of the 1965 songs.
The next highest-selling items were a 1968 oil-on-canvas painting created and signed by the 'Lay Lady Lay' singer in 1968 and a custom 1983 Fender guitar which he had owned and played, which went for $260,000 and $225,000 respectively.
All but 10 of the lots were from the personal collection of late music journalist Al Aronowitz, and his son Myles told the New York Times newspaper he'd found Dylan's lyrics while searching through 250 boxes of his father's "remarkable" collection over a period of several years.
He noted: "He never threw anything away."
The journalist had previously claimed Dylan had written the original drafts in his New Jersey home after splitting from girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
According to the auction house, Al wrote in a 1973 article: "Bob Dylan wrote 'Mr. Tambourine Man' one night in my house in Berkeley Heights, N.J., sitting with my portable typewriter at my white formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit cigaret smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out on my stolen, canary-colored Saturday Evening Post copy paper while the whole time, over and over again, Marvin Gaye sang 'Can I Get a Witness?' from the 6-foot speakers of my hi-fi in the room next to where he was, with Bob getting up from the typewriter each time the record finished in order to put the needle back at the start. (sic)"
He later "found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts" and though he was about to take them to the trash, he took out the "crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines" and then put them in a file.
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