At that same Washington concert, a thirteen-year-old girl called Jamie stood close to the stage, clutching a plastic bag containing jellybeans, ready to throw at the Beatles.
Jamie was hanging around in the auditorium after the show when a friendly policeman handed her a crumpled piece of paper he had picked up from the stage: a set list scribbled by John, beginning with ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and ending with ‘Long Tall Sally’.
Without thinking, Jamie tucked the piece of paper into her plastic bag, where it joined a handful of jellybeans still unthrown. For the next thirty-odd years the bag mouldered in a cupboard, but in 1995 Jamie, now a mother, needed money to help pay for her teenage daughter’s education, and remembered the smeary set list. Accordingly, she sent it to auction, where it was bought by a collector for $5,000, though it would now be worth something closer to $40,000.
The price of Beatles relics, even the least noteworthy, continues to soar. In 2016, an unused ticket for that Washington concert fetched $30,000. Even a set of four tiny squares of white bedlinen, each square measuring half a centimetre by half a centimetre, cut from sheets slept in by the Beatles when they stayed at the Whittier Hotel in Detroit on the night of 6 September 1964, sold for £595.
A single red brick mounted on a silver plaque with the inscription ‘This is to certify that this is one of 5,000 bricks which Royal Life have salvaged from the original Cavern Club, Mathew Street, Liverpool England’ was sold in Los Angeles for £896 in 2019. Item 83 in the same auction was billed as ‘an overtime requisition form for G.T.H. Hipson, who was employed at Ringo Starr’s Sunny Heights, Weybridge, home, with the last week ending on April 30, 1967. Starr signed the form “R. Starkey” when it was passed for payment on May 4, 1967. Attached is a The Beatles Limited petty cash claim form that is also dated May 4, 1967.’ The pleasure afforded by the ownership of this wonderfully obscure item may be hard to pin down, but a collector was nevertheless prepared to pay £384 for it. Other items included a sheet of paper listing John’s high-school detention records from 28 October 1954 to 9 January 1955 – ‘Reasons for detention include “chatter ad nauseam”, “talking repeatedly”, “noise” and “eating again”’ (£3,125), a June 1967 quarterly telephone bill totalling £12.91, addressed to Mrs M.E. Smith (Aunt Mimi) and signed ‘in blue pen’ by John (£1,024), and a ticket stub for the 7 December 1963 BBC recording of Juke Box Jury on which the Beatles appeared (£437).
These were some of the more affordable lots. An early, smudged draft of John’s letter to the Queen announcing the return of his MBE sold for £19,200; a baseball signed by all four Beatles before their last US concert for £56,250; a New Zealand autograph book containing the autographs of all four Beatles as well as Brian Epstein, Jane Asher, Pattie Boyd and Helen Shapiro for £10,240; and a modest 1964 announcement (17x22 inches) declaring that the Blenheim Lounge of Liverpool Airport ‘will be closed in the interest of public safety’ for a Beatles press conference, signed by the group, sold for £31,250.
Over the years, grander items of Beatles memorabilia have fetched infinitely more: in 2005, Madame Tussauds discovered the wax heads of John, George and Ringo featured on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, which had been lost for nearly two decades, and auctioned them for £81,500. In 2018, Sotheby’s sold the ‘Apple Corps Ltd Dissolution of Contract, signed by all four Beatles’ for $118,750. John’s copy of the abandoned ‘butcher’ cover for the album Yesterday and Today, featuring the band in butchers’ smocks with dismembered dolls, signed by John, Paul and Ringo, sold for £179,200. But these were a snip compared to the $790,000 paid in 2015 for copy 0000001 of The White Album (‘very clean and fresh with very minor abrasions’).
Musical instruments associated with the Beatles are perhaps the most valuable relics of all: at that same sale in 2015, a skin from the drum kit played by Ringo on The Ed Sullivan Show sold for $2.1 million, while a guitar played by John fetched $2.4 million. At Bonham’s in 1997 a guitar commissioned by Paul but never played by him was sold to a bidder from Tokyo for £126,000.
A group photograph signed by all four Beatles would currently fetch £29,500. By comparison, a colour photograph of all three members of the Apollo 11 space crew – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins – would fetch only £10,000, roughly the same as a signed photograph of John Lennon. A signed photograph of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, might go for £3,000; signed photographs of Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy are currently on sale for £1,750 and £3,000 respectively. Signed photographs of President Trump go for around $1,000. Paul McCartney’s autograph is £2,950, which makes it currently the most valuable of any living person.1
When someone dies, their autograph gains in value, death having limited the stock. It is in the macabre nature of idolatry that an autograph associated with the death of the idol is the most valuable of all: in 2011, the Double Fantasy album cover signed by John Lennon for his killer, Mark Chapman, sold at auction for $532,000.
1 Annoyingly, I have lost the autograph Paul gave me circa 1972. I spotted him and Linda sitting towards the back of the auditorium before a concert at the Victoria Palace theatre by the group Grimms, of which his brother was a member. The only item I could find for him to sign was a photograph of Roxy Music, signed by the group, which I was carrying from the previous day. Paul obligingly wrote ‘And me too – Paul McCartney’ on the top right-hand corner.