Three Gibson guitars, a coat from the Magical Mystery Tour, and handwritten notes by Paul McCartney for the song "Hey Jude" are some of the cherished items that Julian Lennon is turning into NFTs and selling at auction. In this segment from "The Virtual Opportunities Show," recorded on Feb. 1, Motley Fool contributor Danny Vena shares this interesting new use case for NFTs that marries the old with the new.
Danny Vena: The thing that I came across was a story that kind of marries some of the old with the new. The story that I read came across on Yahoo Finance. This was one that said that John Lennon's son, Julian, was taking some of The Beatles memorabilia that he has in his personal collection and turning it into NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Now the items that we're talking about, first of all, there was a one-of-a-kind, fluffy Afghan coat that John Lennon wore during the Magical Mystery Tour films. If you have a chance to see that, that's a pretty one-of-a-kind coat there. Also three of the Gibson guitars that John Lennon gifted to his son Julian.
Now, probably the most interesting piece in this collection, and by the way, all of these are going to be auctioned off. But the most interesting piece here is handwritten notes by Paul McCartney for the song Hey Jude. Now for those of you that are music buffs, you may remember that Hey Jude originally had the title Hey Jewels, and it was written as a letter to Julian Lennon by his dad John, when John and Julian's mother, Cynthia divorced. It was basically just trying to tell him things would get better, etc. But these handwritten notes by Paul McCartney about the musical construction of the song and where the voice and the piano came in and where the guitar and the tambourine came in and when the song would crescendo and stuff. Experts expect that that one NFT alone could fetch more than $60,000.
Now, the dichotomy here between the old being The Beatles, and the new being the NFTs, I thought was pretty interesting. But the way it came about was that Julian Lennon said that he really could not bear to part with these physical items that had so much connection to his dad. What he did rather than try to sell those off, he decided to create NFTs of those items, which I thought was a pretty ingenious way to address that situation. That was my take here, the old and the new coming together and NFTs.
For those who may not be familiar, I just wanted to drop this little definition in here. But for those who may not be that familiar with NFTs, these non-fungible tokens, the way it was described to me is that think of these as a digital work of art. There can only be one original Mona Lisa, but you see copies of it everywhere so for each of these NFTs, because of the underlying blockchain technology, there can only ever be one. But in the physical world, they might have counterparts or there might be digital recreations but from the NFT perspective, there can be only one.
