Filthy business of cashing in on hard rock

AT 99p, it was mildly amusing. After two or three bids, with a value of £74, it had become guffawingly funny: smirking emails were forwarded in groups. But then the price spiralled from £360 to £510 and nobody was laughing.

The public auction on Ebay of a dollop of 100 per cent genuine Glastonbury mud, scraped from the Wellingtons of an enterprising festival punter, brought rock memorabilia to a new, literal, low.

We can't begin to trace the many laws of economics and basic logic that this sale trampled over. Was this magic mud? Is there a shortage of dirt on Michael Eavis's farm? Hadn't anyone heeded the wackier parts of Das Kapital, where heavy-thinker and honorary Manic Street Preacher Karl Marx warned about commodity fetishism: where a table's wooden brain developed "grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will"?

Not even the mud-raking Ebay salesman suggested the Glastonbury mud could dance, but because it had "witnessed" sets by Oasis, Muse and Morrissey, it was, somehow, a mystically valuable tract of land. This worrying trend may be set to continue if similarly industrious Oxegen punters hauled divots of Punchestown home, entwining their spindly fingers through the grease of the memorabilia market. And now, as Ireland's second Hard Rock Café has discovered, music memento hunting just got filthier.

If there wasn't already something inherently saddening in the unlocked potential of a pair of mint-condition, vintage and unused tickets to Janis Joplin's first ever gig in San Francisco, it was yet more of a bringdown when a display case in Temple Bar was smashed and said tickets were grabbed, before HRC's latest outpost had even officially opened. "Now we can't share them," frowns my waiter and we both try, unsuccessfully, to muster some enthusiasm for Bono's Bulgari sunglasses (as worn in the Beautiful Day video) or his hand-written lyrics to the unloveable song Please - which might make you want to smash the display case for entirely different reasons.

Like many of the 60,000 items of rock memorabilia that festoon the walls of over 100 Hard Rock outposts, both these artefacts of musicana have been acquired through charity auctions, before lingering in a massive warehouse in Orlando, Florida. The warehouse holds a stash of memorabilia worth about $30 million. Here each "unique, authentic and verified" item patiently waits for another Hard Rock invasion, where the walls of new territories can be mounted with bric-a-brac of varying value: Ike Turner's guitars, David Lee Roth's gold cassettes, Keith Moon's banjaxed something-or-other.

The Dublin franchise now holds the dubious honour of being the first café to get looted; memorabilia hanging unmolested in identikit restaurants from Beirut to Yokohama. Thankfully, though, those Joplin tickets were recently recovered, turning up sheepishly in the morning post: either a sign of robber's remorse or a realisation that the tickets - unique, authentic and verified - were never going to fetch much on the black market. A picture of Roy Orbison, swiped from the gents, is still at large.

It only felt criminal, however, when Michael Esposito, president of New Jersey's odious Master Tape Collection, purchased Elvis Presley's recording début, That's Alright, Mama, from the original 1954 Sun Studio sessions in Memphis. He played it one last time and then rendered it as useless and expensive as a genuine Glastonbury sod. Early this year, he had the reel hacked into thousands of two-inch pieces, then mounted each on a plaque and sold them on the Internet for $495 apiece. Presley's estate blithely gave Esposito a licence to market the plaques and, even by the sordid standards of the barrel-scraping Elvis industry, the base pointlessness of this business makes the skin crawl. Still, if you happen to find yourself in Manhattan this autumn, dawdling near West 27th Street with a couple of hours and between $10,000-$30,000 to spare, why not drop into Sotheby's and take home a piece of genuine musical history? On September 14th, the estate of the late Johnny Cash goes under the gavel. If I can outdraw the Hard Rock bidder, my eyes are on the 1968 Best Male Vocal Grammy for Folsom Prison Blues, which I will naturally have smelted and moulded into commemorative money clips: "Cash for Cash" perhaps. It makes sense, you know. Beneath the intangible, ephemeral qualities of music, even mud can be worth something. When it comes to memorabilia, everyone wants a piece.