Bob Dylan’s early draft of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ lyrics fetch $500,000 at auction
With Bob Dylan back at the centre of cultural conversations thanks to the James Mangold biopic A Complete Unknown, an original sheet of an early draft of The Bard’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ has sold at auction for over $500,000.
The release of the Timothée Chalamet-starring A Complete Unknown set the perfect scene for the sheet of lyrics to be sold. With Chalamet as the young Dylan, the movie follows the artist’s rise as a folk star out of the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s until the moment he brought his divisive electric sound to the world at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
The pages are three typewritten lyrics of early drafts of the 1965 song, which feature Dylan’s handwritten notes in the margins. The sheets are thought to have been typed in the home of the music journalist Al Aronowitz in March 1964, with Dylan spending the night there writing and re-writing the track on his typewriter.
At an auction held by Julien’s in Beverly Hills, California, the pages went for $508,000 (£417,000), while other Dylan-related memorabilia included a 1983 Fender Telecaster and a 1968 oil painting that he created and signed were also sold.
In a November 1973 article, Aronowitz published in the Sunday News leisure section, titled ‘The Champ Has No Contenders’, Aronowitz wrote that he “found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts” of what transpired were drafts of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.
“I took the crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines, smiled to myself at the leaps that never landed and then put the sheets into a file folder,” he explained.
Aptly, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was released on the acoustic side of Bob Dylan’s game-changing 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, the record that saw him go electric on the other side. Only a month after its release, it hit number one in the US and UK when The Byrds covered the composition.
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