As punk turns the corner into its fourth decade, it seems fitting that there are finally affluent buyers waiting in the wings to snatch up relics from punk’s salad days. Punk rock may have started on the streets, but it certainly didn’t remain there, having been co-opted by everything from Madison Avenue to Hot Topic. Christie’s, the world’s foremost auction house, recently announced their Punk/Rock sale, which, along with standard rock & roll relics like Jimi Hendrix’ hand-written lyrics and the original artwork for “Master of Puppets,” includes important punk rock items from the likes of the Ramones, Black Flag and the Misfits. We sat down with Simeon Lipman, the head of pop culture for Christie’s, and the curator of the auction, to get the scoop on where the items come from, how they’re appraised and the most notable items in the sale. The auction will be held Nov. 24th at Christie’s in New York City, but you can browse the items online here.

Have you been pleased with the amount of attention the auction has been getting?
Yeah, I think it’s great. It just shows you that people are interested in this type of material and it’s a good time for it. I’m glad we’re able to offer it now.

Is this the first auction Christie’s has done with punk rock items?
Christie’s itself has done Sex Pistols stuff in the past and we’ve sold some Ramones things. Certainly in our London offices there’s been a lot of Sex Pistols stuff sold over the years. But this is the first time we’ve done a comprehensive collection of like 120+ items that are specifically punk-related.

Why was this the right time for a punk auction?
I’ve been in this business a long time, and when I first got into it, all you ever heard about was the Beatles. And then suddenly you started to hear Jimi Hendrix’ name. Then it starts to creep. The generation who can now afford to buy this stuff is interested in different things. They’re not as interested in the Beatles as they are in the Sex Pistols or Nirvana. You’re seeing a whole new generation getting involved in collecting what they like and what they’re nostalgic about. There’s a giant group of people, including myself, who find the punk stuff fascinating. From that era, the material is quite rare because it was so ephemeral in nature – these were flyers and posters and things like that. Very few of these things were kept over the last 30 years.

Where does the stuff come from? How do you find the items that end up in the collection?
In this particular auction, I recruited the help of a gentleman by the name of Johan Kugelberg, who’s well-known in punk circles. In fact, for record collectors out there, he’s the guy who came up with the “Killed by Death” series which brought super-rare punk records to the masses. He knows where all the bodies are buried, so we were able to really draw out some phenomenal material for the sale.

How do you verify the validity of an item? It seems that something like a flyer would be easy to duplicate.
This has rendered a new world. Certainly things were xeroxed and things were mimeographed but there are ways to tell. With mimeographed things, there are ways to tell with the paper and the age, and of course provenance is very important — where is this stuff coming from? You know if it’s coming from someone from the era, who was involved in some way, you know it’s legit, but certainly you have to be careful.

Is it sometimes just a regular Joe who happens to unearth a shoebox full of punk pins in their attic?
The collection that we’re selling is generally about five different collections, so we’re talking about large groups of items – things that were collected over a long period of time in very distinguished collections.

Do they tend to come from people who ran punk businesses early on?
Originally they did, and some of this material comes straight from the people who were there at the time, and some of it is from the secondary market already.

How do you educate yourself about a sub-culture you may not be familiar with?
When it comes to something specific like this, I recruited the help of Johan Kugelberg, who’s our consultant, and we list him in the beginning of the catalog. This is something that auction houses do do because as much expertise as we have, we can’t have all the expertise, and it’s very important to offer only the finest material that we stand behind 100 percent.

Given that there hasn’t been a large punk auction like this before, how do you determine the price of the items? Is it simply guesswork based on age, rarity, etc?
That’s exactly right. With experience in this market you can kind of tell what things should be. That being said, at auction you really never know what’s going to happen. Things can go ballistic. Just recently we did a James Brown auction from the James Brown estate. And one item in particular was this medical bracelet. Just a little, silver medical bracelet that he used to wear later on in life. We had estimated it at $200 to $300, which was very conservative but not overly conservative. It got into a bidding war and ended up selling for something like $30,000. So things like that happen, and those are anomalies, but you’ve got to look at the broad range of items and what they’ve sold for in the past.

Is there an item in this auction you’re particularly fond of?
There are few for me that I think are really important. There’s a poster for the Ramones at the Roundhouse, July 4th, 1976. And that’s a really famous concert because it’s known that the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned were among the audience and were influenced by the concert. It was a seminal event, certainly in British punk history. We have the actual poster from that event. It’s a real rarity. That’s one of the important posters. As far as a flyer goes, we have an original flyer from the Screen on the Green, which was an August 29, 1976 concert that featured the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks. And these were flyers — so ephemeral – tacked on walls, tacked onto a tree – and here we have one that was kept for posterity. We have it estimated at $3000 to $4000. I think that’s one of the more important flyers in the sale. But we have stuff ranging from the very earliest Bowie-related material too. We have a press release from 1966 explaining why he was changing his name from Davie Jones, a name he’d already had some success with — but unfortunately there was a Monkee named Davy Jones. And he needed to distinguish himself so he changed his name to David Bowie. And this is the actual press release and the only known example of this.

You seemed to draw the line at early ’80s punk memorabilia. Why not include anything punk from the ’90s as well?
Like wine, it has to mature, and that material hasn’t matured yet. We know there’s a market right now for a lot of the punk stuff from the ’70s and early ’80s, and we know that there are contemporary art buyers who are fascinated by that period of time and the influence it had on art. We know there are people out there who dig this stuff, and that’s why we’re able to sell it now.

What about criticism that it isn’t very punk to be hawking this stuff at exorbitant prices?
We’re not trying to be anything but an auction house. It might not be punk to sell this stuff but people collect what they like, and this memorabilia has proven that people want to buy it and put it on their walls. It’s an opportunity for somebody who maybe back then didn’t get a chance to have one of the “God Saves the Queen” posters. This is an opportunity many years later to get that poster they’ve always wanted.

What’s the most expensive item in the auction?
It’s one of the more traditional pieces of rock memorabilia. We actually have the organ that John Lennon played in the 1965 Shea Stadium concert. It was his organ. He played it on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” And he played it in the studio as well and it’s estimated at $150,000 to $200,000.

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