A unique recording by John Lennon on the day he met Paul McCartney was sold at auction Thursday to the Beatles' record company for $122,900.
"That's a good price for a slice of history," David Hughes of EMI Records said after buying the scratchy five-minute recording that sat in a bank vault for more than 30 years."It was sold without copyright. We hope to put it out as a record but we will have to negotiate with Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono," he said after the pop memorabilia sale at Sotheby's, the London auctioneers.
Beatlemania still reigned supreme 30 years after the group's heyday, as a private collector paid $81,520 for the drum head portrayed on the cover of the Beatles' album "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Another collector, who also preferred to be anonymous, paid $55,700 for a smudged copy of the original lyrics for "When I'm 64."
But the star of the auction was the Lennon recording.
"It is the very first and earliest known recording of John Lennon that has been found and also was recorded on the day John met Paul. That partnership was to change the course of rock and roll," said Sotheby's pop expert Steven Maycock.
The recording of the Quarrymen, a group led by the 16-year-old John Lennon, was made July 6, 1957 at a church fete in the northern English city of Liverpool, birthplace of the Beatles.
The recording was made on a bulky Grundig reel-to-reel portable by Bob Molyneux, now a 53-year-old retired policeman.