The original sheet lyrics of an early draft of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ have sold at auction for over $500,000.
With Dylan fever in the air thanks to the recent cinema release of A Complete Unknown, the timing was right for the two yellow sheets to go up for sale at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, California.
The pages feature three typewritten lyrics of early drafts of the song, with Dylan’s own handwritten notes in the margins. The sheets are believed to have been typed in the home of music journalist Al Aronowitz in March 1964, with the artist spending the night writing and re-writing the song on Aronowitz’s own typewriter.
At the auction, the pages fetched $508,000 (£417,000), while other Dylan-related lots included a 1983 Fender Telecaster and a 1968 oil painting created and signed by the singer-songwriter.
In March 1964, Bob Dylan wrote and rewrote “Mr. Tambourine Man” at Al Aronowitz’s New Jersey home. Aronowitz rescued the crumpled lyrics from his trash—now expected to fetch up to $600,000 at auction. pic.twitter.com/cLTt6UDEIk
— Eric Alper 🎧 (@ThatEricAlper) January 15, 2025
‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was released on the classic 1965 album ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. A month later, the song reached Number One in the US and the UK in a full-band electric cover version by The Byrds, the first Dylan composition to top either chart.
Aronowitz has said he “found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts” to the song (via BBC). “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 added.
The folk icon is portrayed by Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, which finally hit UK cinemas on Friday (January 17). It tells the story of Dylan’s rise as a breakout star of Greenwich Village’s folk scene in the early 1960s up until his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he performed live with electric instruments for the first time.
NME has launched a special print edition magazine celebrating the film and the legacy of Dylan. The 26-page one-shot is available now – find out where to get it here.
NME awarded A Complete Unknown four stars, writing: “The most important (and often trickiest) job of any music movie is to get the music right. And this nails that. If you’re a Bob newbie, you’ll leave the cinema ready to dive into his back catalogue. If you’re already a fan, the next few weeks will be spent making playlists of lesser-known B-sides or reading the lore around a scene you weren’t familiar with. And that’s why it was a good idea to make this film – a mad idea, but a good one.”
