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In March 1964, the rock journalist Al Aronowitz awoke to find Bob Dylan asleep on his sofa and the lyrics to Mr Tambourine Man crumpled up in his rubbish bin.
The 22-year-old Dylan had spent the night writing and rewriting his new song on a portable typewriter at Aronowitz’s home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, before chucking away the early drafts and stretching out on his friend’s couch.
Now, Dylan’sthe stained, crumpled and partially torn lyrics – which Aronowitz rescued from his trash can that morning and passed on to his children when he died in 2005 – could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are sold at auction on Saturday.
“My father never threw anything away, and we knew the story of Mr Tambourine Man … but he had lost track of it,” said Myles Aronowitz, who unearthed the lyrics last year after spending three years looking through 250 boxes of his father’s papers, photographs and audio tapes. “It meant a lot to him, but he didn’t know where it was.”
The three drafts of the song in Aronowitz’s archive reveal that Dylan substituted words like “bootheels” for “feet” and “magic” for “priceless”. He also deleted and shortened lines, and inserted new verses into later drafts.
“It feels like there’s a stream of consciousness there – but you can also see from the drafts how carefully each word was crafted,” said Myles.
Being able to see the words Dylan crossed out and inserted on the manuscript is like being able to look over the artist’s shoulder as he is writing the song, he said. “It gives you a feeling for what was going on in Bob Dylan’s head.”
Al Aronowitz had already made a name for himself as a journalist by writing about Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac when he was assigned to interview Dylan in 1963. After the two men became friends, Aronowitz introduced Ginsberg to Dylan and Dylan to the Beatles. “He brokered that meeting and brought some marijuana,” said Myles. He believes members of the Beatles then tried the drug for the first time.
In March 1964, the Aronowitz family home was a “safe haven” for Dylan, who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.
“He was licking his wounds,” said Laura Woolley, managing director at Julien’s Auctions, which is selling the lyrics. “And he just threw himself into his work.”
Aronowitz later recalled how Dylan had sat typing that night at “my white Formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit Camels cigarette smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out … while the whole time, over and over again, 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”.
Woolley thinks it’s likely Dylan had jotted down some notes for the song lyrics by hand a few weeks earlier, when he had experienced Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the first time. “I believe our first draft is basically a typed version of a lot of those notes – he was taking the thoughts and the ideas that were dancing around in his head and getting them down.”
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The lyrics appear to have been written quickly, with vernacular spelling (“tho you might hear laughin spinnin swingin madly thru the sun”) and the word “to” repeatedly abbreviated to “t”. But they also reveal how hard Dylan worked to find the right words that night: “He is constantly in search for perfection, on some level, of things having the right ring and sound,” said Woolley.
“No one will ever know how Dylan came up with some of these lines. And I think it makes him human that not everything he wrote just poured out of him. He really did have to work on this one.”
The auction house has officially estimated the lyrics will sell for $400,000 to $600,000.
Also on sale are 50 other items from Aronowitz’s personal archive, including an early oil painting by Dylan from 1968 (valued at $200,000 to $300,000), a 1963 handbill from Dylan’s first major headline performance, at Town Hall in New York City, and vintage photos.
