Just in time for A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan partial biopic with Timothée Chalamet inhabiting the title role, anyone with serious disposable income can own an historic document from the period depicted in the film.
In 1964, Dylan was crashing at the New Jersey home of a friend, journalist Al Aronowitz, when inspiration struck. While sitting at a breakfast bar and repeatedly playing Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness” on a stereo, Dylan typed out a version of his in-the-works “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The next day, after Dylan left, Aronowitz, writing about it nine years later, found sheets with “crumped false starts” in a waste basket. Delighting in the early version, with its “leaps that never landed,” Aronowitz smoothed them out and placed them in a file folder. “I still have them somewhere,” he added.
Until a few years ago, no one knew where those pages were; Aronowitz died in 2005. But the journalist’s family finally located them, and now those two sheets — with lyrics on both sides of one, and Dylan’s handwritten changes and annotations — will be part of an auction, “Celebrating Bob Dylan: The Aronowitz Archive, T Bone Burnett & More,” at the Musician’s Hall of Fame in Nashville on Saturday, Jan. 18.
Courtesy of Julien’s Auctions
“This was family lore,” Aronowitz’s son Myles tells Rolling Stone. “My father talked about it, but he had no idea where they were. He thought he lost them or someone stole them. It took us years going through the archives folder by folder to find them.”
The Julien’s Auctions event will be centered around a new Dylan recording of his iconic “The Times They Are a-Changin,” recently cut with Burnett in the producer’s chair. As with a 2022 remake of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the new “Times” will be pressed on a one-time-only piece of audiophile vinyl. For those with very high-end audio systems, the estimated value is said to be between $400,000 and $600,000.
By way of Aronowitz’s family, the auction will also offer up more than 60 items from his archive, starting with the “Mr. Tambourine Man” pages (estimated to be worth between $400,000 and $600,000). The Aronowitz collection also include sketches Dylan made on a pad in New York’s Plaza Hotel and Aronowitz’s detailed, handwritten notes as he observed Dylan participating in the recording sessions of Doug Sahm & Band in 1972. For an estimated $200,000 to $300,000, Dylanites can also consider owning an oil painting from 1968. “He gave it to my father,” says Myles Aronowitz. “It’s a little abstract, but it appears to be a woman holding a large tray of food, maybe a turkey, maybe during a Thanksgiving dinner. Other people think the turkey leg is a building.”
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the elder Aronowitz, one of the first music-beat reporters, was something of a rock journo Zelig. As a writer for the New York Post and the Saturday Evening Post, he not only met Dylan but introduced him to the Beatles in a hotel room in the summer of 1964. (As legend has it, he and Dylan got the Beatles stoned for the first time at that confab.) Aronowitz, who can briefly be spotted in the current Beatles ’64 doc, was also the first manager of the Velvet Underground and introduced Dylan to Allen Ginsberg, and Jimi Hendrix to Miles Davis. In 1995, long before the word “blog” was even conceived, he launched a website, “The Blacklisted Journalist,” with juicy, behind-the scenes stories and observations that never made it into the mainstream press. “He was so irascible,” says Myles Aronowitz. “He hated editors, and he didn’t want anyone to cut his stuff.”
Courtesy of Julien’s Auctions
During the period when Aronowitz and Dylan were friends, both families shared a summer rental on New York’s Fire Island, likely in 1969. There, the Aronowitzes saw first-hand the way Dylan was still grappling with fame, since he had also just moved back into Greenwich Village. “My sister remembers that if we had the radio on and a Dylan song came on,” Myles Aronowitz recalls, “we were supposed to turn it off.”
Even as A Complete Unknown was filming this year, the market for Dylan collectibles barreled along. This spring and fall, auctions at another house, RR Auctions, resulted in one buyer snapping up another rare Dylan painting from 1968 for a whopping $196,156, this one given to a Woodstock astrologist. Another fan spent $25,000 for unpublished lyrics and harmonica from Dylan’s born-again period (“with Biblical allusions,” according to the listing). A Dylan-signed copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sold for a somewhat more affordable $5,164. Whether the guitars and harmonicas Chalamet used in A Complete Unknown will ever be auctioned off remains to be seen.
