Bob Dylan recently re-recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time in 60 years, and the recording — part of a special “Ionic Original” audio project spearheaded by producer T Bone Burnett — sold at auction for $1.7 million.
The recording was made to Burnett’s new Iconic Original disc, a high quality analog format he developed to be “the pinnacle of recorded sound.” The analogue technology is created by painting lacquer onto an aluminum disc that is played with a stylus like a vinyl record, supposedly producing a “depth, resonance and sonic fidelity that exceeds that of vinyl, CD, streaming or any other means of experiencing recorded music.”
The lone copy of Dylan’s updated recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind” went up for auction at Christie’s, where an unnamed bidder shelled out $1,769,508 for the item. Regarding the sale, Burnett said in a statement that by recording the 1962 classic as “our first Ionic Original archival analogue disc, we have entered and aim to help develop a music space in the fine arts market. I trust and hope it will mean as much to whomever acquired it today at Christie’s Exceptional Sale as it does to all of us who made it, and that they will consider it and care for it as a painting or any other singular work of art.”
[cos-videojs id=”1151a8052-c586-4350-86b8-1b497d1ae7f8″ auto_play=true show_playlist=false sticky=true]
Burnett also talked up the new audio format, saying, “Marshall McLuhan said that a medium surrounds a previous medium and turns the previous medium into an art form, as film did with novels, as television did with film, as the internet has done with television, and as digital has done with analogue.”
Get a refresher on Dylan and Burnett’s storied history by revisiting our review of Rolling Thunder Revue, Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Bob Dylan documentary. You can also see where “Blowin’ in the Wind” ranks among Bob Dylan’s 20 Best Songs, and check out the folk legend’s recent live cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil.”
