A fascinating tidbit from Harry’s Music:
Back in December of last year, the auction house Sotheby’s sold Bob Dylan’s original handwritten lyrics for The Times They Are A-Changin’ to a hedge fund manager for $422,500 (full story here).
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NobodySpecial
I can’t think of a more appropriate anecdote for the 21st Century.
Violet
Things Have Changed. (One of my favorite Dylan songs. He won the Oscar for this song.)
Sad_Dem
There’s a battle outside
and it is ragin’
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum)
In a world of steel-eyed death and people fighting to be warm someone pays almost half a million dollars for a piece of paper. The more things change …
Zifnab
Man, hedge fund managers just gotta own it all, don’t they?
Violet
@Zifnab:
Won’t last forever:
Southern Beale
See how tax cuts for the super wealthy trickle down to us poor rubes?
:-)
pragmatism
first warning doug, i’d hate to have to ban you. attacking hedge fund managers like that. three strikes and you’re out. love, not-mcmegan.
DougJ®
@pragmatism:
I love how she can write a whole post attacking hiring in academia and not answer one question about hiring at the Atlantic.
Southern Beale
Gin And Tacos has posted the clip from Chris Matthews last night talking with Eric Boehlert and Eugene Robinson about the crazy assed shit Glenn Beck and Frank Gaffney are spewing about caliphates and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s kinda funny to see Eugene Robinson say of Beck, “if you don’t recognize the responsibility that comes with your platform, you’re just a jerk.”
Gus
Do you think the purchaser just lacks a sense of irony? Perhaps he thought he was buying the original handwritten lyrics from Bob Roberts “The Times They Are a Changin’ Back.”
The Republic of Stupidity
I gotta say…
The irony inherent in that one moment – a hedge fund manager paying $400K to own a couple of pages of Dylan lyrics – is pretty farkin’ astonishing…
pragmatism
@DougJ®: easy, just characterize every question as a personal attack. i’m just suprised she didn’t trot out the “i come from a family of real academics” in the comments. she seems to be running scared a bit in the comments.
Ash Can
I wonder if that hedge fund manager has a Deadhead sticker on his Cadillac.
PWL
Yep, the times they have-a-changed. A song about rebellion is purchased by some rich Establishment type for almost half a million dollars. Hippies to yuppies.
Proudhon
Hey, as the proprietor of Harry’s Music, let me tell you how much a shoutout like this means – my readership is up by a factor of about 422,500! Thanks so much for reading and for the mention – I really appreciate it!
Ash Can
@pragmatism: Maybe her hit counts are down and her bosses are starting to throw ideas around for a different Stupid Pet Trick to draw attention to their site.
Paul in KY
@Ash Can: His/her Maybach. Cadillacs are for the untermenschen.
joeyess
Well, I guess that hedge fund manager got his Green Weenie.
pragmatism
@Ash Can:
i thought i knew what love was
what did i know
those days are gone for ever
i should just let them go
megs only has one trick. unfounded assertion…..lie to justify……profit!!!
Bobby Thomson
And the first one now will always be first.
Bobby Thomson
@Violet: Usually I can’t stand Michael Douglas but he was great in that role.
cleek
dead-head sticker on a Cadillac
in canaduh
Who cares. Dylan sold out way before this happened as did most DFH’s.
MikeJ
@Violet: I always thought that song sounded like he’d been possessed by Leonard Cohen.
DougJ®
@Proudhon:
No need to thank — it was a very interesting post!
slag
@Violet: Wonder Boys is a great movie and that song was perfect. I haven’t read the book (don’t tell Michael Chabon), but from what I’ve heard the movie was better anyway.
slag
Duplicate?!? I used to care, but things have changed.
DougJ®
@slag:
The book is good, but the movie is better. It kept all the good stuff and left out the over-described, over-Iowa-workshopped extraneous characters.
piratedan
@in canaduh: damn, all this time I thought Dylan was a songwriter/musician who wrote songs and played music because that is what tripped his trigger. That other folks finally found his music and claimed that it spoke to them was completely his fault I guess; as was being ahead of his time and then becoming a contemporary of his time is now some sort of crime. At least we still have Bon Jovi.
Sly
About as inappropriate as using a song about heroin addiction to advertise luxury cruises.
But no where near as inappropriate as this.
mr. whipple
Yup. It’s kind of funny that a hedgster paid the money for this piece of scribbles, but there had to be a seller as well. Was that Dylan?
Proudhon
@mr. whipple: Dylan was not the seller – the first owner (after Dylan, of course, was an old friend of his from Minneapolis named Kevin Krown – I’m not sure if he was the owner at the time of the Sotheby’s sale.
slag
@DougJ®: Yeah. That’s pretty much in accord with other views I’ve heard. Though now that Chabon has blogged for TNC I feel a bit guilty for not having read many of his books. Blogging (with comments section) takes guts and I gotta support that.
joel hanes
this TV presentation of The Revolution brought to you by the financial wizards of Goldman Sachs
Mr. Poppinfresh
“Wealthy kleptocrat pays wrinkly old sell-out half a million dollars for sheet of paper containing anti-establishment lyrics from a bygone generation of hypocrites.”
This is why I moved to Canada. It ain’t perfect, but it’s not burning to the ground either.
slag
@joel hanes: I recently watched the “Bicycle Rights!” clip of Portlandia on Hulu. It was brought to me by Chevrolet.
Yeah–the left is totally winning the battle of ideas in this country. Totally.
Triassic Sands
At least that’s $422,500 that one hedge fund manager can’t spend on much, much worse things.
Mako
In my opinion, there’s no contest, Eric Johnson is an unbelievable technical guitarist and has a lot more range than Dylan.
Matthew B.
Dylan already let the song be used for a Bank of Montreal ad some years back. Used to be on YouTube, but I can’t find it now.
suzanne
Maybe I’m a whiny brat (maybe!), but $400K would pay off my house and my and my husband’s student loans. Can I auction that opportunity off? I’ll scribble on a piece of paper for ya. Hell, I’ll even go ahead and frame it for posterity.
Wonder Boys (the movie, didn’t read the book) is fabulous. So fabulous that I don’t even want to punch Katie Holmes in the face when I watch it. And the Dylan song over the opening credits is one of my all-time favorites. Coming from me, who had a Dylan song as her first dance tune at her wedding, that is high praise.
I love his Victoria’s Secret commercial, too. Nothing made me want to go buy a bra like “Love Sick”.
jl
Off Topic, except that it could go under ‘things have changed’ heading.
WikiLeaks: Saudis running out of oil
The cables detail a meeting between a U.S. diplomat and Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration for Saudi oil monopoly Aramco, in November 2007. Husseini told the American official that the Saudis are unlikely to keep to their target oil output of 12.5 million barrels per day output in order to keep prices stable. Husseini also indicated that Saudi producers are likely to hit “peak oil”–the point at which global output hit its high mark–as early as 2012. That means, in essence, that it will be all downhill from there for the enormous Saudi oil industry.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110209/ts_yblog_thelookout/wikileaks-saudis-running-out-of-oil
So, ‘peak oil’ at least if interpreted to mean the availability of liquid crude petroleum may not be a fantasy. Even if a decline in Saudi production capacity does not lead to long run decline in world crude oil production, it will be a very large and inconvenient blip at an inconvenient time.
In my view, the problem with crude oil is not the extent of unknown reserves that might make up for losses to known productive capacity. The real problem for current decision making regarding energy policy is the uncertainty due to no reliable price or quantity signals about the (edit: long run) supply of crude oil.
Most estimates of mineral reserves you see are for ‘economic reserves’. Economic reserves are an economic concept, and are estimated conditional on expected future price of the mineral. The higher the price, the more stuff is worth getting out of the ground eventually, so estimated reserves go up.
Estimated economic reserves will almost always look pretty finite from a long term perspective, and you can always say that there is some crisis and that in 20 or 30 or 40 years we will be ‘out of Importanium’ or whatever. What you want to look at is the elasticity of reserves with respect to price. If you see reserve estimates sort of stay stuck as price goes up, then that is a real sign that there may be problems maintaining supply in the long run, and it is time to start looking for some kind of substitute or efficiency measures to reduce consumption.
But that kind of reasoning assumes a competitive mineral extraction industry and a competitive exploration industry where everyone has an incentive to reveal information about their reserves.
That is not the case for crude oil. Excess capacity is dominated by one producer, Saudi Arabia. It is not a competitive market. The incentives that influence what Saudi Arabia chooses to reveal about its reserves are more opaque than in a competitive market.
And if you leave aside Saudi Arabia, the remaining excess capacity is dominated by a few more large producers.
So, in terms of crude oil, and its supply, and implications for energy policy, we have been flying blind. The estimates of crude oil reserves, and how they vary with price in the short to medium run are largely what the Saudi Arabia decides is in their best interests to announce.
But I should not have said that. It throws doubt on the wisdom of letting rich people say that whatever happens is the result of the Free Market (also known as FREEDOM, the ultimate bliss), and is communist.
But, will be interesting to follow this story and see how much is there to this particular Wikileak.
WyldPirate
I always thought Bob Dylan sucked ass as a musician and a songwriter. Still do.
But what a waste of money. The original lyrics are not even worth wiping your ass with in a pinch, much less 400+ Gs.
Slugger
I think that it was a bargain! What value would you put on that piece of paper. If I had that kind of cheese, I’d gladly spend it on an authentic manuscript like that.
Just think what rocks chiseled on by Michaelangelo cost.
I did name a child after one of Zimmie’s songs.
Alex S.
@WyldPirate:
Oh, I agree! I can’t think of a Dylan song I really like. It’s probably a generational thing.
Violet
@slag:
I really love the movie “Wonder Boys”. That is has this fantastic Dylan song is just icing on the cake. Michael Douglas gives a really great performance, but the whole thing is beautifully done. I loved it.
@suzanne: And yeah, it’s one of the few times I didn’t just roll my eyes at Katie Holmes. That was pre-Cruise days, though, so she still had a little something to her. Now she just seems like a rich, pretty robot.
Michael
@jl:
Fat white male exurban Christians might have to park their giant SUVs? Horror…
ETA: And what about the fat white exurban Christians and their 6000 sq ft Texas McMansions for small families? What will they do without 7 bathrooms and a display room for Dad’s NASCAR collection or Mom’s Precious Moments display cases?
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
I have written 5 albums worth of material. I think I’d better contact my archivist and check on the whereabouts of my lyrics.
In spite of what people say about his voice, for phrasing and articulation Dylan is practically peerless. He defines 20th century rock and roll on an atomic level. For songwriters he is a colossus that must be reckoned with or purposefully ignored. Either way, if you are trying to write a certain type of music, you are playing in his ballpark.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@ Alex S
Sorry, no. Dylan’s music is playful and referential in a way that is irresistible to people who like music. Dilettantish dismissal of Dylan’s music spans the generations.
Amanda in the South Bay
Eh, for all I care it could’ve been a wealthy Silicon Valley person-rich assholes are all the same to me, geeky software engineer startup person or investment banker. One just happens to culturally fit in on the left better.
Steeplejack
@Bobby Thomson:
That whole movie (Wonder Boys) is great. I particularly like the page-numbering bit at the start of this clip. “Is all of that single-spaced?”
Montysano
@Violet:
Damn right. Take this song and his incredibly spooky “Ain’t Talkin'” and it’s apparent that Bob isn’t too optimistic about the future.
Steeplejack
@Sly:
WTF?! on that second one. Models digging coal to “Sixteen Tons”? That ain’t right.
Here’s the necessary palate-cleansing corrective.
Grover Gardner
Maybe ten years from now, when his career is on the skids, he can shlep it to Antiques Road Show and learn from the chipper guy with the pony tail that Dylan memorabilia has seen a decline in recent years, but, conservatively, it’s worth a few thousand bucks for insurance purposes.
“So, tell us, how much did you pay for it?”
…
“Oh.”
cmorenc
Um…how did the original handwritten pages for the song ever depart from Bob Dylan’s ownership? That’s exactly the sort of thing that if I was a small-time local coffee-house folk songwriter/performer who rocketed to mega-stardom in no small part due to THAT song, I’d hold onto it forever, have it framed on a wall in my house.
If Dylan sold it himself, he’s a douche bag. If he gave it to a close friend who then sold it, the friend’s a douche bag. Wait! Dylan’s a great songwriter, but IMHO he IS a douchebag. I went to a doubleheader concert that was part of a tour circuit he and Willie Nelson were doing together, and Nelson came on first. What a wonderful performer and person Nelson is: he made you feel as if you were at a guest performance in his own living room, almost family. MUCH more talented a musician than even comes across on the teevee. And then Dylan’s performance was second. HE NEVER FACED THE AUDIENCE OR ADDRESSED US, OR ACKNOWLEDGED US, ONCE. He made us feel almost like uninvited voyeurs peering in on a studio rehearsal, trying to stay inconspicuous and quiet so as not to get busted and thrown out. What a douche bag, a talented douche bag, but a total douche bag IMHO. And yes, Dylan is one of those artists who don’t sound nearly as good live in person as they sound on recordings, and he has a hoarse voice with limited range to begin with even with all those stuido engineers and fancy audio equipment to clean his sound up.
Delia
@cmorenc:
Well, I don’t know how long ago this Willie Nelson tour was. Dylan’s done more than one with him. In the Dylan concerts I’ve caught in recent years he doesn’t do any patter with the audience, but he certainly faced us often enough. He introduces the band members toward the end of the shows. I think you’re projecting your own feelings about feeling unwelcome or needing to be quiet. At the shows I’ve been to he seems to draw energy from the enthusiasm of the crowd and likes to have people in the front up and dancing around.
His voice has certainly diminished a lot in recent years and he doesn’t have nearly the range he once did, especially for the more lyrical songs (e.g., Mr Tambourine Man). If you listen to audience recordings from earlier years you’ll hear that he had a much wider range and a much stronger voice.