Dylan performs on the second day of the Hop Farm Music Festival on June 30, 2012. PHOTO: REUTERS
NEW YORK: A draft of the lyrics for Bob Dylan’s protest song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is going up for auction in London next month and is expected to fetch up to 200,000 pounds ($314,000), Sotheby’s auction house said on Tuesday.
The typewritten manuscript, with the date 1962, contains many scribbled revisions and scratching-outs to the song that Dylan recorded in December 1962 and released on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan the following year.
A 2014 auction of Dylan’s 1965 original handwritten lyrics for Like a Rolling Stone fetched just over $2 million at Sotheby’s in New York, setting a record for a rock music manuscript.
But the Hard Rain lyrics, described as a draft, are a mixture of type and handwriting, accounting for the lower auction estimate, Sotheby’s said. A different Dylan manuscript of the same song fetched $485,000 at the 2014 New York auction.
The song, like many of those recorded by Dylan in the 1960s, has been much discussed as to its inspiration. Dylan has both suggested and denied that it was written in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Sotheby’s said the manuscript is being sold by the family of Elizabeth D’Jazian, ex-wife of American entertainer and peace activist Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney.
It was in Wavy Gravy’s room above the Gaslight Folk Club in New York’s Greenwich Village that the 21-year-old Dylan typed the lyrics.
The manuscript will be auctioned in London on September 29 along with Bruce Springsteen memorabilia from the making of his iconic 1975 album Born to Run.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 27th, 2015.
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