The manuscript for Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (his first rock ‘n’ roll hit) sold today at auction for slightly over two million dollars — $2.045 mil to be exact — to a mystery buyer, according to Sotheby’s, the auction house that handled the transaction, but that buyer didn’t get a key to unlock the mysteries of the manuscript.
For instance, why did Dylan write “Al Capone” in the margin with a line from the gangster’s name to the word “direction” in the chorus?
“Al Capone” might have worked in terms of a rhyme, but it would make no sense in terms of what the song is about.
Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” sold for $485,000.
But back to Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ manuscript:
There are various alternate phrases written on the manuscript that Dylan wisely rejected, but they don’t reveal much.
On the second page of the manuscript is a version of the chorus with “path unknown” as one of the lines.
At the top of page three is written: “How does it feel/ Behind the wheel.”
At the bottom of page three the chorus is again a work in progress:
How does it feel to be on your own
It feels real (dog-bone)
Does it feel real.”
Then he wrote “New direction home” but put a line through “new” and wrote “no” under it.
Then: “When the winds have (unreadable word that could be “flown”)
“Shut up and deal like a rolling stone
Raw deal
Get down and kneel.”
More interesting perhaps, Dylan has written names of songs and books on the pages, which may or may not relate to the song itself: “Pony Blues,” a song by Charley Patton; “Midnight Special” (and above it “Mavis”); “On the Road”; and “Butcher Boy,” which likely refers to “The Butcher Boy,” an old folk song that the Clancy Brothers recorded.
Other revisions.
There’s a mostly discarded verse that reads:
“You never listened to the man who could (illegible) jive and wail
Never believed ‘m when he told you he had love for sale
You said you’d never compromise/ now he looks into your eyes
and says do you want make a deal.”
And what ended up being the third verse reads like this in part:
“You never turned around
To see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns
When they all came down
And did tricks for you to shake the money tree.”
There’s a line drawn through that entire last line.
Page two of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” manuscript.
Yesterday I did a post about Bob Dylan’s manuscript for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which is being auctioned by Sotheby’s on June 24, 2014 in New York.
I wrote that what I found most interesting about the manuscript was that Dylan had written “Hiroshima” and under that, “Nagasaki” just a few inches from the chorus to the song. I wrote “it’s clear that Dylan meant the song to refer, at least in the chorus, to nuclear annihilation.”
What I found amazing about Dylan writing the names of the two cities the U.S. dropped atom bombs on during World War II, was that he had denied that the song was about what Studs Terkel called “atomic rain,” when Terkel interviewed him in 1963.
Clearly, Dylan was putting Terkel on, I concluded.
In fact, Dylan wrote the song in the summer of 1962, as tensions between Russia and the U.S. were building to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 – this was a time when the whole country feared a nuclear conflict.
Dylan told journalist Robert Shelton that he wrote “A Hard Rain” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which wasn’t exactly true: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song,” Dylan said. “But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.”
The reason I’m coming back to this is that today I got a comment about my post. A reader wrote:
“Interesting that the notations about Hiroshima / Nagasaki would be pulled out from all the other random notations in the song notes as ‘proof’ that the song is about nuclear fallout and nothing else. Surely that theme is an influence here, but I don’t think it means that Bob was lying’ in the interview by saying that meaning expands beyond that. It’s the rare Bob song that is about one thing and one thing only, in my opinion!”
Now I certainly didn’t mean to say or imply that the song is only about nuclear war, but I think it’s pretty clear that one of the meanings of “hard rain,” was “atomic rain.”
Dylan is infamous for misleading or putting on interviewers. Since the early ‘60s he’s said whatever he felt like saying, whether it was true or not. In fact, he purposefully made up fictitious stories about his past. In the fall of 1961 he told CBS that he’d worked in a carnival, which wasn’t true:
Dylan: Yeah, well, I was in the carnival when I was about 13 — all kinds of shows.
CBS: Where’d you go?
Dylan: All around the Midwest, uh, Gallup, New Mexico, Aptos, Texas, and then … lived in, Gallup, New Mexico and …
CBS: How old were you?
Dylan: Uh, about 7, 8, something like that.
“Bob Dylan” is, in fact, a character that Robert Zimmerman created, a character that changed from a scruffy acoustic guitar playing folk singer to a mod rock ‘n’ roller to a Nashville crooner, to mention just a few of Dylan’s personas. One could look at the character “Bob Dylan” as a kind of living montage — a character Zimmerman created and then has been refining and developing ever since.
So misleading Terkel was nothing new, and Dylan has continued to mislead and confuse interviewers in the 51 years since that Terkel interview. That’s part of what “Bob Dylan” does. And in fact, what he’s doing is similar to what fiction writers do. They invent a story that, if they’re good, gets closer to the truth than non-fiction.
Regarding the “other random notations in the song notes” that the commenter brought up, I don’t think they’re all random.
Bob Dylan frequently looked to older songs and poems, sometimes as more than inspiration, when he wrote his own songs.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is structurally based on the question and answer refrain pattern of the traditional British ballad “Lord Randall”, published by Francis Child, according to David Hajdu, author of “Positively 4th Street.”
For his melodies Dylan had been borrowing from old folk songs, so his notations of old folk songs including “Black is the Color (Of My True Love’s hair)” and “Railroad Boy” don’t strike me as random, but rather they may have been songs he was thinking about as he came up with the music for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
Writing the name of the rock ‘n’ roll group, The Dominos, and their hit, “Have Mercy Baby,” shows that even in 1962 when he appeared to be a hardcore folky, Dylan was into rock ‘n’ roll. And the references to comic book super heroes and a line from Edgar Allen Poe show that Dylan was drawing from a wide range of pop culture in addition to old folks songs and poetry as source material for his songs.
Perhaps most telling is that he wrote “Robert Houdin book” on the manuscript. As I wrote yesterday, that “likely refers to a book about the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, who is considered the father of modern conjuring.”
Dylan himself has proven to be quite a magician, transforming a middle-class kid from Hibbing, Minnesota into an international rock star, and conjuring up from bits and pieces of pop and folk culture, some of the greatest songs ever written.
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]
– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Oh to have been a fly on the wall as Bob Dylan wrote some of his now classic songs.
Until time travel becomes possible, the closest we may get to observing Dylan the songwriter in action are the four pages from the working manuscript for “Like A Rolling Stone” that Sotheby’s will auction on June 24, 2014 in New York.
On the pages, along with many of the lines that ended up in what some believe is Dylan’s greatest song, a song that certainly changed people’s ideas of what rock ‘n’ roll could be upon it’s release in July of 1965, are lyrics that Dylan clearly was considering for inclusion, but which didn’t make the cut.
The chorus, for instance, didn’t fully come together until page four of the manuscript. On page one there is a version of the chorus that reads:
“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be (or not to be) on your own
Direction (road back home)
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
Right below the second “How does it feel,” Dylan has added “Is it ain’t quite real.”
And at the side of the page it says “Al Capone” with a line drawn to the word “direction” in the chorus.
Page two.
On the second page of the manuscript is a version of the chorus with “path unknown” as one of the lines.
At the top of page three is written: “How does it feel/ Behind the wheel.”
At the bottom of page three the chorus is again a work in progress:
How does it feel to be on your own
It feels real (dog-bone)
Does it feel real.”
Then he wrote “New direction home” but put a line through “new” and wrote “no” under it.
Then: “When the winds have (unreadable word that could be “flown”)
“Shut up and deal like a rolling stone
Raw deal
Get down and kneel.”
Page three.
By page four this is the chorus:
“How does it feel, how does it feel
To be on your own
Like a dog without a bone
Now you’re unknown
Forever complete unknown
New direction home
No direction home
Like a rolling stone.”
“If you look at these four pages, you can see that at this stage there are rhyme schemes that he didn’t pursue, and I suppose the chorus is the biggest surprise,” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s manuscript expert, told the New York Times. “Here you have a chorus that is such an iconic piece of history, but it clearly didn’t arrive fully formed. And you wonder, if he chose another rhyme, would it have had the same impact?”
Dylan has written names of songs and books on the pages, which may or may not relate to the song itself: “Pony Blues,” a song by Charley Patton; “Midnight Special” (and above it “Mavis”); “On the Road”; and “Butcher Boy,” which likely refers to “The Butcher Boy,” an old folk song that the Clancy Brothers recorded.
“It was ten pages long,” Dylan once said of the manuscript for “Like A Rolling Stone.” “It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky.”
Page four.
There’s also a mostly discarded verse that reads:
“You never listened to the man who could (illegible) jive and wail
Never believed ‘m when he told you he had love for sale
You said you’d never compromise/ now he looks into your eyes
and says do you want make a deal.”
And what ended up being the third verse reads like this in part:
“You never turned around
To see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns
When they all came down
And did tricks for you to shake the money tree.”
There’s a line drawn through that entire last line.
The four manuscript pages for “Like A Rolling Stone” could sell for as much as $2 million.
An in-process handwritten draft of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics for “Born To Run” sold at Sotheby’s today for $197,000.
At one time the notebook page was owned by Springsteen’s former manager, Mike Appel, according to Sotheby’s. However the identiy of the seller nor the buyer have been revealed.
Of course if you don’t need to have the original, you could do like I did and print out this scan of the lyric sheet.
It’s not gonna get you $197,000 but it’s pretty cool to check out a work in progress, especially when the writer is Bruce Springsteen and the song is “Born To Run.”
A notebook page on which Bruce Springsteen worked on his trademark song, “Born To Run,” is going up for auction at Sotheby’s and is valued between $70,000 and $100,000.
The page reveals that the song didn’t come fully formed onto the page. Rather, much of the original lyric was reworked.
Early version of “Born To Run.”
Check out a larger version of the notebook page here.
Here’s a line that didn’t make it:
They live in fury chasin’ the bad kind of fools glory down a killer’s highway into mainlined [scribbled word] of the sun.
Here are some lines that in revamped form did:
I looked out cross my hood + saw the highway buckle neath the wheels of a gold Chevy 6.
I was headin for the place were good girls die in the arms of wild angels in one last kiss.
There’s also this alternative version of that last line:
I was headin for the place where wild angels die in an everlasting or neverending kiss.
If this is of interest, there’s an article in the New York Times to check out.
