History-making treasures from The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan & The Band, Woodstock, and more lead the July 19-20 event
Rare artifacts from the careers of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan & The Band, Woodstock, Elvis Presley and others will be available during Heritage Auction’s Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Auction in July. The two-day event, July 19-20, will feature history-making treasures one could only imagine owning.
There’s a famous 115-year-old bronze sculpture of a Native American on horseback, titled Appeal to the Greater Spirit, in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that is hardly associated with its creator, Cyrus Dallin. It is instead associated with the Beach Boys.
Brian Wilson, the band’s resident genius, chose it as the band’s company logo in the 1960s because, as his brother and bandmate Carl has explained, the Wilson brothers’ grandfather felt that there was a spiritual guide who watched over the Wilson boys from the “other side.”
Brother Records, Inc., the Beach Boys’ recording and holding company, has employed the image of the horseback rider over all of the band’s output for decades, and famously, a bronze edition of the sculpture graced Brother Records’ Los Angeles headquarters from the start, where the band referred to the mascot as “The Last Horizon.” And now this deeply historicized slice of rock-and-roll lore comes to Heritage in its July 19-20 Music Memorabilia and Concert Posters Signature Auction.
This familiar bronze sculpture is one highlight in an event packed with rare and significant memorabilia and original promotional posters from the bands that defined the 1960s, the most explosively creative decade of rock-and-roll, and were often spurred on by each others’ most brilliant work: The Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and many more. After the Beach Boys’ teen surf-song beginnings, the band’s “Last Horizon” sculpture aptly symbolized Brian Wilson’s evolving wilder impulses and his determination to musically go for broke.
“I was the person who wrote God Only Knows, and here was another person – the person who wrote Yesterday and And I Love Her and so many other songs – saying it was his favorite,” Wilson once said of the Beatles’ Paul McCartney. “It really blew my mind.” So much so that in response he wrote Good Vibrations, one of the most thrilling cuts of all time.
In the mid-’60s, rock-and-roll was so culturally urgent that the press tried to manufacture a rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But a far more fertile dynamic was brewing across the Atlantic, between the Beatles and the Beach Boys. The Beatles were open about their admiration for the Beach Boys and especially Wilson’s 1965 masterpiece Pet Sounds. It’s long been argued that Pet Sounds‘ drastic innovation was partly driven by Wilson’s admiration for the more mature direction of the Beatles’ 1965 Rubber Soul and that Sgt. Pepper’s experimental bounty was inspired by Wilson’s ambitious work on Pet Sounds. And so on. And while the originally aborted Beach Boys album Smile and the subsequently released Smiley Smile may well have been influenced by the Beatles’ (and producer George Martin’s) creative bursts, the Beach Boys’ Mike Love insists that after the release of Pet Sounds, the only thing Brian Wilson wanted to top was Pet Sounds. Wilson was so determined to take the Beach Boys into uncharted musical territory that, more than a year before the Beatles conceived of Apple Records, he started Brother Records – a new label that would get the Beach Boys out of its dependence on a more cautious Capitol Records give Wilson complete freedom.
Joining the Brother Records’ bronze sculpture in this auction are the fruits of Wilson’s inspiration from the Fab Four’s excellence as well as his own. Among them: An impressive box set reissue of The Smile Sessions, released in 2011 and signed by the five members of the group at the time. It and the bronze, along with other Beach Boys treasures in this auction, came from the estate of longtime Beach Boys touring member Jeffrey Foskett. Among other gems, Foskett’s profound relationship with the band is also commemorated by a full-sized Hobie longboard created for the Smile Sessions reissue that’s signed by the band, and in-house Beach Boys gifts to Foskett that includes a 1966 Good Vibrations platinum sales record and a gold sales award for the band’s magnum opus Pet Sounds.
On the Fab Four front, Heritage continues to dominate the category with a handful of lots that synthesize the Beatles’ astonishing run. Included is a 1963 band-signed, UK first-pressing record sleeve for Please Please Me.
“This is a fantastic vintage album cover for the British Parlophone Records edition of the Beatles’ first LP, autographed beautifully on the reverse by the band members in large, bold script written in fountain pen,” says Garry Shrum, Heritage’s Director of Entertainment & Music Memorabilia. “The band appeared on the ABC TV variety show Big Night Out and signed it for a fan while filming a comedy skit for the show. Most collectors would be hard-pressed to name a Beatles item more desirable than a signed version of their groundbreaking first UK album.”
Other Beatles rarities in the event include an unused ticket to the band’s 1965 Shea Stadium concert and a compact promotional jukebox release of the Beatles’ second album (Capitol took advantage of the Beatles’ popularity by issuing this six-song jukebox EP). A 1966 first-state stereo Butcher Cover is here (aka Yesterday and Today’s infamously nixed album cover) in very good condition. Speaking of the aforementioned Apple Records – it fell under the umbrella of Apple Corps Ltd, which released via its London boutique limited editions like this 1967 Apple watch designed by Richard Loftus and produced by Old England. The shop closed after a short run and a handful of the watches were retained by Apple and given as gifts to Beatle associates.
Original concert and promotional posters for legendary bands from both sides of the pond continue to pull in seasoned collectors, and this auction is packed with significant examples including (speaking of the Beatles) this 1967 “Carnival of Light” event poster advertising a “million-volt rave” and a promised “Light-Sound from California,” provided by San Francisco’s Ray Andersen of the Holy See Light Show and “Music Composed for the Occasion by Paul McCartney!”
“The music in question is a 14-minute avant-garde composition called Carnival of Light, and yes, Paul was joined by his three bandmates on the recording,” says Pete Howard, Heritage’s Director of Concert Posters. “We’ve had lifelong Beatle collectors here at Heritage take one look at the poster and say, ‘What’s that? I’ve never seen that before!’ It’s a marvelous pastiche of firecracker-explosive psychedelic art.”
It’s hard to imagine a rock history landscape without the Rolling Stones, and one of the most fascinating and historically loaded lots in the event can be summed up with one bracing word: Altamont. The elusive and much-discussed event poster was created in 1969 when the band played that fateful festival at Altamont Speedway in California. In Heritage’s last signature music auction, the auction house sold its first-ever specimen of the poster for $93,750 and broke all records for a Rolling Stones poster by tens of thousands of dollars.
“When a result like that reaches the public, it’s not uncommon for someone else to step up rather quickly and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got one of those!’” says Howard. “It so happens that not only did we land another Altamont poster after April’s result, but much to our pleasure, it came from a couple who attended the ill-fated festival and acquired their poster from a man hired to put them up. And now, 55 years later, they’ve decided to part with it, given its robust reception by Heritage’s vast collector base.”
Woodstock Festival 1969 Artie Kornfeld-Approved Historic Prototype Poster. Altamont wasn’t even the most famous concert of 1969. That honor goes to Woodstock, and the poster that advertised it could win the nod as the most recognizable concert poster ever. In this event, Heritage offers an astonishing piece of Woodstock history: It’s the music festival’s co-creator and co-producer Artie Kornfeld’s spec copy of the iconic red Woodstock poster on which he wrote “Let’s go with this ”before they printed them all. “Kornfeld kept it, lived with it, traveled with it, had his wife frame it,” says Howard. “He grew old with it, and finally sold it to pay off personal bills, providing a great couple of letters to tell its story. And some may sneer, but we love the fact it’s still in Artie’s old ramshackle frame.”
Other fantastic posters from this juicy era include one that advertises the very first time Bob Dylan played with Levon & The Hawks, aka The Band. Dylan bifurcated his shows – the first half was acoustic, and the second half was a fully plugged-in band set, and this 1965 Austin, Texas concert was his first official outing with Helm, Robertson, Danko & Co.
“This is the first time Heritage has ever offered this prized Austin poster,” says Howard. “It’s a tour blank so rare that in our 45-year history, we’ve only been able to offer it twice from any city.”
Also on tap is the crown jewel of the Ben Bierman Carmel Street Collection: An original summer-of-1966 first printing of the revered Grateful Dead “Skeleton & Roses” FD-26 San Francisco Family Dog concert poster, graded to the high heavens of 9.8 Near Mint/Mint by CGC. Heritage will offer a 1955, pre-famous Elvis Presley poster.
“This is an original cardboard window card advertising a WSM Grand Ole Opry All-Star Jamboree at the Southeastern Livestock Pavilion in Ocala, Florida,” says Howard. “Elvis had gotten some local success with a few Sun Records singles but nothing nationally, and here he’s listed seventh on the bill. He was still so unknown that the poster’s typesetter didn’t realize that Scotty & Bill were part of his trio and not a separate act!”
