DALLAS, TX.- This is the auction that goes to 11.

There are countless treasures among the more than 700 lots offered in Heritage’s December 2-4 Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Signature® Auction, including legendary engineer Bob Ludwig’s copy of his fabled “hot mix” of Led Zeppelin II, a poster from the ill-fated Winter Dance Party once displayed at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first original Woody Guthrie poster ever offered at auction, the 100th copy of The White Album from the collection of Apple Records president Jack Oliver and one of the few surviving Monterey International Pop Festival handbills designed by the Beatles. Any one of these lots could, should and would serve as the centerpiece of any rock and roll auction, were it not for one masterpiece that once adored another.

Alan Aldridge was “behind some of the most striking pop images of the 1960s and ’70s,” The Guardian noted upon the British artist’s death at 78 in 2017. He counted among his legendary credits the album cover for The Who’s A Quick One, 1969’s The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics and the controversial poster for the 1966 Andy Warhol film Chelsea Girls.

But as The Guardian pointed out, Aldridge’s illustration for Elton John’s 1975 album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy — featuring “the singer and his piano surrounded by a menagerie of extraordinary creatures” — garnered him not only acclaim but a Grammy nomination for an album that topped the charts and featured the eternal “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

“Alan delivered a visual package beyond my wildest dreams for Captain Fantastic,” John told the paper about the work that reveals something new with each glance. “Never have I been so pleased with the artwork for an album.”

Aldridge’s original artwork for John’s ninth (and most autobiographical) album appears in this auction, a dazzling attraction among so many other coveted pieces. As the catalog notes, “An original piece of musical history such as this does not surface very often.”

The same can be said of engineer Ludwig’s fabled test pressing for Led Zeppelin II, from which first pressings were made until Atlantic pulled the album from initial distribution — thanks, in no small part, to the daughter of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun.

The album — which counted among its tracks “Whole Lotta Love,” “Thank You,” “Heartbreaker” and “Moby Dick” — was produced by Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page, with Eddie Kramer serving as engineer. Ludwig would become one of rock’s best-known and most celebrated mastering engineers, working with everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Queen to Nirvana while collecting a baker’s dozen Grammys.

But when he was just 23, and as Ludwig has often recounted, Kramer brought over the just-completed Zeppelin record and asked the kid if he could “make it hotter?” To which he responded: Absolutely. And by all accounts, everyone loved it; that early mix sounded like the band wasn’t just in your house but playing live and loud to a packed arena inside your frontal lobe. Radio stations played the hell out of the pressings made from Ludwig’s mix.

Ludwig said the problem came when the vinyl landed on “really cheap turntables” with lousy needles, like the one owned by Ertegun’s daughter. Because the record was “so hot,” Ludwig has explained, it would skip on inexpensive record players. As a result, Ludwig recounts, Ertegun “freak[ed] out” and had Led Zeppelin II pulled from distribution until the label “cut all the bass out of it, so it wouldn’t skip, and compressed it.” The result, says Ludwig: Led Zeppelin II “sounded tinny and puny.”

Ludwig famously held on to his original master until now. It is being publicly offered for the first time in this auction as part of his archives, which includes among its more than 130 offerings his Recording Industry Association of America’s platinum sales awards for Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Metallica’s … And Justice for All, Rush’s Moving Picturesand just about all your other favorite records.

Among this auction’s myriad magic moments is the second-oldest Elvis Presley concert poster known to exist (from Feb. 6, 1955, in — where else? — Memphis). And once again, Heritage is thrilled to present nearly 100 trophies from the David Swartz Concert Poster Collection, among them only the third poster Heritage has offered from the Rolling Stones’ infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway on Dec. 6, 1969.

Making its auction debut — and, likely, its first appearance anywhere in more than 80 years — is a cardboard window card advertising “Folk Songs on the Firing Line,” a concert held at New York’s Town Hall on June 26, 1942. Earl Robinson and Richard Wright sponsored the event under the auspices of the Negro Publication Society of America, and counted among its performers Leadbelly, Josh White, Sonny Terry (misspelled as “Sunny”) and Brownie McGee, Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie. The Dust Bowl balladeer from Oklahoma was two years removed from having written “This Land is Your Land,” which wouldn’t be released until March 1944; at the time of this show, he was also writing his autobiography Bound for Glory.

The concert was well-received: The New York Times’ headline on June 27 raved that “‘Firing Line’ Songs Thrill Audience,” and noted that the performances that historic night “had vitality and the singers, most of them amateurs and many of them in uniforms, sang, for the most part, without traditional refinements of the concert hall. They were true to the spirit of their songs and as delightful for that reason.” Guthrie performed, among other songs, his “Jackhammer John” alongside the legendary lineup of folk-music immortals.

This poster is likely the sole surviving artifact of its kind from a concert documented in numerous history books. It’s also the first poster ever offered at auction bearing the words “Woody Guthrie.”

Says Pete Howard, Director of Concert Posters, “This is a stunning discovery that set the poster hobby back on its heels.”

No less significant is the iconic poster from 1959’s Winter Dance Party, which featured among its star attractions Buddy Holly and the Crickets, “The Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson, Ritchie Valens, Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo. Just thrice before, Heritage has had the honor of presenting this historic cardboard, with one poster from the concert scheduled in Moorhead, Minn., on Feb. 3, 1959 — the very day Holly, Valens and Richardson were killed in the plane crash forever immortalized as The Day the Music Died — realizing $447,000 in November 2022 to become the world’s most valuable concert poster.

The concert poster in this auction hails from the Winter Dance Party stop at the Laramar Ballroom in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on Jan. 30, 1959, three days before the crash. It was the first Winter Dance Party poster ever to surface publicly, thanks to a wanted ad in Goldmine magazine in the 1970s, and remains the only known advertisement for this show. This grail, from the eighth stop on the tour, has never been to auction.

But it has been seen publicly, having been displayed at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of its Play it Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll exhibition and loaned to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Its provenance is impeccable, as Swartz’s meticulously curated assemblages of posters and vinyl have become cornerstones of music auctions at Heritage. In this auction alone, Swartz presents for the first time a poster from 1969’s First Annual International Palm Beach Music & Art Festival (featuring the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane among its roster), alongside an original first-printing San Francisco concert poster for The Great! Society featuring Grace Slick, the Grass Roots, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service — just the second Family Dog concert poster ever made, this one signed by its co-designer Wes Wilson.

This auction has two other major collections, each tied to the Beatles and, more specifically, their Apple Records label.

Jack Oliver joined the label in 1967, working with Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, and served as Apple’s president from 1969 through ’71. As one would expect, his assemblage contains numerous significant pieces, perhaps none more so than his stereo first pressing of The White Album bearing the number 100 stamped on its iconic plain white cover. Each pressing featured unique serial numbers, with the first four going to the band. Given his position at Apple, Oliver walked away with the 100th copy of the million eventually made.

No less impressive is his copy of Fifty Years Adrift (In An Open-Necked Shirt), Taylor’s autobiography that was edited and annotated by George Harrison.

The book is a spirited read and a lavish tribute: As The New York Times noted upon its publication, Taylor’s tome “is forthcoming and candid about what went on during the Beatles’ early American tours and during their later ‘psychedelic’ phase.” Oliver owned one of the 2,000 copies published, a rare example signed by Taylor and Harrison.

Chris O’Dell never rose as high as Apple’s president, but she nonetheless has a front-row seat to some Fab history — while making history herself as the first female tour manager in rock history.

From her collection, Heritage offers 19 remarkable lots — intimate moments from throughout the Beatles’ history, including something you’d never think would find its way to auction: a Beatles-designed handbill for 1967’s Monterey International Pop Festival, for which Derek Taylor was the publicist.

O’Dell and Taylor met in 1968, when he was working for A&M Records, and became fast friends, as she was particularly enamored of his time with and tales about the Beatles. She recalls going by A&M one day to pick him up and seeing behind him on the wall a tacked-up copy of the Monterey Pop Festival poster, prompting her to ask him about the fest’s history and his part in it.

“He turned and pointed to the poster, thumbtacked to his wall, and told me how he had asked the Beatles to do some artwork for a flyer, a way of them being represented at this festival,” O’Dell says. “He then pulled the flyer off of the wall. He handed it to me and told me that now I was part of that festival, too. I have carried this flyer with me for over 50 years and never really realized that it’s one of the originals, not one of the copies. I can truthfully say that this came directly from Derek Taylor.”

Her other offerings in this auction are no less remarkable: a never-before-seen Polaroid photo of the Beatles’ immortal rooftop concert on Jan. 30, 1969; 14 pages of song lyrics from the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, typed by O’Dell (at the time, the band’s personal assistant) and corrected by Mick Jagger; and other memories from a life well spent among the makers of myth.

Some of those myths are here, too, including the withdrawn picture sleeve accompanying the Stones’ U.S. single “Street Fighting Man”/“No Expectations” and the sealed, slabbed and graded copy of the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today with the “butcher cover.” The former is the rarest American picture sleeve ever seen (at least for a second), thanks to its photo of police officers beating a protestor. The latter is the most infamous and coveted album cover ever seen (at least for a second), thanks to its photo by Robert Whitaker depicting the band dressed in doctors’ coats and covered with decapitated baby dolls and raw meat.