How does it feel — to shell out more than $1 million for a piece of Bob Dylan’s brilliance?
A big-money bidder will get to answer that question this summer, when Dylan’s handwritten composition to “Like a Rolling Stone” goes on the auction block.
The notes are written in pencil and show how he toyed around with several phrases before landing on the tune’s most famous lyric, “How does it feel?”
“It’s not the first draft, it’s more like the final draft. We know it’s the only complete or near-complete final draft that exists [for `Like a Rolling Stone’],” said Richard Austin, Sotheby’s senior VP in charge of books and manuscripts.
“You can see him using different rhyming schemes – ‘raw deal,’ `take the wheel,’ `get down and kneel.’ ”
Sotheby’s expects the notes will go for between $1 million and $2 million at a June 24 auction.
“Like a Rolling Stone,” about a debutante who loses her way once she’s cast out from her elite circles, was recorded by a 24-year-old Dylan at Columbia’s New York studios in June, 1965.
Dylan’s notes are on four pages of stationery from the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington DC. But Sotheby’s believes these notes were scribbled by the singer-songwriter in Gotham just before recording it.
Modern songwriters, of course, use computers and other gadgets to pen their tunes.
So the backspace and delete buttons would have erased near-miss lyrics such as “raw deal,” “take the wheel” and “get down and kneel.”
“You lose that trail of creativity, when you write on a computer and can [so easily] edit and revise,” Austin said.
Dylan’s notes also include doodles, such as a hat, a bird and an animal with antlers.
The words “Al Capone” are on Dylans’ notes, but the famed mobster didn’t make the song’s final cut.
The “Rolling Stone” notes now belong to an unidentified California collector, who acquired them directly from Dylan, according to Sotheby’s.
The New York auction house, in 2010, sold John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics for “A Day in the Life” for $1.2 million.