In 1965, a 24-year-old Bob Dylan sat down at the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington, grabbed some stationery from the desk drawer, and scrawled what would become the last original draft of his iconic song “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Later Dylan would unsentimentally sell these sheafs of paper to an acquaintance he knew outside of music without thinking much about it. And now, many years later, that anonymous collector is cashing in. At a recent Sotheby’s auction the four pieces of paper went for more than 2 million dollars, nearly doubling the previous rock-manuscript record of $1.2M brought in by John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life” back in 2010.
Here is a closer look at each of the sheets. While the song is clearly near its final form, you can see that he was still experimenting with a lot of lyrics that ended up scrapped…
Read more at The New York Times and NPR.