The manuscript for Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (his first rock ‘n’ roll hit) sold today at auction for slightly over two million dollars — $2.045 mil to be exact — to a mystery buyer, according to Sotheby’s, the auction house that handled the transaction, but that buyer didn’t get a key to unlock the mysteries of the manuscript.
For instance, why did Dylan write “Al Capone” in the margin with a line from the gangster’s name to the word “direction” in the chorus?
“Al Capone” might have worked in terms of a rhyme, but it would make no sense in terms of what the song is about.
Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” sold for $485,000.
But back to Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ manuscript:
There are various alternate phrases written on the manuscript that Dylan wisely rejected, but they don’t reveal much.
On the second page of the manuscript is a version of the chorus with “path unknown” as one of the lines.
At the top of page three is written: “How does it feel/ Behind the wheel.”
At the bottom of page three the chorus is again a work in progress:
How does it feel to be on your own
It feels real (dog-bone)
Does it feel real.”
Then he wrote “New direction home” but put a line through “new” and wrote “no” under it.
Then: “When the winds have (unreadable word that could be “flown”)
“Shut up and deal like a rolling stone
Raw deal
Get down and kneel.”
More interesting perhaps, Dylan has written names of songs and books on the pages, which may or may not relate to the song itself: “Pony Blues,” a song by Charley Patton; “Midnight Special” (and above it “Mavis”); “On the Road”; and “Butcher Boy,” which likely refers to “The Butcher Boy,” an old folk song that the Clancy Brothers recorded.
Other revisions.
There’s a mostly discarded verse that reads:
“You never listened to the man who could (illegible) jive and wail
Never believed ‘m when he told you he had love for sale
You said you’d never compromise/ now he looks into your eyes
and says do you want make a deal.”
And what ended up being the third verse reads like this in part:
“You never turned around
To see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns
When they all came down
And did tricks for you to shake the money tree.”
There’s a line drawn through that entire last line.
Oh to have been a fly on the wall as Bob Dylan wrote some of his now classic songs.
Until time travel becomes possible, the closest we may get to observing Dylan the songwriter in action are the four pages from the working manuscript for “Like A Rolling Stone” that Sotheby’s will auction on June 24, 2014 in New York.
On the pages, along with many of the lines that ended up in what some believe is Dylan’s greatest song, a song that certainly changed people’s ideas of what rock ‘n’ roll could be upon it’s release in July of 1965, are lyrics that Dylan clearly was considering for inclusion, but which didn’t make the cut.
The chorus, for instance, didn’t fully come together until page four of the manuscript. On page one there is a version of the chorus that reads:
“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be (or not to be) on your own
Direction (road back home)
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
Right below the second “How does it feel,” Dylan has added “Is it ain’t quite real.”
And at the side of the page it says “Al Capone” with a line drawn to the word “direction” in the chorus.
Page two.
On the second page of the manuscript is a version of the chorus with “path unknown” as one of the lines.
At the top of page three is written: “How does it feel/ Behind the wheel.”
At the bottom of page three the chorus is again a work in progress:
How does it feel to be on your own
It feels real (dog-bone)
Does it feel real.”
Then he wrote “New direction home” but put a line through “new” and wrote “no” under it.
Then: “When the winds have (unreadable word that could be “flown”)
“Shut up and deal like a rolling stone
Raw deal
Get down and kneel.”
Page three.
By page four this is the chorus:
“How does it feel, how does it feel
To be on your own
Like a dog without a bone
Now you’re unknown
Forever complete unknown
New direction home
No direction home
Like a rolling stone.”
“If you look at these four pages, you can see that at this stage there are rhyme schemes that he didn’t pursue, and I suppose the chorus is the biggest surprise,” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s manuscript expert, told the New York Times. “Here you have a chorus that is such an iconic piece of history, but it clearly didn’t arrive fully formed. And you wonder, if he chose another rhyme, would it have had the same impact?”
Dylan has written names of songs and books on the pages, which may or may not relate to the song itself: “Pony Blues,” a song by Charley Patton; “Midnight Special” (and above it “Mavis”); “On the Road”; and “Butcher Boy,” which likely refers to “The Butcher Boy,” an old folk song that the Clancy Brothers recorded.
“It was ten pages long,” Dylan once said of the manuscript for “Like A Rolling Stone.” “It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky.”
Page four.
There’s also a mostly discarded verse that reads:
“You never listened to the man who could (illegible) jive and wail
Never believed ‘m when he told you he had love for sale
You said you’d never compromise/ now he looks into your eyes
and says do you want make a deal.”
And what ended up being the third verse reads like this in part:
“You never turned around
To see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns
When they all came down
And did tricks for you to shake the money tree.”
There’s a line drawn through that entire last line.
The four manuscript pages for “Like A Rolling Stone” could sell for as much as $2 million.
Dylan playing a Fender Jazzmaster at Forest Hills Stadium.
When I read that someone paid $985,000 for the Fender Stratocaster that Bob Dylan played at the Newport Folk Festival, at first it kinda made sense.
Obviously that was a historic event, a turning point in Dylan’s career, one that resulted in some of the best rock music of all time and which had a profound impact on rock ‘n’ roll, and on the world at large.
But then I began to reconsider. Why is that guitar worth that kind of money? Well, you could say, because someone was willing to pay it. And I would disagree.
I think this is an example of the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome. Or a fetishism that mythologies objects, giving them undeserving power and value.
A million dollars? Really?
The guitar that sold at auction for nearly a million dollars, and which Dylan supposedly played at Newport, is a 1964 Stratocaster, so Dylan could only have owned it for at most a year and a half.
Dylan’s lawyer, Orin Snyder, recently denied it was the guitar played at Newport.
“Bob has possession of the electric guitar he played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965,” Snyder said in a statement he provided Rolling Stone. “He did own several other Stratocaster guitars that were stolen from him around that time, as were some handwritten lyrics.”
However vintage-instrument expert Andy Babiuk told Rolling Stone he’s confident it’s the guitar. He was convinced after PBS asked him to compare it to close-up color photos from Newport. “The more I looked, the more they matched,” Babiuk told Rolling Stone. “The rosewood fingerboard has distinct lighter strips. Wood grain is like a fingerprint. I’m 99.9 percent sure it’s the guitar — my credibility is on the line here.”
Babiuk has previously authenticated numerous guitars including a John Lennon Gretsch 6120 that’s been on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and a Bob Dylan Hummingbird used by Dylan at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
So let’s assume the Strat sold at auction was the guitar played at Newport. It turns out that Dylan had a bunch of electric guitars he used at the time. There are pictures of Dylan playing a Fender Jazzmaster, both in the studio and on stage. In Bob Spitz’s book “Dylan An Autobiography,” he describes Dylan walking into Columbia Studio A on June 15, 1965 and plugging in a Fender Telecaster for a run through of “Like A Rolling Stone” before recording began.
So we can safely say that Dylan had at least six electric guitars he was using at the time of the Newport gig. There’s a reason Dylan had so many Fender guitars. Columbia Records owned Fender at that time, and so Dylan would have had easy access to the company’s guitars, and the company was surely happy to have their guitars associated with Dylan.
What can make a guitar really valuable? Well, if a musician uses it to compose songs that become classics. The guitar Neil Young used to write “Heart of Gold,” for instance, would be of some value, but if Neil Young had one acoustic guitar that he used from say 1964 through 1974 to write all his songs, that guitar would really be worth a lot. Neil Young himself might feel that particular guitar was key to his songwriting.
Some musicians customize their guitar, or buy a vintage guitar that’s been played for years and has a unique sound that they can’t get from just any guitar. Neil Young, for example, feels that way about Old Black, a 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop that he’s had seriously customized.
But of course that isn’t the case with the off-the-shelf, year-and-a-half old Strat Dylan played that night.
Does the fact that Dylan played a Strat at Newport really mean anything? He could have easily played the Jazzmaster or a Telecaster instead, as he did at Forest Hills Stadium two and a half months later. Would those guitars be worth a million?
It would seem that simply because that was the guitar Dylan happened to play that historic night, it’s worth a fortune, and not because the guitar added anything to the performance. Well then what of the black boots Dylan wore? Or his black leather jacket? How about his shirt? A million dollars?
It’s not the guitar Dylan happened to play that matters, it’s that Bob Dylan turned his back on the rigid rules mandated by the folk music establishment and made a big statement by going electric and playing rock ‘n’ roll. It’s all about Bob Dylan, not whatever guitar he happened to play. In fact, he could have played any electric guitar.
According to Rolling Stone, Dawn Peterson, who is apparently the one who put the guitar up for auction, got it from her father, Victor Quinto, a private pilot who worked for Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, in the mid-1960s.
“After one flight, my father saw there were three guitars left on the plane,” she told Rolling Stone. “He contacted the company a few times about picking the guitars up, but nobody ever got back to him.”
It would seem, then, that those guitars were not that important. Dylan had lots of guitars. He clearly wasn’t attached to that guitar. It wasn’t a special guitar. He didn’t need that guitar to write great songs, or perform onstage. It was just a guitar he’d gotten the year before that he happened to play during his first electric gig.
Is it worth a million dollars?
As has been said before, there’s a sucker born every day.
“Like A Rolling Stone” at Newport Folk Festival, 1965:
An in-process handwritten draft of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics for “Born To Run” sold at Sotheby’s today for $197,000.
At one time the notebook page was owned by Springsteen’s former manager, Mike Appel, according to Sotheby’s. However the identiy of the seller nor the buyer have been revealed.
Of course if you don’t need to have the original, you could do like I did and print out this scan of the lyric sheet.
It’s not gonna get you $197,000 but it’s pretty cool to check out a work in progress, especially when the writer is Bruce Springsteen and the song is “Born To Run.”
A notebook page on which Bruce Springsteen worked on his trademark song, “Born To Run,” is going up for auction at Sotheby’s and is valued between $70,000 and $100,000.
The page reveals that the song didn’t come fully formed onto the page. Rather, much of the original lyric was reworked.
Early version of “Born To Run.”
Check out a larger version of the notebook page here.
Here’s a line that didn’t make it:
They live in fury chasin’ the bad kind of fools glory down a killer’s highway into mainlined [scribbled word] of the sun.
Here are some lines that in revamped form did:
I looked out cross my hood + saw the highway buckle neath the wheels of a gold Chevy 6.
I was headin for the place were good girls die in the arms of wild angels in one last kiss.
There’s also this alternative version of that last line:
I was headin for the place where wild angels die in an everlasting or neverending kiss.
If this is of interest, there’s an article in the New York Times to check out.
The man who used the tag “gorpetri” to make the winning bid of $615,000 for the painting Banksy modified and retitled, “The banality of the banality of evil,” reneged on his bid once the auction was over, according to the New York Times.
What happened next has caused some controversy in New York. Rachel Hirschfeld, an art collector whose bid of $614,800 was right behind the gorpetri bid, said she got a call on Nov. 1 from an auction official about the painting, the Times reports.
“She said, ‘You win the Banksy,’ ” Ms. Hirschfeld told the Times. “I said, ‘Why? Somebody bid more than me.’ She said, ‘He’s out.’ ”
Hirschfeld didn’t think it fair to pay the full price since she’d been bidding against an insincere bidder — obviously, in retrospect, gorpetri’s bids were not genuine. “Every bid that he made has to be out,” Hirschfeld told the Times.
Ultimately another bidder got the painting, but the auction house won’t reveal the new selling price. However, it was over $400,000, according to Hirschfeld, who told the Times she offered $400,000 and lost out to a higher offer.
As you probably know by now, the painting he “vandalized,” “The banality of the banality of evil,” sold at auction yesterday for $615,000 to someone using the tab “gorpetri,” for bidding.
Banksy’s latest artwork (as of Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 12:27 p.m. PST), a thrift store painting that Banksy added a Nazi soldier to and titled “The banality of the banality of evil,” is being auctioned at the online charity website, BiddingForGood.
Bidding began Tuesday with a minimum bid of $74,000 required. As of midday Wednesday 74 bids had come in, the most recent being $220,200. The auction will close on Oct. 31 at 8 pm EDT.
The painting is signed by the original artist, and by Banksy. It’s 36” x 24.5” and the frame is 43” x 31.5.”
The money raised will go to Housing Works. Below is the BiddingForGood website description of Housing Works:
Housing Works is a healing community of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Our mission is to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy, the provision of lifesaving services, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain our efforts.
What an incredible way for Banksy to end his month-long “Better Out Than In” street art show? Right when attention on Banksy is at an all time high, he puts a painting up for auction for a good cause. On so many levels this is terrific.
