A number of doors from the iconic Chelsea Hotel in New York have been sold at auction.
Doors from the rooms of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell and more were purchased for thousands of dollars each.
Bob Dylan’s door went for $100,000 (around £70,000) alone, while the door to a room occupied by Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin during an affair that is rumoured to have inspired Cohen’s track Chelsea Hotel No. 2′ went for $85,000.
Author Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road while staying at the hotel in the 1950s and his door sold at auction for $30,000. Jimi Hendrix and Madonna‘s doors went for $13,000 each.
The doors were reportedly rescued by Jim Georgiou, a former tenant, who saw them being thrown away and arranged to take possession of them.
Speaking to the New York Times, Georgiou said: “For me they were history and beauty and connected to my heart. They’re precious because there are so many people who’ve been through them.”
Meanwhile, Bob Dylan has contributed to a new compilation that turns classic tracks into “same-sex wedding anthems”.
‘Universal Love’ was released last Friday (April 6) and features the likes of Dylan, St Vincent, Kesha, Bloc Party‘s Kele Okereke, Death Cab For Cutie‘s Ben Gibbard and Valerie June.
For the six-track EP, Dylan takes on American classic ‘She’s Funny That Way’ (popularised by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole), changing the song to be ‘He’s Funny That Way’.
Executive producer Rob Kaplan said Dylan was quick to agree to the project: “It wasn’t just ‘yes, I’ll do this’. It was ‘hey, I have an idea for a song.’”
“If you look at the history of pop music, love songs have predominantly come from one heterosexual perspective,” co-producer Tom Murphy told The New York Times. “If we view music as something that brings people together, shouldn’t these popular songs be open to everyone?”