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A rare 1963 Bob Dylan lyric for the unpublished song “Go Away You Bomb” will go up for auction at Christie’s on June 26th. The lyrics were hastily dashed off by Dylan at the request of one his early friends and mentors, Izzy Young of the Greenwich Village Folklore Center. “I asked everyone I knew to write a song about the nuclear bomb,” Young tells Rolling Stone. “Bob Dylan came in literally the next day and handed this to me.”
“I hate the letters in yer word,” muses Dylan, addressing the masters of war he would call out in a more successful song that same year.
“B that means bad, yer so bad that even a dead hog in the sun would get up and run,” he writes. “O that stands for ‘orrible, yer so ‘orrible that the word drops its first letter and runs.”
The lyric sheet is expected to fetch up to $55,000 dollars for Young, who helped book Dylan at Carnegie Hall in 1961. Young will also auction off a flyer from that show.
Anyone care to put this song to music, Billy Bragg and Wilco style? Send us your version and we’ll post it on our site.
UPDATE: Thanks to Robert James Wolfe, Dennis M. Callahan Jr. and Reggie Leydens for answering the challenge
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