Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ Lyrics That He Threw Away Are Sold 60 Years Later for Over $500k

Two pages of Bob Dylan’s drafted lyrics to “Mr. Tambourine Man” were auctioned for over half a million dollars.

On Saturday, Jan. 18 in Nashville, Julien’s Auctions hosted an auction to sell 60 items related to the celebrated singer, including photos, music sheets, his guitar, pencil drawings and an oil painting he created. All but 10 of the items were from the personal collection of late music journalist Al Aronowitz, per the auction house’s site.

The auction generated nearly $1.5 million in in-person and online bidding sales. The typewritten lyrics accounted for one-third of the sales, totaling $508,000.

The sheets included three drafts of Dylan’s 1965 song “Mr. Tambourine Man” from his album Bringing It All Back Home. The song first appeared as the album’s lead track on the acoustic side. The Byrds’ 1965 cover topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S. and the U.K. Singles Chart.

The yellow sheets of paper also included Dylan’s handwritten annotations.

The auctioneer said that Dylan wrote the original draft lyrics in Aronowitz’s New Jersey home after Dylan broke up with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, according to Aronowitz’s 1973 Sunday News article, “Bob Dylan: The Champ Has No Contenders.”

Per Julien’s, Aronowitz wrote: “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 [sic] 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.”

Aronowitz later wrote that he “found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts.” He confesses he almost took the papers to the trash, but he was moved not to and “took the crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines, smiled to [himself] at the leaps that never landed and then put the sheets into a file folder.”

Aronowitz’s son, Myles, told the New York Times he searched 250 boxes of his father’s “remarkable” collection over several years, which helped him discover Dylan’s papers.

“He never threw anything away,” Myles said of his father. He noted that Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” drafts were “family lore,” noting they thought the drafts were lost.

Another third of the auction sales comprised two other high-selling items: a 1968 Dylan-signed oil-on-canvas painting for $260,000 and a custom 1983 Fender guitar that he owned and played for $225,000.

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Dylan, now 83, is the subject of A Complete Unknown, the biopic based on his rise to stardom in the early 1960s. The film stars Timothée Chalamet, who worked for several years on the performance, which includes singing and playing guitar.

Chalamet mastered the guitar and harmonica and shaped up his singing skills to portray the 10-time Grammy winner. He previously told PEOPLE that “the whole thing was really just a sort of magical experience.”

Source people.com