Bob Dylan's auction: give me a buck apiece!

Bob Dylan sells treasure trove of lyrics and poems to university for millions

The Guardian

The 6,000-item collection spans nearly the entire length of his 55-year career, and many items have never been seen before

Bob Dylan has sold his personal archive of notes, draft lyrics, poems, artwork and photographs to the University of Tulsa, where they will be made available to scholars and curated for public exhibitions, the school said on Wednesday.

The 6,000 item collection spans nearly the entire length of Dylan’s 55 year-long career, and many have never been seen before. The collection was acquired by the George Kaiser Foundation and the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

The collection also includes master recording tapes of Dylan’s entire music catalogue, along with hundreds of hours of video.

The foundation and the university did not say how much the Bob Dylan archive cost, but the New York Times, which was given an exclusive preview, said it was sold for $15m to $20m.

Tulsa is also the home of a museum dedicated to folk singer Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s early influences.

“I’m glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie ... To me, it makes a lot of sense and it’s a great honor,” Dylan said in a statement.

Despite being regarded as “the voice of a generation” for his influential songs of the 1960s and 1970s, Dylan, now 74, has mostly kept his items out of the public eye, resulting in high prices when they occasionally come up for auction.

A handwritten copy of the song Like a Rolling Stone sold for a record $2m at a New York auction in 2014, while the electric guitar he played during the 1965 Newport folk festival sold for nearly $1m in 2013.

The archives handed over to the University of Tulsa include two notebooks with lyrics from the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, and Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to his 1964 song Chimes of Freedom scrawled on hotel notepaper dotted with cigarette burns. There is also correspondence between Dylan and the late beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. This report is incomplete. Having made only $20 million on the old papers he had lying around, Bob Dylan decided to clean all the old junk out of his closets and see what he could get for it.

The items were sold at auction at undisclosed prices.


ITEM 476

Bob Dylan's first guitar. Formerly displayed in Smithsonian as First Guitar in Human History. List price, $4,000,000.00

ITEM 14

Bob Dylan's hairpiece, hitherto kept secret from the public. List price, $4.79

ITEM 14A

Bob Dylan's first school assignment, an untidily-written poem called It's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, given a C+ for effort.

ITEM 479

Bob Dylan's first girlfriend Minnie Zota, a resident of Shadylady Nursing Home, Red Hen, Rhode Island.  List price, negotiable.


ITEM 37

Bob Dylan's first set of encyclopedias, sold door-to-door to his neighbor Manny Manheim, borrowed in 1957 and never returned. List price, whatever the list price was in 1957.


ITEM 53

Bob Dylan's horse, Spaghettineck. Taxidermied and mounted on wheels in 1982. List price, pretty high.


ITEM 2

Bob Dylan's dog, Spoons. List price $5,000,000.00. Cupcakes not included.


ITEM - ?

Bob Dylan's second school assignment, also known as "You've Improved!' List price, seven cents or so.

ITEM 1

Unidentifiable artifact. Extremely rare. Speculation suggests an egg slicer which was used as a rack for curing marijuana. May also be the world's only combination banjo/water canteen.

PHOTO GALLERY. These represent rare, historic photos which chart the course of the illustrious Mr. Dylan's life in music and momentous world affairs. For these he will take a buck apiece.

Bob Dylan's class picture. He has just sneezed in the photo and spread a cloud of lethal disease throughout the school, killing many.

Artist's rendition of Bob after each of his first four music lessons. The artist, Hibbie Zimmerman, was quoted as saying, "There will always be a little bit of ape left in Bobby."

Bob's first high school band, the Ramblin' Rockets. Also known as the Jumpin' Jeronimos, the Hibbing Hoot-owls, the Gymbusters, Zimbo and the Zeitgeist, and The Two Tops.

Bob's favourite picture of his sometime girlfriend/goddess/priestess/sponge-off partner/ice-maiden/coat-tail queen, Joan Baez. Shortly after this photo was taken she dedicated a song to him, "Nothing Rhymes with Genius (that's why you treat me so badly)".  Later she complained that the diamond he gave her had turned to rust.

Gerry Mathers in an unsold pilot for a TV series, Leave it to Bob. 

Bob Dylan's second high school band, which Bob admits were "pretty green". Bob never named this group, but they were known around Hibbing Collegiate as "Those Guys Again".

Bob's first copyright infringement notice. (He said a buck apiece. OK?)

MISCELLANY.

Bob Dylan's socks. May contain traces of his DNA.

Bob Dylan's fox. No one knows how to get it down from there.

Bob Dylan's garbage can. Suitable for framing. (Note: monetary accessories not included.)

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Spam I am

https://www.youtube.com/user/MattTheSaiyan

Last night, very late, I got into a Thing, and as usual when I am into a Thing, I don't stop until it feels complete. Which this never will be, because it's one of the big themes/obsessions of this blog.

Old ads. Gifs of old ads, so you won't need to watch all of it. Lots of people say "I hate gifs", and I will tell you why. 90% of the ones I see on "real" sites are about 2 seconds long, a near-violent jerking back-and-forth of figures. I don't even know why those are considered "real" gifs, as it is now easy as hell to make 20- or 30-second ones with utterly simple programs like Makeagif or Giphy:

http://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif

https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker

These.

Some time ago I found a wonderful YouTube channel called MattTheSaiyan, featuring mostly classic ads like the ones I giffed last night. The ones I chose to gif (and I herein present only about half of them) struck some kind of a chord with me, either from familiarity or just plain oddness. It's a weird feeling to see an ad you haven't seen since you watched Queen for a Day when you were seven. Why do we remember these things? As a rule, we were forced to watch them over and over again.

Kind of like these gifs.

One category I particularly like are VERY old ads, probably done live in the middle of a variety show. MattTheSaiyan's ads are edited from reels/videos/DVDs of early television. The "boooop" of an organ is often heard at the beginning of them, indicating live soap operas. An announcer will come on and earnestly present the ad. "Crawls" back then looked like they were mounted on rolls of paper or canvas, and were very likely cranked by hand.

Early advertising was very "in your face", in that someone had finally discovered that TV was not just radio with still pictures. Things MOVED on TV, so suddenly, in the ads, everything was moving. Dove's "1/4 cleansing cream" was so much a part of their ads for so long that I had to include it here along with all the lovely doves. Interestingly enough, Dove now claims that women should think they're beautiful no  matter what they look like. They should, too - as long as they use Dove products.

A lot of the gifs I made last night went to 20 seconds, and really, those are better-quality and more essay-like than these short ones. But they can run a bit weary after a while, if you're not a real afficionado. This is the short version of the Joy ad, the best part really, illustrating that in-your-face, literally explosive quality.

I love this one, and was quite impressed with it when I first saw it. From radiant bathing beauty to radioactivelly CLEAN beauty to. . . bride. It all fits together, doesn't it? If you smell this good, you're going to land a (preferably-rich) husband for sure.

This is a nice one, if a bit vertigo-inducing. Things are literally comin'-atcha. I have a feeling this was a 1950s ad. It's as if they're visually turning up the volume.

I've saved the best 'til last. Who of my generation doesn't remember all these recipes, usually made with Spam or one of its knockoffs (Spork, Klik, Bluggh, etc.) Scraps of pig-snout from the butcher's floor were ground up with plenty of fat as a binding agent. And there you had it: a perfect meat substitute. Spam and eggs! Spam on the barbecue! Spam with pineapple rings (my life is now flashing before my eyes!), and - oh God - Spam with cloves and brown sugar glaze on it, baked in the oven like a ham.

You could do anything to it that you would do to a ham. So says the ad. It was cheep, this Treet. It opened with a key, like a sardine can. And the strange thing is, fried up golden or baked in the oven, it really wasn't too bad. Kind of like really deluxe army rations. Beat the hell out of creamed chipped beef on toast.