, who dropped out at $1,800. "I'm here for the cars.
I don't know what I'm doing over here," LeMay said of his impulse to bid on the Sinatra item. On a chilly Arizona night that conjured up Winterland, the famed San Francisco concert hall, the first night of Barrett-Jackson's rock memorabilia auction tallied well over $75,000 in sales. That included small-ticket items ranging from posters, performance contracts and signed Madonna checks to Bruce Springsteen's handwritten lyrics, which went for as much as $1,200 a page.
Other collectibles included jazz great Ella Fitzgerald's Master Card, priceless at $500, and a Rod Stewart black satin smoking jacket with pink piping that sold for $2,100. And what would a rock auction be without an Elvis-item sighting? In this case, a red concert tour jacket from the 1970s that sold for $900.
One of the biggest items of the night was the first management contract for the Doors from 1967, signed by Jim Morrison and the other three band members. It sold for $22,500. The cavernous auction tent at WestWorld corralled dozens of bidders, while the auctioneers droned on in their own special kind of hip-hop money talk.
One man, Jeff Lefever, jumped the red velvet rope and threw his program onto the stage to make sure his client's bid got noticed. Otherwise it was a pretty tame night. Returning Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson was on hand but said he was "just hanging out" and did not have any specific rock memorabilia or cars he was interested in.
Richard and Carolyn Trappe of Mason City, Iowa, also were just kicking tires and watching the rock auction. A retired Canadian Pacific Railway engineer, Richard said they came back for a second winter in Arizona because they found there was a lot more to do here than in Texas, where they first wintered.
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