A vintage photo of Al Aronowitz.
In a 1973 article for The New York Sunday News, Al Aronowitz wrote about the time that Bob Dylan wrote some of “Mr. Tambourine Man” in his kitchen, while visiting him in Berkeley Heights.
“At the breakfast bar I found a wastebasket full of crumpled false starts,” Aronowitz wrote in the article. “I took it out the side door to empty it into the trash can when a whispering emotion caught me, like a breeze that sometimes gently stops you cold just because of its own ghostly power to make you notice it. I took the crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines, smiled to myself at the leaps that never landed and then put the sheets into a file folder. I still have them somewhere.”
Aronowitz — a major ’60s rock journalist who befriended Dylan, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Miles Davis and other hugely important artists of the era — died in 2005, at the age of 77. A Bordentown native who grew up in Roselle and graduated from Rutgers, he was living in a small apartment in Elizabeth — cluttered with stuff he had accumulated over the years — at the time of his death.
Those sheets of paper saved from the wastebasket — with Dylan’s typewritten lyrics to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and hand-written notes — still exist, and will be part of an auction, “Celebrating Bob Dylan: The Aronowitz Archive & More,” that will take place at The Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in Nashville, Jan. 18 at 10 a.m. CST, though bids can also be made online. Visit juliensauctions.com.
The “Mr. Tambourine Man” papers have an estimated value of $400,000-$600,000, and the current high bid (as of Jan. 16) is $250,000.
JULIEN'S AUCTIONS
The handbill from Bob Dylan’s April 12, 1963 concert at Town Hall in New York.
Other items in the auction include a 1968 oil-on-canvas painting by Dylan; pencil sketches, made by Dylan on a Plaza Hotel notepad; photos of Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and others; a handbill and a program from Dylan’s April 1963 concert at Town Hall in New York; fragments of a typed letter from Dylan to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and a press release about Dylan’s debut album from May 1962.
There is also an assortment of newspaper and magazine articles, by and about Aronowitz, that — I’m proud to say — includes a feature about him I wrote for the newspaper The Star-Ledger in 2004.
More items will likely be auctioned at a later date, said Myles Aronowitz, one of Al’s three children.
“Frankly, he was a hoarder,” says Myles Aronowitz, a photographer who lives in Nyack, New York. “He didn’t throw anything away. He tried to keep things organized, but he moved so many times over the years, and there were times when he had to move when he was being evicted … things got jumbled and he started and restarted his files, many times. And there were kind of last-minute things where you just have to throw things into boxes and hope that it’ll still be there when you get to the next place you’re going.”
Myles Aronowitz said there are close to 250 boxes of artifacts in the collection. It has been a huge undertaking, just to go through it all and figure out what is there. Obviously, not all of it is in this auction. Aronowitz calls this batch of items just a “peek” at what is there.
Another part of the collection that may be made available, in some form, in the future, is Aronowitz’s audiotapes. “They go back to the late ’50s,” said Myles Aronowitz. “He interviewed all of the Beat poets for that 12-part series that he did on The Beat Generation (for The New York Post). He got to be very close with them, while he was doing that. The tapes are incredible.”
He said that when his father wrote that series, he would send his manuscripts to the Beat writers, so that they could give him feedback. “He let them annotate them: write notes on them. My father thought they were lost, but we found a dozen manuscripts that were annotated by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — all these people — and dozens of letters between them. Postcards and letters. He ended up being lifelong friends with Ginsberg, and I got to know Ginsberg very well, also.”
The cover of Al Aronowitz’s 2004 book, ” Bob Dylan And The Beatles: Volume One of the Best of the Blacklisted Journalist.”
The audiotapes aren’t just of these poets. “There’s film stars,” said Myles Aronowitz. “There’s an hour-long interview with The Beatles in 1964, in a London hotel room. There’s an audiotape of a song that was being written in our living room, on Thanksgiving 1970, with George Harrison and David Bromberg. There’s so many really fascinating audiotapes.”
There is also a film of The Velvet Underground’s first concert appearance, which took place at Summit High School on Dec. 11, 1965. Aronowitz was managing the band at the time, and organized the show, which was headlined by Jersey garage-rock band The Myddle Class, whom Aronowitz managed as well.
There is no audio to it, Myles Aronowitz says, but there is some footage of The Velvet Underground. He adds that the film was made by Barbara Rubin, who died in 1980; he describes her as “an experimental filmmaker and close friend of the family.
“It’s an art film kind of thing, but it’s great. Most of it is The Myddle Class. But it’s double- and triple-exposed film. You know, a lot of those minutes are overlapping. Some of the fun stuff is, after the concert, there’s sort of this gathering backstage, with people milling about. It’s pretty great. Carole King and Gerry Goffin were partners with my father for The Myddle Class” — the husband-and-wife songwriting team wrote music for the band, and produced their singles — “and they were there, at the concert. They’re featured in this footage, too, as all the musicians are.”
Myles Aronowitz said the Aronowitz family has talked to two different research libraries about acquiring the entire collection. “Both were really interested, but one of them had to pass because it was too big. The other one, we’ve been working with for the last year and a half, and we’re getting close to making final negotiations with them. But in the process, we continue to go through all of these boxes, and we’ve nearly completed the box-level inventory for everything.”
It wasn’t until just a year ago, he said, that his wife, Lisa Levart, found the “Mr. Tambourine Man” lyrics, in the boxes. Al Aronowitz hadn’t even been sure that he still had them, thinking they might be lost or stolen, Myles said.
CHRIS WELLES
From left, Myles Aronowitz, Bob Dylan, musician Geno Foreman and activist Albert Maher in Chicago, in 1963.
One item that has special meaning for Myles is a photo of Dylan on the streets of Chicago, in 1963. “This was from a trip that my father and I took: It was one of the first of these trips that he would take me or my brother or sister on, when he went traveling for work. I was 7½ years old and we went to Chicago in 1963 and there was a photographer, and he took a photograph of me with Dylan and these two other guys on the street, and we decided to put that in the auction as well.”
According to the auction description, Dylan was in Chicago to perform at Orchestra Hall, and the photo was taken for a Life magazine feature, but not used.
The auction also includes some Dylan-related items that are not from Aronowitz’s collection. Among them are a 1983 Fender Telecaster guitar owned and played by Dylan; a signed harmonica; and a jacket worn by Dylan in the movie “Hearts of Fire.”
Myles Aronowitz said Dylan was a family friend of the Aronowitzes for about a dozen years: from 1963 to the mid-’70s. “After (Dylan) was married, we visited Woodstock all the time,” he said. “We shared a summer rental on Fire Island with the Dylans. He visited us all the time, and had my father drive him around, also, to meet people. They just got close. From my perspective, he was a friend of my father’s: He would come and crash at our place.”
JULIEN'S AUCTIONS
Bob Dylan’s typewritten lyrics for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” with handwritten notes, are being auctioned off.
The new movie “A Complete Unknown” documents Dylan’s life from 1961 to 1965, and ends with Dylan “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival. There is no Al Aronowitz character in the movie. But there could have been.
Al Aronowitz brought Dylan to meet The Beatles for the first time, at The Delmonico Hotel in New York in August 1964; it was there that he and Dylan introduced the four to marijuana. Myles Aronowitz says his father also took Dylan to see The Beatles perform a charity concert at The Paramount Theatre in New York, on Sept. 20, 1964.
“The way my father (told) it, Dylan was watching this concert from the side, standing on a chair — just like, really, really observing the whole thing. And then he took him back to Berkeley Heights. And (Dylan) had my mother take him over to the Rondo Music store on Route 22 (in Union), where he rented an electric guitar. It probably was the next day, Sept. 21.”
As far as the movie itself, he says, “I saw it twice, and I loved it. The music is what got me. To be honest, I cried both times. The music just went straight to my heart. They did a great job with that. But there’s big things missing out of the story. I mean, if the plot line is about him going electric … leaving out The Beatles is a big boo-boo. And, you know, my father was right there, in all that.”
The auction can be accessed online at juliensauctions.com.
For more on Al Aronowitz, visit blacklistedjournalist.com.
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