Years ago, at rock concerts, some attendees would sneak in tape recorders to record the music. Some would go so far as to then edit those tapes in a studio and have them pressed onto records. Known as “bootlegs,” these pirate recordings became highly sought after audio keepsakes for die-hard fans and groupies.
The recordings weren’t exactly legal. Performance arenas posted signs saying recordings were not allowed. Didn’t matter. Fans couldn’t get enough. The scarce bootleg albums turned up in some independent record stores where fans snapped them up. Today, it’s different. Now, you can’t attend a show without seeing a sea of thousands of smart phones trained on the performers capturing every note and move. Actual bootleg records are a thing of the past....
Another person creatively obtained some music, this time performed by the Beatles. The unnamed man lived in London and knew where the studio for Apple records was. Though he couldn’t get into the studio, one day he spotted a large trash can out back of the building. In it were multiple reels of audio recording tape. On a whim, he took a few reels out of the trash and played them at home.
The reels proved to be out-takes of music sessions performed by the Beatles. For true fans, any such tapes were solid gold. He had the best of those tapes pressed onto records which, again, sold like hotcakes. I’m not advocating dumpster diving in order to discover lost treasure. But, it clearly can sometimes pay off.
I mention all this due to the discovery a while back of some music lyrics that also were tossed into the trash. This time, the musician was Bob Dylan. Dylan had been staying in the apartment of a friend. Most of one night, Dylan stayed up typing on an old manual typewriter creating lyrics for a song he had been playing with. He evidently wasn’t satisfied with the two pages he had written. He ended up throwing them in the trash can.
Fortunately for fate and fans, the next day, Dylan’s friend went to empty the trash and spotted the two pages. On a whim he pulled them out and tucked them away.
The lyrics on the sheets were for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” eventually made famous by Dylan and The Byrds. For years, speculation has had it the song was really about drugs and the “Tambourine Man” was code for a drug dealer. Dylan has ardently refuted that as often as Peter Yarrow of the group Peter, Paul and Mary has denied that “Puff the Magic Dragon” was ever about smoking marijuana. Still, folks love to conjecture.
The typing on the “Mr. Tambourine Man” pages showed considerable edits, X-outs and handwritten insertions. The sheets had some tears and holes in them and, due to age, had yellowed considerably.
None of that mattered last week when the pages were put up for sale by Julian’s auction house. In the end, the sheets ended up selling for just over half a million dollars -- $508,000.
Too often, I’ve written about treasure just waiting to be found. At another auction held recently, a family put a medal earned by a relative up for sale. It had laid around for over 120-years gathering dust. It was time to bring it out to see what it might fetch.
The medal was awarded to a man named Fred Shule way back in 1904. That’s when the first Olympic games to be held in the United States took place. Fred was slated to run the 110-meter hurdles. It’s said he was up against primarily other American and Canadian runners.
Shule did quite well winning gold in that event. On the medal – roughly the size between a half dollar and silver dollar coin – is the image of a classic Greek athlete holding a wreath beside the words “Olympiad 1904.” The reverse shows Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and the words “110 Meter Hurdle” and “St. Louis U.S.A.”
Clearly, Olympic memorabilia hasn’t waned over the years. Like the Dylan lyrics, the half-million price barrier was again eclipsed. The Shule Olympic gold medal was hammered down for a whopping $545,371. For the record, back then, the medals were actually struck from real gold. Today they are gold plated.
Either way, it’s clear that whether forgotten trash or dusty sports memorabilia, there will always be treasures waiting that are pure gold. Could be time to start looking a little closer.
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