The electric guitar Bob Dylan played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when the acoustic troubadour shocked traditionalists with a set of rock and roll, sold for US$965,000 on Friday, a world auction record for a guitar, Christie’s said.
The 1964 Fender Stratocaster, along with five song lyrics left on a private airplane by the songwriter and his band in the months after the Rhode Island festival, were part of six lots in a special sale of Dylan material in New York.
“A tremendous amount of international interest was generated at the time of the sale’s announcement, and today’s result justifies the mythic status of this guitar in the annals of music history,” Tom Lecky, a specialist at Christie’s, said in a statement.
An absentee bidder bought the Fender Stratocaster with a classic sunburst finish, its original case and black leather guitar strap for nearly double its high pre-sale estimate.
The previous auction record for a guitar was for Eric Clapton’s Fender Stratocaster, which fetched US$959,500 in 2004.
Only one of the five lyrics sheets sold, for US$20,000, bringing the auction total to US$985,000. That was a handwritten and typed version of 1965’s I Wanna Be Your Lover.
Friday’s sale came just a day after rocker Bruce Springsteen’s 1974 handwritten draft for Born to Run went for US$197,000 in New York.
Rolling Stone magazine has cited Dylan’s performance at the Newport festival as one of the most notable events in music history, according to Christie’s.
Dylan, one of rock’s most influential songwriters, wrote and sang Blowin’ in the Wind, Like a Rolling Stone, Mr. Tambourine Man and the 2001 Oscar-winning Things Have Changed. He also used the guitar in 1965 for recording sessions for the album Bringing It All Back Home.
The guitar and lyrics, which were found in the guitar case, were authenticated and put up for sale by the daughter of Vic Quinto, a New Jersey-based commercial pilot who had been hired by Dylan’s manager to fly his artists.
Dylan had claimed ownership of the guitar last year and was involved in a legal dispute with Quinto’s daughter, Dawn Peterson, after she brought it to the attention of the public television show History Detective, which authenticated it.
Christie’s said the ownership dispute had been settled. No details were available.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS