Country music star Zach Bryan never made it to Christie’s auction house, but nevertheless made a killing.

For Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll purchase, the night could not have been more dramatic. Here’s how it went:

Deadheads filled Christie’s auction house on Thursday March 12, eager to bid on “Tiger,” Jerry Garcia’s guitar. That went for $9.5 million, not even the highest priced instrument from Jim Irsay’s expansive collection of rock guitars. The most dramatic went to David Gilmour’s “Strat,” ($12.1 million) after a brisk bidding war between an in-house buyer and someone shopping by phone. The purchase garnered enthusiastic applause, and on my part, a wistful recognition that some people had money to burn. For me, the most exalted item, even beyond a crimson cape worn by James Brown, or a white robe from Mohammed Ali, was the 120-foot scroll text of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. 

I had been here before, in this room, in 2001 to see Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, swoop in accompanied by Doug Brinkley, at the time writing a biography of the so-called “King of the Beats.” Irsay paid a clean $2.47 million, and that’s without the right to quote a single phrase from Kerouac’s poetic epic. That was the highest price ever paid for a literary manuscript, even more than James Joyce’s Ulysses. John Sampas, at the time the head of Kerouac’s estate, was pleased. He took me and Joyce Johnson out for celebratory drinks at a nearby Rockefeller Center bar, Joyce being Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time On the Road was published in 1957 and the author of Minor Characters and The Voice is All, perhaps the best of the dozens of biographies written to date. I am the author of several books on Kerouac including Spontaneous Poetics. At the time, I was commissioned by the estate to assemble and introduce Kerouac’s Book of Haikus.

Now so many years later, the scroll was again up for grabs, and after a pissing war between a mild-mannered man in house and someone on the phone, the man took it for a clean $10 million plus trading fees. I was with Kerouac’s latest biographer Holly George Warren and Jim Canary, the man Irsay hired to take care of the scroll text as it traveled like a rock star making appearances in exhibitions all across America and abroad. We rushed over to the buyer to find out who he was and what was he going to do with it? I don’t know. I did not get it for me, he said. So now we are left to find out, who bought Kerouac’s masterpiece? Immediately calling Joyce to let her know, I heard her say she was astonished at what was paid for the artifact, and then she reminded me, Jack was the poorest person I ever met. 

Eventually, it was revealed that Zach Bryan was the buyer. Bryan, a country superstar who writes evocative lyrics, has long been known as a Kerouac aficionado. Last year, he bought the Saint