DALLAS, TX.- The Rocket Man took flight at Heritage Auctions this week.

Only days before R.J. Cutler and David Furnish's documentary Elton John: Never Too Late begins streaming on Disney+, Heritage Auctions offered Alan Aldridge's original artwork that adorned John's 1975 masterpiece Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. The result, as expected, was nothing short of fantastic itself as the dazzling, detailed work realized $212,500 during Heritage's $2.2 million December 2-4 Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Signature® Auction.

The album, John's ninth and most autobiographical, has long been a favorite of the singer-songwriter's. In a 2006 interview with Cameron Crowe, John said he "always thought that Captain Fantastic was probably my finest album because it wasn't commercial in any way. … Captain Fantastic was written from start to finish in running order, as a kind of story about coming to terms with failure — or trying desperately not to be one."

He was also deeply enamored of Aldridge's illustration, which The Guardian described in 2017 as "the singer and his piano surrounded by a menagerie of extraordinary creatures." Aldridge counted among his legendary credits the album cover of 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 Captain Fantastic ranks among his most enduring masterworks."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."

Garry Shrum, Heritage's Director of Music Memorabilia, says he's not surprised by the result during an auction that saw nearly 2,400 bidders worldwide compete for several hundred musical treasures.

"Captain Fantastic has sold millions of copies in every conceivable format, and every last one of them derived their cover art from this one painting by Alan Aldridge," Shrum says. "Elton's legend not only endures but continues to grow, and the result for this remarkable artwork serves a tribute to the man, his music and the myth surrounding both."

One of the few surviving posters from 1959's Winter Dance Party was no less significant, featuring among its star attractions Buddy Holly and the Crickets, "The Big Bopper" J.P. Richardson, Ritchie Valens, Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo. Heritage has only offered examples of this historic cardboard three times before, always with collectors tussling over scant keepsakes from the tour cut short when Holly, Valens and Richardson were killed in the plane crash immortalized as The Day the Music Died.

Grateful Dead Skeleton & Roses 48 x 72 Framed One-Off Painting by Stanley Mouse.
The concert poster in this auction hailed 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.The poster opened live bidding at $44,000. But a lengthy bidding war ensued, and after several minutes, it finally realized $187,500.

The Winter Dance Party poster was among the nearly 100 trophies from the David Swartz Concert Poster Collection, along with only the third poster Heritage offered from the Rolling Stones' infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway on Dec. 6, 1969. That poster from the Gimme Shelter show opened live bidding Tuesday at $18,000 and, after another prolonged bidding war, realized $42,500.

"Only three other concert posters have ever sold for more than the $187,500 realized by The Winter Dance Party poster sold in this auction, all at Heritage," says Director of Concert Posters Pete Howard. "It was so thrilling to have the winning bidder on the phone because he completely hid in the bushes until the last minute and, then, bam: He won the poster with that one final bid."

One of the auction's biggest hits was scored by renowned psychedelic poster artist Stanley Mouse, whose legendary Grateful Dead "Skeleton & Roses" poster has long been a coveted favorite among collectors at Heritage. In 2015, Mouse revisited that poster using acrylics on canvas, his sole recreation of this iconic artwork. Mouse's "Skeleton & Roses" painting realized $62,500.

One of the most coveted items in this auction was legendary engineer Bob 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.Live bidding on this fabled pressing opened at $3,000 Tuesday — then immediately shot up to $11,000 before a prolonged bidding war drove the final price to $35,000.

The reason is that Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page produced the album, with Eddie Kramer serving as the engineer. Ludwig would eventually become one of rock's best-known and most celebrated mastering engineers, but when he was just 23, 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 adored the sound and played pressings made from Ludwig's initial 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 was publicly offered for the first time in this auction as part of his archives.