Overview
- Propstore has listed Lennon’s tinted round prescription glasses in its Music Memorabilia Live Auction with in-room and global bidding from The Cumberland Hotel.
- Propstore cites photographic evidence from March 12, 1974 at the Troubadour showing Lennon wearing the glasses earlier in the night and leaving without them.
- Contemporaneous accounts describe a scuffle during a Smothers Brothers performance, after which Tommy Smothers’ wife ended up with the spectacles.
- The auction house estimates the lot at $198,000 to $396,000, a range widely characterized in coverage as about $400,000.
- The glasses are featured alongside Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics for “Straight Ahead” and Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” fedora, and they previously appeared at Sotheby’s in 1987 and Christie’s in 2008.