Forgotten in a folder for years, once thoughtlessly discarded after a night of smoking, typing and rewriting, three drafts of Mr. Tambourine Man – straight from Bob Dylan’s trash bin – are now fetching hundreds of thousands at an auction in Nashville.
The three typed versions of the song date from March 1964. Dylan worked on the lyrics that night, smoking, with Marvin Gaye on repeat, at music journalist Al Aronowitz's breakfast table. The next morning, Aronowitz went to empty the trash, but at the last minute decided to smooth out the crumpled pages and save them. "He was jumping from one thing to another," Aronowitz recalled in a later interview. "But that's what made it fascinating."
Sixty years later, those same scraps yielded almost half a million euros at Julien's Auctions. The buyer remains anonymous, but it is clear that interest in Dylan is peaking again. Thanks in part to the biopic A Complete Unknown with Timothée Chalamet as a young Dylan, the singer is once again in the spotlight.
Won't you play a song for me
The three versions of the song show how Dylan's writing style developed. Lines were rewritten, sentences simplified. For example, the original line "won't you play a song for me" changed to the iconic "play a song for me". Also notable: the choruses were in different orders and some verses did not appear at all in early versions.
Mr. Tambourine Man was eventually released on Dylan's 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, but it was The Byrds who brought the song to global fame, with their version reaching number one in both the US and the UK.
The auction raised a total of €1.37 million. In addition to the lyrics, a Dylan guitar went for €202.200, a denim jacket from the film Hearts of Fire for €23.100, and various sketches and photographs.