Lennon’s handwritten lyrics up for grabs

London: Late Beatles member John Lennon’s handwritten lyric sheet for ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ is to be auctioned off for 200,000 dollars.

Auction house Profiles in History said that it expects the draft lyric sheet to sell for more than 200,000 dollars at a sale next month in Beverly Hills, the Daily Mail reported. It has the opening lyrics for the song, and a rough sketch by Lennon of four people in a room with windows draped in curtains. When the psychedelic song was released on 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, listeners and the media speculated it was a thinly disguised paean to the drug LSD, based on the first letters of Lucy, sky and diamonds. But Lennon always disputed that notion, even though he was known to experiment with drugs. Lennon said he did not realize until later the title contained those letters in sequence. As Lennon and others have explained it, the inspiration came from his son, Julian, who was then a child and drew a picture of his classmate Lucy. Julian Lennon is said to have showed the painting to his father and told him, “That’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds”. A British woman named Lucy Vodden, whose maiden name was O’Donnell, revealed in 2007 that she had been the source of the song. She died in 2009. Despite the explanation of the song’s origins, the debate about its ties to LSD has persisted, in part due to the song’s swooning melody and strange lyrics. The draft ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ lyrics will be sold at an auction scheduled for May 14 and 15 at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills. ANI