2005 has been the year of Bob Dylan. He’s everywhere you look – Bob Dylan CDs in Starbucks, Bob Dylan documentaries on TV, Frank Skinner doing hopelessly inept Bob Dylan impersonations on his show.
So it was only a matter of time before some enterprising young pup found some decent Bob Dylan memorabilia to flog at auction. And it finally happened; a handful of early Dylan poems were sold yesterday for $78,000.
Poems that Bob Dylan (DVDs) wrote during his college years have been sold
at a New York auction for $78,000. They are thought to be the first
time that Robert Zimmerman used the Bob Dylan name, and come from his
time at the University Of Minnesota in 1959-60.
The 16 pages of poems are titled Poems Without Titles, and
apparently deal with Dylan’s relationships with various woman and his
desire to stop smoking, as well as showing Dylan’s "witty and sometimes
course humour." They are all signed "Dylan" or "Dylanism" and were sold
to an anonymous European bidder.
This auction – the highest auction price of any Bob Dylan memorabilia – is another sign that Bob Dylan, despite now looking like a grizzly cowboy with a wasting
disease, hasn’t enjoyed fame like this in decades. Last year you could
tell that he was gearing up for something big; he finally wrote his –
probably mostly made-up – memoirs and then starred in a knicker advert.
But even the heady success he enjoyed by sort of staring at an
underwear model a bit vacantly has been eclipsed by the exposure he got this
year.
There was Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962, the CD of early rarities
sold exclusively through Starbucks, but the thing that reminded
everyone of Bob Dylan was No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, the
feature-length Martin Scorsese documentary that showed close-up the
moment when Dylan changed from a honking folksinger beloved by saps
into someone that actually wrote proper songs.
Yesterday was also a good day for miserable overrated guitarist Eric
Clapton – his 1959 Fender composite Stratocaster sold at the same
auction for $36,000. But pudgy-faced rubbish poet Jim Morrison didn’t
do so well – words to the song Not To Touch The Earth didn’t find a
buyer at auction, nor did the medallion that Jimi Hendrix wore when he
set fire to his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Maybe Jimi should think about starring in a bra commercial – that’d get punters interested in all of his old crap.
Read more:
Early Dylan poems sold at auction – BBC
[story by Stuart Heritage]