Bob Dylan's famed electric guitar from 1965 folk fest sells for $965,000 (hmm; a mobile link?)
Saw it when it was verified on a silly episode of History Detectives. Guess Dylan didn’t push to reclaim.
The case also contained handwritten lyric sheets- don’t know if they’re included with the guitar. I heard that it’s expected to fetch 300k.
ps- I see the auction already happened…What I meant to say was, I hear that it’s expected to fetch almost a million bucks!
“The first thing the buyer did was swap out the stock pickups for some Seymour Duncans…”
You are sharing this as a joke, right? I am not getting it ::whoosh::
I totally got it!
Care to throw me a bone?
Sorry, I thought the joke was pretty obvious. The guy pays a million bucks for a historic guitar and then treats it like an off-the-shelf instrument that he’s actually going to use for gigs. A poke at the fetishization of collectible instruments. Funny, right? No? Oh, well.
Hey, I’ve heard of idiots doing worse. Forgive my Comic-Book-Guy level of geek seriousness 
Kinda like the <<eastern European>> athlete who won a gold medal at the Olympics and had it bronzed.
How did it leave Dylan’s control? Stolen or lost?
Forgotten. Love the irony, given the “significance”…
Dylan left it behind on a chartered plane. The pilot tried to contact Dylan to give it back, but no one ever returned his call, so he kept it.
Well, it’s your joke, but I thought it was funny because of the conflict of geekdoms. You’ve got your celebrity obsessed geeks and you’ve got your customization geeks (cars, guitars, whatever), and you had the later casually trump the former in extraordinary circumstances.
Sounds like something Yngwie would do, although his MO is more like this:
Buy rare yellow strat from the sixties
Scallop the fretboard
Change the pickups
Put Ferrari sticker on the back
Pile it on top of 30 other similar yellow strats in your studio
Hence my getting whooshed by the joke.
See, I am ambivalent about this. In my mind there is a sort of difference between art for art sake [a Picasso painting, a cute little bronze statue of She Who Was Beautiful Heaulmiere] and functional art aforesaid guitar, a [%2Csizedata[450x2000]&call=url[file%3Aproduct.chain]"]Galle vase] Obviously the former basically is designed to sort of sit there and get dusted weekly and looked at.
Now yes, you can let a guitar or vase sort of sit around and get dusted, and let the occasional person look at it at a party as part of the decor. But in my eyes that is sort of a waste, instruments are made to be played, and vases are designed to plunk a dried vegetation display in or to add water and put semidead vegetation in to torture it to death until it dies [sorry, I was watching the torture plants episode of Mythbusters this morning.:p] But then the collector in me thinks but what if it breaks … and then the musician in me would think sure it is great, Dylan played it, while the little devil sitting on my shoulder thinks that that pickup could be replaced and it would have a better sound … :smack:
Meh. A player should do whatever they want to their tools. Most guitars that have made history have tons of mods.
But old guitars have a value - the market is a fact. I am mindful of that when I buy, so I can have something trade-able when it is time to consider something else. Sacrificing that known value just doesn’t seem…practical to me. Not with modern examples that are excellently built and you can mess with all you want.
So I don’t get offended at the thought; I just think it would be economically foolish.
The whole point of the Dylan Newport guitar is that it’s a historic artifact. Sure, it’s also a vintage Stratocaster, but to treat it like any other guitar, even a collectible one, is like saying that the Spirit of St. Louis should be used for transportation and not left gathering dust in the Smithsonian.
There you go. But that’s not to say that an instrument can’t be used - it should just be respected for it’s value as an historical object, too. Billionaire Paul Allen let Kenny Wayne Shepherd use the Jimi Hendrix Woodstock Strat at some gigs. Heck, Nicolo Paganini’s famed Guarneri Violin, Il Cannone, is played pretty regularly to keep it opened up. And Yo Yo Ma tours with his Strad…when he doesn’t forget it in taxi cab trunks 
I wonder who bought this Newport Strat?
BTW, a quick glance at ebay shows non-celeb 1965 Strats going for 11-17K. That’s asking/buy it now price.