ELYSE: Tonight on History Detectives: Is this Bob Dylan's?
I don't believe it.
I'm getting goose bumps.
MAN: We heard that the Beatles were going to come down here.
Are these autographs real?
Oh, man!
MAN: I found it in a thrift store.
Was this really made by Frank Zappa?
That's a big question.
ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪ Watchin' the detectives♪ ♪ I get so angry when the teardrops start♪ ♪ But he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart♪ ♪ Watchin' the detectives♪ ♪ It's just like watchin' the detectives♪ TUKUFU: Funding for tonight's Hi, I'm Tukufu Zuberi, and we're on location here in Santa Fe.
And I'm Wes Cowan, and listen, I can't believe I'm saying this, but welcome to the 10th season and 100th episode of History Detectives.
Rock 'n' roll is the soundtrack of postwar America.
And tonight we're going to do an entire episode devoted to uncovering some of the mysteries behind some of this great music.
Right now, right here, on History Detectives.
[♪ ] My name is Dawn Peterson.
For more than 40 years, this guitar has been in my family.
My dad was a private pilot for Bob Dylan.
The guitar was left on one of his planes, and he took it home.
After he died, I watched a documentary about Bob Dylan, and it showed footage of the first time that he played an electric guitar live.
It looked exactly like the guitar that my dad had left in our family's attic.
I want to know if this is the guitar that Bob Dylan played when he plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
I'm Elyse Luray.
And I'm Wes Cowan, and we're about to investigate one of the potentially biggest finds we've ever made on History Detectives.
DYLAN: ♪ How does it feel...♪ WES: The story of Dylan being booed for switching to an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is a legendary moment in rock 'n' roll history.
But the guitar's whereabouts have long remained a mystery.
Hello.
Hi, how are you?
Good.
Nice to meet you.
Hi, how are you?
ELYSE: Okay, let's see what you have.
Oh, nice.
WES: Wow.
Can we take it out?
Sure.
All right, let's see this baby.
So, uh, Fender Stratocaster, right?
Yes.
And it's a Sunburst.
That's its finish, the Sunburst finish.
Wow.
It's my favorite finish.
Let's hear the story.
My dad flew Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul and Mary; The Band.
And I'm told that it was one of the guitars that Bob Dylan had.
Wait, hold it.
Wait a minute.
Your dad used to fly Bob Dylan around in the 1960s?
Right.
Wow.
That's pretty cool.
That's totally cool!
So wait a minute, did your dad ever try to get in touch with Bob Dylan, said, "Hey, Bob, I happen to have your guitar"?
I was told my father tried to get them to pick it up or get it back to them, and nobody ever came.
In 2005, Dawn and her husband wrote to Bob Dylan's management, requesting that Dylan waive any claim to the guitar that had been with her family for so long.
Dylan's lawyers declined her request and said if his guitar had been left with Dawn's father all those years ago, it should be returned.
The lawyers have not been in contact since.
So while it's not clear who actually owns the instrument, our job is to find out if indeed it is the legendary Newport guitar.
I've got to tell you, though, there were thousands of this exact model of guitar made, right?
Right.
Yeah.
So what are the chances that this is the real one?
This has all been family folklore.
Right.
There were lyrics, though, also in the case.
Oh, wow.
To what song?
I don't know.
It looked like he might have been writing songs.
Wow, if these are really his handwritten lyrics, that's actually really cool.
Well, we don't know they're his handwritten lyrics.
No, but if they are, that's a good...
Absolutely.
So we've got all this stuff.
Looking at the case, was there a luggage tag or anything like that?
Nope.
I do have a picture of my dad, his pilot photo.
Oh, he's cute.
Wow.
He looks like he could be in a rock 'n' roll band in the 1960s.
Take a look at that.
Wow, that's great.
This is a picture after one of the flights in California, I believe, that my father took of Bob Dylan.
And my dad's address book has a number for Bob Dylan when he was in Woodstock, New York.
Oh, that's cool.
Did you ever call it?
I called it when I was in junior high school.
And?
And no answer.
So have you done any research on the stenciling on the case, "Ashes & Sand"?
I have looked it up on the Internet.
I didn't find all that much about it, though.
So it's a mystery.
Right.
[♪ ] We take the guitar back to our office for a closer look.
It's an incredible story, but at this point, that's all it is.
Let me just say one thing.
You're thinking the same thing I am, I'm sure.
I don't believe it.
Listen, if this is the guitar, right, that Dylan plugged in at Newport, I mean, how big is that?
It's huge.
The first thing we need to do is figure out when this guitar was made.
I mean, there's a serial number on the back.
Of course.
So where's the -- wait a minute, here's "Dating your Fender stringed instrument."
Oh, cool, okay.
So let's see.
Ready, I'll tell you what it says.
"L31324."
The L 20,000s to the 50,000s...
Okay, so that would fall into that category.
'64.
Okay, so the guitar was made before the '65 Newport Folk Festival, but there's no documentation that Dylan was playing a '64 Strat that day and not an earlier model.
Photos of Dylan at Newport in 1965 show him playing a Fender Stratocaster with a Sunburst finish.
Dawn does have some interesting evidence.
And this thing was kind of cool, the address book.
The first thing I'd ask, though, is -- I mean, this is like too good to be true, right?
"Bob Dylan, Woodstock."
The lyrics, I think, are totally cool, but I'll tell you, they don't look like complete songs.
And the handwriting -- We should be able to match it.
I mean, either it is or it isn't.
Yeah, yeah.
So why don't we split this up.
I'll try to dig into the lyrics, you dig into the guitar.
That's a good idea.
Cool.
ELYSE: My first stop is Rolling Stone magazine, which has been covering rock 'n' roll since the '60s.
I'm meeting Dylan expert Andy Greene.
So how many times has Dylan been on the cover?
He's had the most covers out of any solo artist.
Wow, so he's really up there in the history of Rolling Stone.
Yeah, we just keep going back to him.
Dylan began his career in the folk music scene of the early 1960s.
But Andy explains when the 24-year-old stormed the stage with an electric guitar at Newport, the folk hero was plugging in to a rock 'n' roll revolution.
Now here is the top 50 moments in rock history.
I think that's the guitar.
Looks pretty close.
50 most important moments that changed the history of rock 'n' roll, and there's Bob Dylan.
Yeah, and that was a folk festival, even.
Yeah, that was the moment.
They're claiming that this is the guitar that Dylan went electric with.
That's pretty awesome.
What do you think?
This definitely looks like it.
But they obviously made a bunch of them.
Let's talk about that day in July, because I'm a little confused as to why it would be such a big deal.
Well, it was the Newport Folk Festival, which he played the previous two years.
And by '65, he was the headliner, and the audience expected him to do "Tambourine Man" and do "Times, They Are a-Changin'."
The early '60s had seen a folk revival, and Dylan was the movement's golden boy.
DYLAN: ♪ Let me ask you one question♪ ♪ Is your money that good...♪ ELYSE: In years past, he dutifully sang the folk songs the fans knew and loved, often accompanied only by acoustic guitar and harmonica.
And then Dylan walks onstage and he has a band.
It was extremely dramatic.
He went from solo acoustic to just full-on electric.
It's the most shocking thing that he's ever done, and he's done a lot of shocking things.
If an artist wanted to change, why not let him change?
Well, because they saw folk music as changing the world.
And they saw rock 'n' roll as pop, as sort of fluff.
If I play "The Times, They Are a-Changin'" from January of '64, you will see the huge difference in sound that he had.
♪ Come gather 'round, people wherever you roam♪ ♪ And admit that the waters around you have grown♪ ♪ And accept it that soon...♪ This was Dylan at the height of his powers, this is the Dylan that they most revered, just the protest singer, the civil rights warrior even.
You know, this was Dylan at his most iconic to the folk purists.
I can hear it.
I get it.
Yeah.
I totally get it.
I can hear the emotion, the passion in his voice.
They didn't want to lose that.
Okay, so what's the opposition to this?
I'll put on "Tombstone Blues" for you.
That's a nice blues rocker.
Track two... [ "Tombstone Blues" plays ] I mean, this is... That's so good.
This is night and day.
There's a whole band playing, it's almost blues rock.
It's great.
This is like garage rock.
I love it.
It's very aggressive.
Yes.
And it's not socially conscious at all.
It's not a protest song.
No, it's fun!
But to the folk purists, this was treason.
Andy says Dylan's Fender Stratocaster had sounded the call to revolution, and the new rock music movement that Dylan helped pioneer that night would define the late '60s counterculture.
So show's over, huge phenomenon, what happens to the guitar?
I've seen pictures of him playing it at a few more gigs, and then it was gone.
I have no idea what happened.
Andy says one of the problems is that to his knowledge, no one has any details about that Newport guitar: where it came from, what year it was made, or what he did with it.
There's so many mysteries that just surround Dylan, and this guitar is definitely one of them.
So if I could prove that this was Dylan's guitar where he went electric, how big of a find do you think that would be?
It would be huge.
It would be a major historical find.
[ "Hard Times in New York Town" plays ] Greenwich Village, New York City.
Dylan lived here in the early 1960s.
This is where the myth began.
A few hangouts from that day remain, like the legendary White Horse Tavern, where I'm meeting Jonathan Taplin.
He was a Dylan roadie at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the man responsible for moving equipment, including the guitar.
So this is the guitar that I emailed you about.
First let's look at the case.
Oh, my God.
What's "oh, my God"?
Well, this company, Ashes & Sand, Inc... Yeah, what is that?
was the company that Dylan set up to run his tours and collect the money for his tours.
Okay.
Nobody would've known that.
Well, what do you mean, nobody would've known that?
That was what?
Well, it wasn't on any posters or anything.
So the fact that that has that on this case is huge.
Yes.
Let's look at it, see if it looks familiar to you.
It's a Fender.
Well, this is exactly the kind of guitar that Bob was using.
Uh-huh.
It is the Sunburst.
This looks like it.
I mean, I don't know if it's the real guitar, but it definitely looks like it.
So that's looking good.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, so now tell me a little bit about -- I mean, you were there.
I was there.
And he plugs in.
He plugs in -- Tell me what happened.
Basically what happened was Pete Seeger opens, there's lots of folk music, and then Bob comes on.
And everybody had been waiting for him, and when he shows up in an orange shirt, a black leather jacket, high-heeled boots, I mean, it was like a shock to folk music.
This was not the blue work shirt that we'd been used to.
And then he starts into "Maggie's Farm," and by the end of the song, the audience is booing.
Basically the folkies were outraged.
And Pete Seeger was telling the head of the festival, "Turn the electricity off."
There was just total chaos backstage.
And then Bob quit.
He was supposed to play for an hour, and he just walked off the stage.
And I ran around backstage from the sound mixing board, and there was Bob, and he was sitting at the bottom of the steps, and he was just, like, crushed.
I think it's probably the first time he'd ever been booed.
Dylan did eventually return to the stage and pleased the crowd with acoustic numbers like "Mr. Tambourine Man."
How'd you feel when he plugged in?
Like, what was going through your head?
From an emotional point of view, I loved it, because I was totally on the side of Dylan changing.
I have a theory of art that great artists take incredible leaps and just take big chances.
Picasso did it and Dylan did it.
So the show's over, it was a monumental evening, what happens to the gear?
So they packed up the gear, and it just so happened that Peter, Paul and Mary, which were the biggest act in folk music at that time, had a plane called a Lockheed Lodestar.
So they would've put it in Peter, Paul and Mary's plane.
I have this photograph.
His name is Vic Quinto.
Look familiar?
No.
Okay, so he was the pilot.
According to his daughter, Vic Quinto was the pilot of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.
You would never have seen the pilots?
No.
Okay.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
It was great information.
But something is bugging me.
I'm a little skeptical that Jon didn't recognize Dawn's father's name, Victor Quinto, or the photograph.
I mean, if he was in charge of the equipment, I kind of think he should.
Hey, this is Tom.
One of my researchers, Tom McNamara, has been looking for anyone who might remember Dawn's father flying for Dylan.
To be frank with you, I couldn't find anybody.
Tom says flight records from the time are gone.
So I found Richie Greene in this phone book.
Tom called every number in Vic's phone book until he got hold of Richie Greene, a former pilot.
And what did he have to say?
Richie Greene remembered Vic.
They were old buddies.
They flew together back in the 1960s.
Then he found this picture of Vic and Richie back in the day.
Nice.
They worked at the same airfield when Bob Dylan's manager approached Vic, Dawn's father, and said, "Will you fly for me?
I've got a job for you."
And from then on, Vic Quinto was flying for The Band; Peter, Paul and Mary; and of course Bob Dylan.
All right, good.
And he gave me one detail which was pretty interesting.
He remembered the exact plane that Vic was flying, and that was a Lockheed Lodestar.
That's the plane that Jonathan Taplin remembers.
I wonder how Wes is doing.
[ phone rings ] Wes here.
Hey, Wes, it's Elyse.
How are the lyrics?
Listen to this: "Well the walls quiver and the back door slams, the county farms and the traffic jams," I mean, that sounds like Dylan, right?
Yeah, but I can't match it up.
Oh, that's weird.
So, I mean, we're still looking at a total mystery.
So I'm in SoHo in New York City.
While Elyse is checking out the guitar, I've got to check out these lyrics.
Now, I've already sent copies to a Dylan expert named Jeff Gold.
I'm on my way to meet him right now.
And he's going to tell me up or down.
You've got to be extremely skeptical when it comes to Dylan stuff.
There's lots and lots of fake stuff around.
The vast majority of it, probably 95% of the stuff that I see, isn't authentic.
Let's take a look.
So there you go.
WES: Jeff explains that authenticating Dylan's handwriting isn't easy.
Dylan's handwriting changes as often as Dylan's songwriting.
He's got the most inconsistent handwriting of anybody I've ever experienced.
Well, in the autograph business, we'd want to compare these with something we know he wrote in '65, and these were supposedly written in '65.
Can we do that?
Yes, and that's where this gets really interesting.
He writes here, "watching the six white horses pass."
Well, "six white horses" is a phrase that shows up in "Absolutely Sweet Marie," a song Dylan wrote for his Blonde on Blonde album.
I knew that I'd heard these phrases before.
Well, I own Bob Dylan's manuscript for "Absolutely Sweet Marie."
So I scanned these things and blew them up pretty large.
And this "six white horses" is from the manuscript in question.
This is from my "Absolutely Sweet Marie" manuscript.
And you can see he wrote "six flying horses" and then amended by writing "white" up here and "the" up here.
So I Photoshopped this to put the words in the same exact order.
Now, as you can see -- and this is very consistent with Dylan -- it alternates between handwriting, or cursive writing, and printing.
I see exactly what you're talking about.
He wrote the sixes in block printing, and then he would start a word or he'd take a couple letters, and he'd write it in cursive.
It's kind of an idiosyncrasy of his.
He does go back and forth in that way.
So is this pile of stuff Bob Dylan's?
Beyond a shadow of a doubt these are authentic manuscripts written and typed by Bob Dylan.
Whoa.
I mean, I'm getting goose bumps when you just tell me that.
They're pretty extraordinary.
Jeff believes the lyrics we have include fragments of three songs that were recorded at the Blonde on Blonde sessions in late 1965 but never actually made it to the album.
They're evidence of a profound artistic transformation.
He's not writing topical songs anymore, he's not writing love songs anymore, he's not writing so much literal songs about what he's feeling.
These are more surreal, these are more abstract.
So, I mean, I've got to ask, what are they worth, the group?
I'd say $30,000 to $50,000.
Yeah, well, I mean, that doesn't surprise me a bit.
These are a pretty extraordinary find.
Man, I cannot believe this.
These lyrics are the real thing.
Now the final step is to find out if the guitar is the very one that Dylan plugged into when he changed the world at Newport.
ELYSE: I'm in Rochester, New York, to meet Andy Babiuk.
He's authenticated guitars for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Everyone tells me if there's any way to match our guitar to the Newport Fender, Andy's the man to do it.
Thanks for coming.
Love the place.
Thank you.
So let's see this thing.
All right, go ahead.
Whoa!
What do you think?
Wow, it's got the original flatwound strings on it still.
Okay, what does flat mean?
Explain that to me.
The strings are actually flat, like a ribbon, wound.
New strings, typically most players use a roundwound string.
Okay.
It's quite a bit different.
Andy says the flat strings are common to the period, although they could have been added at any time.
[ plays chord ] Ah, cool.
[ plays rock song ] Way cool.
The plate on the guitar's body dates to 1964, but Andy tells me that serial number plates are only held on with a few screws and can be switched to increase a guitar's value.
He has another way to determine when the guitar was made.
I've got this little desk set up here so we can take this apart.
[♪ ] Mm, it's got that cool old guitar smell.
In the guitar geek world, that's a sought-after smell.
All right, I've got to get this geek smell down.
So now we're going to very, very carefully remove the neck.
Okay, I got it.
Oh, cool.
Huh.
And there's the neck.
Ooh, is that dust?
And there's the date.
The 2nd of May, '64.
So it's period.
I mean, it's a match.
This is the right thing, so this is great.
This is really great.
The guitar is dated one year and two months before Newport, but is it the Fender he played that night?
My office has made what may be a breakthrough.
We ran down a photographer, John Rudolph, who had been a 17-year-old pressed up against the stage that summer night in Rhode Island.
Okay, so these are from the 1965 Newport Festival.
He took what may have been the best and clearest images of Dylan that night... and his controversial guitar.
We had them sent up to Andy for comparison.
Some of the shots, the guitars are blurry in the shots, but I think with this photo, it's a very clear shot where you can see the wood grain in the guitar.
The clear wood grain is vital evidence, like a fingerprint.
Andy says no two guitars have exactly the same grain.
Okay, these lines here are the wood grain, right?
There's two lines here right by the input jack that match up.
Okay, that -- I can see that, but I don't know -- is that 100% sure?
I mean, what else could we...?
Well, what we could do is look at the fingerboard, also made of wood, and if you take a look in the photo, there's a line, dark line, that goes across the dots.
ELYSE: So here's the story.
We kind of broke it up into three different elements.
We explain to Dawn that the guitar case can be linked to Bob Dylan, the lyrics are in Dylan's handwriting, and the guitar itself can be dated to 1964.
The last step was to compare the wood grain in the body of the guitar to photographs from that historic night.
ANDY: If you take a look in the photo, there's a line, dark line, that goes across the dots, and you see that exact same line appear right here.
I see it!
That's great!
So, I mean, in your opinion, what do you think?
That's Bob Dylan's guitar.
Wow!
This is a culturally very important guitar.
This is way cool.
You want to leave it here?
[ laughing ] Um...I just -- I don't know what to say.
It's just amazing.
WES: If this was once Bob Dylan's guitar, the question remains, who owns it now?
Determining ownership after decades can be extremely difficult with issues of law, intent, and context all playing a factor.
But its value to history and the marketplace cannot be disputed.
WES: The people that I talked to said that a fair sort of estimate would be somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000.
So what do you think?
I thought it might be that guitar, but to know it actually is, it's just awesome.
Thank you, guys, so much.
Coming up, our rock 'n' roll hour continues with Frank Zappa and a mysterious piece of art.
But first...
Almost every summer when we were boys, our parents took us for summer vacation down to Miami Beach.
Early in 1964, we heard that the Beatles were going to come down here.
This was the first time they hit the shores of the United States, and I decided to write Charles, the mître d' at their hotel, to see if he would get me their autographs.
We know that the Beatles were performing at the Deauville Hotel on February the 16th.
Two weeks later, this came in the mail.
Signed by Ringo Starr.
And this room service menu signed by John Lennon.
It was unbelievable.
I always imagined that Charles got John Lennon's autograph by delivering room service to his room.
I can imagine that he got Ringo Starr's when Ringo was at the pool.
We have treasured these autographs for over 48 years.
But a lot about them has remained a mystery.
Are these autographs real?
I'm Tukufu Zuberi, and I was definitely a fan of The Beatles.
Their impact on American pop music was groundbreaking.
Those early hit songs and first U.S. TV appearances were a beachhead in what became known as the British Invasion.
So when I heard about this story, I was like, "Yeah, I want to do this."
I dig The Beatles.
This is the Deauville Hotel room service breakfast menu, and it's signed by John Lennon.
Whoa.
What does that say?
"To Jimmy..." "To Jimmy, with luck, The Beatles, Ringo Starr."
And this is a postcard that Charles included.
The Mischner brothers always wondered exactly how Charles had managed to get The Beatles' signatures.
"Dear Jimmy, this is the best I can do for you.
At the time I managed to get the pictures, there was only one 'Beatle' in the room, and he did the autographs.
As you will see, it was Ringo Starr.
With best wishes, Charles."
Who was Charles?
He was the mître d' in the evening meal at the Deauville Hotel.
Jimmy and Michael had met the mître d' when they vacationed at the Deauville with their family in the summer of 1963.
What was his last name?
Don't know his last name.
Where did he live?
Don't know where he lived.
"P.S.
Hope you can use the other autographs."
He sent several autographs on Deauville Hotel memo pads.
One was for Bob Hope.
Vic Morrow.
A comedian named Myron Cohen.
And then Cynthia Lennon, who was John Lennon's first wife prior to Yoko Ono.
I kept all of this stuff together, including the envelope that it was sent in.
Michael's been holding on to the autographs, but everything is addressed to Jimmy.
Jimmy, Jimmy, James.
Who -- how did Jimmy -- are you keeping them for Jimmy or what?
About two weeks after I received the autographs, I needed some money for a date.
So he needed $5.
And I said, "No, I'm not going to give you $5, but I will buy The Beatle autographs from you for those $5."
It's been a source of a lot of good-natured teasing over the last 48 years.
In fact, what I've said is that I'm going to use the proceeds from this to pay for my retirement.
Of course, that's if you find out they're really authentic.
THE BEATLES: ♪ Baby, you can drive my car...♪ I'm here in Miami Beach, and as you can tell, I'm happy, the weather's beautiful.
This investigation should be fun.
If these autographs are real, I'm not sure Mike could retire on them, but they might be worth thousands.
1964 is the year the Beatles exploded onto the American scene.
ANNOUNCER: 3,000 screaming teenagers are at New York's Kennedy Airport to greet, you guessed it, The Beatles.
TUKUFU: The nation fell in love with the cheerful, irreverent lads from Liverpool in their high-octane TV appearances.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles!
[ screaming ] ♪ Close your eyes and I'll kiss you...♪ I knew about the famous Ed Sullivan Show in New York, but I've never heard of a second taping in Miami.
Okay, here it is, the Deauville Hotel.
Here is a video of The Beatles playing at the Deauville Hotel on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Now, tonight, here in Miami Beach, The Beatles!
Bring them on out!
♪ She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah♪ ♪ She loves you...♪ So The Beatles were at the Deauville.
I'm not a signature expert.
I really need to talk to somebody who knows more about signatures than I do.
I'm sending copies of the autographs to an expert, Roger Epperson.
Hey, how you doing, Roger?
So did you get the scans that I sent you?
Roger says he can help, but warns their signatures changed a lot in their early years as they went from unknowns to signing hundreds of autographs at a time.
It's going to take him a while to track down examples from that 1964 trip for comparison.
In the meantime, I want to find out more about The Beatles' visit to Miami.
Would it even be possible for this mysterious mître d', Charles, to get close enough to The Beatles to secure these autographs?
Beatles author and expert Bruce Spizer agrees to meet me at the Deauville Hotel.
And this is where it happened.
This is inside the Napoleon Room.
That's the stage The Beatles performed on.
This is how it looked back in 1964.
[ screaming and applause ] All the fans going crazy.
They said they actually got in 3,500 people.
That seems like that was really packing this place tight.
ANNOUNCER: Here come The Beatles!
Here they come, here they come!
There's Ringo!
GIRL: I touched him!
That's all I could stand!
By the time they were at the Deauville, they were certainly at the height of Beatlemania.
So at this moment, when they arrive in Miami, they're like bona fide superstars.
Like never before.
Now, the people in New York warned the people in Miami.
You know, be on guard.
The airport is going to be besieged.
REPORTER: Thousands of local teens storming the Deauville Hotel.
MAN: They're trying to get in the elevator, too, and the police are standing by, trying to keep them from getting in the elevator.
But they didn't believe it was going to be quite that bad, and 3,000 to 7,000 people show up.
The Deauville Hotel staff certainly must've been warned by Ed Sullivan's people that pandemonium would be here.
But once again, the Deauville staff thought they could handle it, and they really couldn't.
But why the Deauville?
Why the Deauville?
Because Ed Sullivan and the owner of the Deauville apparently knew each other.
And for the Beatles, it was the perfect situation.
They play New York, they fly down to Miami, they do The Ed Sullivan Show, and they've got a vacation in Florida.
TUKUFU: Bruce tells me around 70 million people watched The Beatles' Miami performance on TV.
How would Charles have gotten access to The Beatles to get these signatures?
Bruce had the same question, so he spent some time looking for the Deauville's mysterious mître d'.
Well, we knew he was the mître d' at the Deauville, but unfortunately, the Deauville changed hands in management and ownership a couple of times, so any employment records are presumed destroyed, so we weren't able to find out Charles' last name.
And without a last name, we really haven't been able to track down Charles.
But whoever Charles was, the other autographs he sent suggest he had the powers of persuasion.
I have no way of telling you whether these four signatures are real or not, but I can tell you Myron Cohen was on The Ed Sullivan Show with the Beatles, so he was there.
He was there.
We know Bob Hope was there.
REPORTER: Have you gotten a a Beatle wig yet?
No, I'm buying one for Crosby.
Monday, February 17, Bob Hope announced in Miami, "Of course I dig the Beatles.
My kids would take away my television set if I didn't."
And "Best wishes, Cynthia Lennon," she was there.
Bruce says, as the mître d', Charles could've encountered any of these celebrities in the restaurant.
But he doesn't think The Beatles ever ate there.
He guesses Charles could have procured the autographs somewhere else.
Now, here we are up on the 12th floor of the Deauville, and this was the room that the Beatles stayed on.
Paul and Ringo were in here?
Two Beatles in this room.
So if Ringo would've signed something in his room, this is the room where he would've signed it.
This would've been the room.
Okay.
His fans were trying to do things like dress up as maids and try to get in that way.
The manager was very sensitive about this, so the staff was really informed that they also couldn't be swept into Beatlemania, that they pretty much had to stay away from The Beatles.
Did Charles risk his job to get John and Ringo's autographs for Mike and Jimmy?
THE BEATLES: ♪ Hold me, love me...♪ TUKUFU: Handwriting expert Roger Epperson finally has an answer.
He's meeting me at the Hard Rock Cafe, where they have a painting from that '64 visit signed by the Beatles.
What did you find out about the other four autographs that I sent you?
I was going to start with Myron Cohen.
And I've picked up a known exemplar from a Las Vegas hotel that he'd signed an autograph for.
As we can see here, they're absolutely identical.
And that one's definitely real.
Whoa, okay.
Bob Hope, as you can see here, this one is without question authentic, too.
Vic Morrow.
It's a perfect match, dead on.
Cynthia Lennon here, she always puts a dot at the end of her signature.
If you line them up, they're exactly identical.
So my guy is really holding some signatures.
Oh, absolutely.
Now, let's get down to The Beatles.
The thing with The Beatles, they're a little bit trickier than these guys.
As they're rising to fame, they've signed many, many, many, many autographs.
It usually digresses.
So this should be good for us to use, because the four signatures on here were supposedly gotten while The Beatles were here in 1964 doing The Ed Sullivan Show at the Deauville Hotel.
Well, let's start with the John Lennon.
[♪ ] Let's take a look at this one.
So here we are, the Napoleon Ballroom.
This is where it all happened.
I love it!
And this is the stage where the Beatles played.
It's awesome.
Right here.
So how you guys feel being where The Beatles played back in 1964?
I love it.
Can't believe it.
I'm going to pinch myself.
It's exciting.
You wanted to know if these were authentic.
Every single one of these four signatures are authentic.
Great.
Good.
Good.
That's great.
That's super.
That's great.
That's what we were hoping.
But are The Beatles autographs real?
So from comparing the two from the same week, I have to say this John Lennon and the Ringo Starr is not authentic.
Oh, man!
Oh, no!
[ laughing ] That's too bad.
Oh, man!
The J is definitely different.
This isn't a type of J he normally made.
Ringo's R is much rounder here than it is here.
The underline doesn't have the star that he put underneath his name.
This autograph is not from Ringo Starr.
Really?
And as you can see, this is not John Lennon's signature.
The J for sure is different.
That's right.
Disappointing.
So now we know.
Ringo Starr didn't sign, John Lennon didn't sign.
Who do you think signed it?
I always heard that the road manager signed in lieu of the artist.
Could it have possibly been their road manager?
It's definitely possible.
So their tour and road managers signed in their place?
Many, many times.
They look pretty good.
They fool a lot of people just so they could satisfy that autograph hunger.
But in regards to the John Lennon and Ringo Starr autographs, that's not their style of signature.
TUKUFU: The road manager didn't sign them.
Okay, okay.
Could it have been Cynthia Lennon?
Cynthia Lennon could've signed it.
We know that she was there as well.
That's certainly not her handwriting either.
But what about Charles?
I show Roger that along with the autographs came a postcard from Charles, the mître d'.
Well, let's take a look at the way he wrote.
"Beatle" here and here are very similar.
Let's look at the way he wrote "Jimmy."
Mm-hmm.
It's nearly identical.
This one Charles definitely signed.
Whoa!
This photo here was signed by Charles.
[ laughing ] Okay?
Okay.
It's unbelievable.
Oh, man.
Michael and I have teased each other, or he's teased me, that he will retire on this.
It could still be his retirement.
Might not be as much, but it's his retirement.
I'm certainly not mad at Charles.
I think he thought he was doing something nice for a couple of boys.
You believe that he had good intentions in it.
That means something to you.
It does.
Now, that kind of meaning is priceless.
Exactly, exactly.
You're right.
ELYSE: And now, our final story.
My name is Edward Lewis.
I'm a thrift store addict.
I found this collage in a thrift store that I really think may be made by the famous musician Frank Zappa.
I only paid $5, but I really believe it may be worth a whole lot more.
Was this collage really made by Frank Zappa?
GWENDOLYN: In his three-decade career, Frank Zappa never had a number one hit and only flirted with the mainstream.
Zappa's music was genre-busting, eclectic, and experimental.
FRANK ZAPPA: ♪ Watch out where the huskies go♪ ♪ And don't you eat that yellow snow♪ GWENDOLYN: He was a social critic in his music and his actions, satirizing the counterculture, confronting Congress over music censorship, and championing political and artistic freedoms around the world.
But I've never heard that he made visual art.
This is what I was telling you about.
Now, why do you think it's a Frank Zappa piece?
There's FZ over here.
It's signed FZ, which I didn't think a whole lot about, but a friend of mine actually called me up and said, "You need to look at this website.
There's a picture similar to yours, and it's a Frank Zappa collage."
So I went to that website, and there was one very similar, and it was attributed to Frank Zappa.
Well, I'll see.
Attributed is the key, that's right.
Tell me where you found it.
I found it in a thrift store in South Carolina, but the tag on the back shows that it was framed in California.
Let's see.
Denney's Paint Shop.
And what's the name of this town, Santa Paula, California?
Santa Paula, California.
I would want to take this out of the frame at some point.
Is that okay with you?
Sure.
I'll be very careful.
Just don't tear it up.
Well, I'll see what I can find out for you.
That's why I contacted you.
[♪ ] This says "drum shop."
An interesting piece of work.
Some things are cut, some things are torn.
It's ink and watercolor.
The cymbals are paper, as is this man's jacket.
The plaid is painted on.
And then up here we have what looks like it's either a bell for a boxing match or for a fire alarm.
There's a real vitality here.
It's dense, it's colorful.
Zappa certainly was known to have a visual style in his album covers, but I can find almost nothing about him as a painter.
Seems he once worked as a greeting card designer, made claymation shorts, and even built a film set, but these references to visual art are fleeting in a career overwhelming devoted to music and musical experimentation with his band, The Mothers of Invention, and his later solo projects.
Edward mentioned that there's a fan site that has other artwork purportedly by Frank Zappa.
Let me see what I can find there.
Most of these look nothing like our collage.
Here's the piece that Edward thinks resembles his.
It clearly has a lot of similarity with our piece.
It has the same thick and thin pen and ink lines, but there's no signature, not even FZ.
And frankly, although some of this looks promising, almost nothing here is verified.
Some of the statements about provenance show how unreliable this can be.
"This artwork was given to a lady I became friends with when I lived in Beverly Hills.
She personally knew Frank Zappa."
With Edward's piece found in a thrift store, I don't even have that tenuous connection.
I need to find a way to link this collage to Frank Zappa.
Denney's Paint Shop.
That might give us an important clue.
I presume that's when this was originally put into a frame.
It's a long shot, but maybe they'll have records of who framed this.
I can't find the paint store online, but Santa Paula is in southern California, where Zappa had moved with his family as a teen.
My office is seeing if they can get records of when the store closed and run down any of the people on the art website.
In the meantime, I'm meeting pop-culture historian Michael Walker in the legendary Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon, where Frank Zappa lived in the 1960s.
I'm trying to find out if this particular pen and ink -- Oh, gosh, look at that.
Isn't this fabulous?
If this was done by Frank Zappa.
Have you ever heard about his doing any work as a visual artist?
No, I did not know that he did anything like this.
But Michael does tell me that Zappa was a drummer in his high school days and definitely part of a visual arts scene in Laurel Canyon.
Laurel Canyon was just a polyglot with all sorts of artists, real or imagined.
But Frank Zappa and Gail Zappa, his wife, and their daughter, Moon Unit, and this entourage that lived at the cabin with them, it was almost like a salon, like in Paris, except that he was running it.
But Michael explains that Zappa stood apart from many of the other musicians and artists surrounding him.
MAN: ♪ Come on people, now let's get together♪ ♪ Try and love one another right now♪ That was when folk rock was just huge.
There was the Mamas and the Papas and The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.
He was surrounded; he lived amidst all these people.
But he was not doing what they were doing.
[♪ ] GWENDOLYN: Zappa was a fan of radical modern composers, especially Edgard Vaèse, who experimented with electronic music.
He was doing avant-garde, almost symphonic compositions.
Lyrically, Zappa was also willing to poke fun at the earnest folk scene and the drug use of the day.
He was sort of doing a reality check for the counterculture.
He did not have an abiding love for hippies.
He thought perhaps it was sometimes hypocritical.
This is a song called "Plastic People," and it's a great song because it's a parody both of Frank Zappa's own generation and also sort of a middle class American generation.
♪ Take a day and walk around♪ ♪ Watch the Nazis run your town♪ ♪ Then go home and check yourself♪ ♪ You think we're singing 'bout someone else♪ ♪ But you're plastic people♪ ♪ Oh, baby, now♪ That's basically him busting his own people, which was a brave thing to do at that time.
He was more of a commentator and an iconoclast.
FRANK ZAPPA: ♪ Ronnie's in the army now and Kenny's taking pills♪ ♪ Oh, how they yearn to see a bomber burn♪ GWENDOLYN: Zappa was a political dissident, too.
In the mid-1980s, he appeared before Congress to protest music censorship.
In all his research into Zappa's artistic experimentation, Michael never came across Frank the collage maker.
But he believes that Frank's concept of music was uniquely visual.
Well, you also talked about his music in a three-dimensional way.
When he played a guitar, he referred to them as sound sculptures, so he was making a physical thing in the air.
And he loved the idea of moving masses of air around in big concert halls with big speakers.
Fascinated him.
That's interesting, but I still don't have any proof that this collage was one of his artistic visions.
The Santa Paula Library has sent me copies of their business directories.
They show Denney's Paint Store was only open from 1959 to 1963 at the address on our label.
If Zappa painted this, he did it before the age of 24.
Someone who knew him back then for sure was his younger brother, Bob Zappa.
I meet Bob and Calvin Schenkel, the artist who designed many of Zappa's most iconic album covers, at Calvin's studio.
Have either one of you seen this?
I've never.
Does it look at all familiar?
Specifically?
No.
No, I never saw it.
But Bob says his brother was making visual art in his teens and early 20s.
He even won a prize for a poster that he did on fire prevention when he was in the 9th grade.
And when he was working for a card studio in Claremont, California, he was using silkscreen.
I think he did a TV commercial for Luden's.
Luden's Cough Drops, yeah.
Frank collaborated with animator Ed Seeman.
I don't remember exactly what it said, but there were no people in it, it was just that visual of the lines and the sound of the record.
The visual was dancing to the music.
But very much this notion of sound, and not just here's music and here's a painting, but how do we see these screeching together.
Earlier in L.A., he did a lot of ads for the events, the concerts, using collage.
Oh, really?
That's the thing about his music, too, he worked in so many different directions and put it all together in just all kinds of different ways: classical, jazz, and rock on the same album and even in the same song.
Calvin says the little art he does have that Frank made reflects this eclecticism.
And I have a copy here of a flyer he did at the time.
You see the same density and dynamism here.
There's a lot going on on the page.
The cut of the letters, his style, you can see it in here, the little flourish on the S. Yes, there are real similarities, but was this done by the same hand?
Our researchers at the History Detectives office have been tracking down leads from the website.
None have panned out.
But there is another lead, the one person who might be able to help settle this.
I'm excited.
Gail Zappa, Frank's wife, has agreed to meet me.
I sent her a scan of the collage, and she asked to meet me at the Professional Drum Shop in Hollywood.
Are you Gail?
Hi, Gwen.
How nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I'm very honored.
I'm trying to find some material about an early visual piece that I think he might have done.
I sent you that scan, but here's the original.
Let me show you.
Oh, my goodness.
I didn't know I was going to get to see the actual piece.
So here it is.
So I'm trying to find out if FZ was Frank Zappa.
Okay, that's a big question.
Gail has not seen the collage before, but the art reminds her of how Frank would sometimes draw music before writing or playing it.
This is really similar to a lot of the ways that Frank used to start off a composition.
He would make a sketch of it in terms of densities and progression.
Because for Frank, music was visual.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And that's how he saw music, like mobiles floating, things crossing each other.
And what people don't realize is he only ended up in rock 'n' roll because there was no other label that he fit into.
We also have this pretty conspicuous FZ.
Did you ever see him use his initials that way?
All the time.
Oh, tell me.
The first time he went on the road, he had to go to the bank and get traveler's checks because that's just how it happened in those days.
Can you imagine?
And they rejected them because he could not sign his name the same way twice.
And it got to be starting out "Frank Zappa" and it eventually ended up as this sort of "FZ" scribble.
And that's consistent.
We see that everywhere.
Gail has another possible clue, and it's much more personal.
I wanted you to see this place, because Frank, when we first met, we had a very limited budget.
And one of the few times that we actually went somewhere was to this place.
This is particularly meaningful because of Frank's relationship with the owner, the original -- the guy who started this place.
Over here we have this fabulous picture, and I believe that to be the owner, Bob Yeager, and this is a picture of him in that jacket.
That is very striking.
Then Gail points out one more thing that she thinks the owner's stepson can fill us in on.
Well, you know what, let's get Stan over here, and he can tell us.
[♪ ] Now, Frank Zappa was a drummer when he was very young.
Oh, I see.
He was also a visual artist when he was very young.
That's something very few people know.
See, I didn't know that.
I tell Edward that much of what I'd heard was circumstantial until Gail Zappa brought me to the Professional Drum Shop in Hollywood, where they'd had something in storage for half a century.
In the mid-'60s or so, we had a huge rental situation, and this was one of our rental things that we had.
It's a bell.
[ rings quietly ] Which is not working too well now.
But that's the first thing I noticed was that up in there.
It certainly is the same kind of thing.
The loving re-creation of the Professional Drum Shop leaves Gail with no doubt.
This is absolutely Frank Zappa.
FRANK ZAPPA: ♪ Great googly moogly♪ That is amazing.
That is amazing.
Good $5 investment, I hope.
I asked my colleague Elyse Luray how much she'd appraise this for.
She said, "Oh, probably $25,000."
$25,000.
I made a good investment then.
What I find even more exciting is the way that this opens up dimensions about Frank Zappa.
You can hear this piece of art.
I always liked it.
I appreciated it then; I really appreciate it now.
I think I won't let it out of my sight.
www.LNScaptioning.com on TUKUFU: To learn more about History Detectives, visit us on the web at pbs.org/historydetectives, where you can find behind-the-scenes material, exclusive web-only videos, and information on investigative techniques.
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ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪ Watching' the detectives♪
