Two sheets of yellowed stationary are crumpled but intact, with typewritten lyrics and scribbled changes that offer a rare glimpse into the creative process of their famed author as he penned one of the best-known songs of the 1960s.
The early drafts of Bob Dylan’s 1965 chart-topper “Mr. Tambourine Man” sold this weekend for more than $500,000, according to Julien’s Auctions, the California-based house that facilitated the sale.
The delicate papers were sold alongside dozens of other Dylan memorabilia from the artist’s early career in the 1960s, including sketches and photographs.
The lyrics were part of the personal trove of the prolific rock ‘n’ roll journalist Al Aronowitz, who cut his own trail through the 1960s as chronicler and confidant of the era’s artists and musicians, including Dylan.
“He never threw anything away,” said Aronowitz’s son Myles Aronowitz, who has spent years sifting through some 250 boxes containing his father’s personal collection, a time capsule of 1960s music and writing.
For Dylan experts, the lyrics offer a rare, early glimpse of how Dylan approached his work and the mechanics of songwriting.
“It’s absolutely mind-blowing, and confirmation that this is how genius works,” said Richard Thomas, a classics professor at Harvard who also teaches a course on Dylan’s writing.
The drafts of “Mr. Tambourine Man” were “family lore,” Myles Aronowitz said, and his father, who died in 2005, could not recall where or how he had filed them away. For years, his family believed the drafts were lost.
Myles Aronowitz and his wife unearthed the papers recently as they organized his father’s collections. They expect to put together another auction, but hope to eventually turn over the archives to a library or museum.
“It’s remarkable,” Myles Aronowitz said of the collection, which includes rare home recordings from musical titans of the era, as well as letters, notes, and photographs.
In a 1973 column for The New York Sunday News later preserved on his personal website, Al Aronowitz wrote of the evening Dylan began drafting the song at the journalist’s New Jersey home.
“Bob 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 Camels cigarette smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out on my stolen canary-colored Saturday Evening Post copy paper,” Aronowitz wrote of the evening.
“Marvin Gaye sang ‘Can I Get A Witness?’ from the six-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 wrote of emptying his trash can the morning after, as Dylan crashed on his couch. “A whispering emotion caught me,” Aronowitz wrote. He pulled the discarded, yellowed sheets out of the waste bin, read Dylan’s working lyrics and saved the papers.
At the time he wrote the song, Dylan had just split with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had appeared on the cover of his famed 1963 album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” “Mr. Tambourine Man” was eventually recorded and released on Dylan’s 1965 album, “Bringing It All Back Home.”
The Nobel Prize-winning artist has been in the spotlight recently amid the release of the biopic “A Complete Unknown,” which chronicles Dylan’s early rise in 1960s New York.
On smaller screens, he caused somewhat of a stir this week when he joined the social media platform TikTok, just days before it appeared set to be shut down in the United States.
In what appears to have been a tongue-in-cheek nod to the app’s pending fate, Dylan posted a clip from a 1960s news conference in which he sat behind microphones and then immediately said: “Good god, I must leave right away.”