is Donovan really this much of a tw*t?

Brock is the singer with Modern Mouse. Saw them and Donovan at Bumbershoot Festival a couple of years ago.

If I may say so, that's awesome.

---opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one. How many Donovan albums have you heard in their entirety? Can you name more than 3 without googling Donovan Albums? What is not original about Donovan's songwriting? Donovan wrote far more tracks on his first LP then Dylan did on his. I might add the songs that Donovan wrote on his first LP Whats Bin Did are a lot better then Dylan's. Song to Woody was about the best, other than that they were weak. Dylan was a Woody clone. No one puts Dylan down for ripping him off when he was a rookie in the music world. Listen to all of Don's albums before you judge. Forget about Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow, he is much deeper then that. Listen to HMS Donovan, Dylan could never match that album.

Because in the intervening years, this crazy thing happened where Bob Dylan invented the modern concept of the singer-songwriter!

Also, it's always seemed to me in that Don't Look Back scene that Dylan says, in his amphetamine-enhanced frog voice, "I wanna play 'It's All Over Now Baby Blue'" as he takes the guitar.

Better than Donovan ripped him off.

On another front: That scene in Don't Look Back is like a Rosarch test for music writers. After hearing about how confrontational it was, when I finally saw it, I was surprised at how confrontational is wasn't. I think the whole idea of Dylan dressing Donovan down there was created a bit in the editing and mostly in the imaginations of music writers.

Nope, You can actually read Donovan's lips and hear him say "I want to Hear its all over now baby blue" Donovan had heard Dylan play this from previous nights of the UK tour and liked it because it was a brand new song at the time. But I do agree that the editing and press made it look a lot worse then it ever was. It was a friendly jam, can't forget folk banjolegend Derroll Adams, The Banjo Man. He was there watching his young prodigy at work. Alan Price from the Animals said that Dylan was listening to Don's first album quite a bit during that tour and really enjoyed it. They were fans of eachother. The scene where Alan tells Bob that Donovan is a better guitarist then he was brilliant!!

i respectfully disagree. some good songwriting, but many of the lyrics make me wretch.

plus, some dude, straightfaced, is cooing quasi-eastern spiritual babble wrapped in thin beatnik vocab is pretty funny when he's sitting right next to you.

You shouldn't be laughing, you should have been in awe that the greatest singer songwriter was performing right in front of your eyes.

doh! that's what i should have done! thanks for the input.

i was somewhat in awe. i guess i don't have a username to reflect as such.

Hi Katie,
'
----Where do you work that Donovan would just drop by and play in the office? That is so cool!!

Why such a vulgar response to a friendly debate?Is this the typical peace love and brotherhood of man Donovan fan?Maybe so.Donovan came to town awhile back and created quite a scene with his roadie and some teen girls in a local night spot.Made all the local news.I can go with the roofie story after this.

uh...Yay! I guess some people have to be careful 'cos their parents are reading, or posting, or whatever, or maybe they're even on here pretending to be 30 years old again...

I wasn't trying to be vulgar, everyone has an opinion like everyone has an asshole. Meaning we all can express our opinions. Has nothing to do with Peace and Love.

---I thought I heard something about this.. Was this the Mountain Goat band or something like that??

www.everlastingsea.com this was listed on the 4 remastered EMI cd's issued in the UK this past spring.

cheers
HGM

J0hn Darn1elle to thread.

----Took him about 40 years to do it, and he brings it on the road with him. Pretty humble

I suppose this is true of his music.But his well publicized escapades are the antithesis.I've put Donovan's CDs aside for awhile.I have daughters.I can't let them think I condone his treatment of women by playing his music.

Obviously

Hurdy Gurdy, I have a question about some Donovan trivia. Is it true he helped Paul McCartney with the lyrics to Rocky Raccoon?

---- Good question but the answer is no. One thing I can tell you is that Paul wrote Mother Natures Son for Donovan while in India.

Sunday Herald
9/10/05

We changed the world

By Peter Ross

ALTHOUGH he considers himself a visionary, I see Donovan before he sees me. He is standing in the reception area of Glasgow’s Malmaison hotel, talking to a blonde woman holding a yellow flower. He’s wearing the standard issue beatnik black polo-neck and his greying hair is as long and curly as in his hippy heyday. He has just come from performing a short acoustic set in a bookshop; when he started playing, one woman burst into tears, presumably from pleasure. We walk downstairs to the brasserie to talk. Donovan is celebrating 40 years since his first chart success – his debut single Catch The Wind went to number four in 1965, the first of 10 hits in that decade. His auto biography, The Hurdy Gurdy Man, is being published to coincide with the anniversary. It’s all very well-timed; his music has more currency now than at any time since the 1960s, Devendra Banhart and the new American folk movement he spearheads having cited Donovan as a key influence.

Donovan became a pop star aged 19, packed it in at 24, and is now 59. Born Donovan Philips Leitch in Glasgow in 1946, he grew up in a (now demolished) tenement “a stone’s throw” from the hotel in which we are sitting . The Glasgow of his childhood was a post-war city of bombed buildings; he hunted for shell casings in the rubble.

His father, Donnie, had helped build Spitfire engines, and after the war continued to work as a tool setter. The family was poor but Donnie was an autodidact, a great reader who could be counted upon to stand up at parties and recite the works of Robert Burns and Robert Service; he was also a staunch trade unionist. “I was brought up on a diet of Celtic mysticism, poetry and socialism,” says Donovan. He was no stranger to jeely pieces either.

Donnie Leitch was Protestant, his wife Wynn a Catholic. Through the example of their marriage, Donovan reached an early understanding of a common humanity, beyond religious and other differences, which would inform his work in the peace and love era. The family moved to the south of England in 1956 when Donovan was 10, but his accent becomes increasingly Scottish when he reflects on his Glasgow years.

He was given the polio vaccine when he was four but the dosage was too strong and his right leg began to wither. Donovan wore a leg brace and walked with a limp, which meant he couldn’t run with the gangs. “It’s possible that one is an outsider immediately when one is a sick child,” he says. “I kind of look back on it and think it was positive for me because it made me withdraw from my pals and realise I was different.”

When local kids battered him, he didn’t fight back. His mother told him to stand up for himself, but that sort of aggression wasn’t in him. He thinks now that his eventual success was partly rooted in this need to triumph over his physically superior peers. Anyway, he took comfort from his father, who would cuddle him and recite from the Romantic poets.

He seems to have had a more complex relationship with his mother, who appears to have been rather highly strung; when she discovered her son had been masturbating, she locked herself in the bathroom and threatened to commit suicide. “Why was it so shocking to her?” Donovan wonders aloud. “Was it her background? Had she not come to terms with her own upbringing, or was her marriage not as she had imagined it would be? She thought it was her fault that I was masturbating.”

He says he may have had more sexual fantasies that most boys his age, and my impression from the book is that he was a very sexual person from quite early on. Is that fair to say? He puts his cup of Earl Grey down, rattling, on the saucer. “Yeah, I would say so. One has to move into the world of astrology. My wife Linda, my muse, my sunshine supergirl, we met God knows how many lives ago, and she studied astrology.”

This is how Donovan speaks, David Blaine meets David Brent – and you’d better get used to it. Anyway, Linda told him his character has been shaped by his star sign, Taurus. “And Tauruses are very earthy, connected to the earth. Our sign is the bull, and bulls are ... ” He breaks off, chuckling, then continues. “Bulls are very productive, and into the other cows in the field. So, yeah, I guess it’s because I’m a Taurus. But also I didn’t have a sister; it was just me and my brother. So maybe with being Taurus and having no girls in the family, I was attracted to women very early.”

His sexual libertarianism was also shaped by teenage reading of the Beats, particularly Jack Kerouac. “When I read On The Road it seemed like there were gals in the bohemian world who were willing to break the conditioning of their background, and refused to be pushing a pram, refused to marry in the normal way, and wished to be artists. These gals were not just sexual objects, they had freedom and an artistic bent. I was fascinated by those liberated females – not just because of the sexual freedom but because they had left society.”

In the early 1960s, he studied art at college in Welwyn Garden City and began to get into the new acoustic music coming out of America. The poetic ballads and socialism Donovan had learned from his father meant the folk scene was instantly familiar to him. He dropped out of college and bummed around, hanging out with the beatniks of St Ives, getting stoned and laid, washing dishes for a living. “I did not disagree with society’s aims,” he says, “but I realised that it was full of hypocrisy and greed, and I did not want to join.”

Returning home to Hertfordshire, his enjoyment of folk music became an obsession. He learned as many songs as he could, and persuaded a musician known as Dirty Phil to teach him the fingerpicking guitar style. Donovan would later show this technique to John Lennon while he and The Beatles were studying transcendental meditation in India.

The Peacock pub in St Albans was the place to hear and play folk music. But Donovan felt that he wasn’t liked by the other folkies. He writes in the book that it may have been because he was lame and regarded as a dreamer, but tells me he thinks the real reason is because he was an authentic working-class boy in a scene of middle-class kids slumming it. However: “I used all that derision and people looking down on me. I just got stronger with it.”

Not being taken seriously has always been a problem for Donovan . A Los Angeles Times review on his 1969 concert at the Hollywood Bowl – at which he performed to over 20,000 people – states: “Donovan is an unexceptional singer and guitarist. His songs smack heavily of dimestore incense. And he’s almost laughably pretentious and showbiz.” This is not atypical. Even in the 1960s, the press saw Donovan as something of a cheesy hippy, and he has come to stand for the worst excesses of the decade – drippy, twee, a bit daft.

He also had the misfortune to appear on the national stage in the very year – 1965 – that Bob Dylan was abandoning folk and pushing forward the frontiers of pop and rock . They met when Dylan toured Britain that year, and Donovan appears in DA Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back. Conventional thinking on the film is that Dylan is sneering at Donovan, who performs a song for him, but Donovan doesn’t see it that way. “Absolute bullshit,” he snaps. “If you actually look at the movie, Bob is honouring my work.”

The allegation clearly hurts. I hadn’t even asked about Don’t Look Back; he brought it up himself. I do want to know, however, what it’s like for Donovan, trying to celebrate his 40th anniversary when suddenly 2005 turns into the year of Bob Dylan. Surely it must be frustrating that even after all these years he can’t escape the man’s shadow? “I’m going to have a pee,” he says, “but I’ll be back, and we’ll address that.”

He must be fed up having to talk about Bob Dylan. The comparison isn’t even appropriate. Four Donovan albums from the 1960s, reissued earlier this year, demonstrate the excellence and variety of much of his music. There are folk songs (Catch The Wind, Colours), catchy pop (Mellow Yellow, Jennifer Juniper) and tremendous psychedelic rock (Barabajagal, Hurdy Gurdy Man, Season Of The Witch).

But there is a lot of rubbish too. Donovan’s willingness to experiment with styles has made his body of work very inconsistent; he can be brilliant and awful, a dichotomy exemplified by the fact he had a hand in writing one of The Beatles’ very best songs, Julia, and one of their worst, Yellow Submarine.

Not that he is the sort to admit his failings. Back from the loo, he says: “When I met Bob through Joan Baez in 1965 of course I knew who he was, but I wasn’t particularly influenced by him. I sounded like Bob for five minutes, but Bob sounded like Woody Guthrie for a whole album. For me, it was a passing thing. The true link between us is that two solo singer-songwriters brought meaningful, poetic lyrics into pop culture. We have had more influence over the whole world of songwriting than any other two solo artists. We brought with us a poetic understanding and influenced forever the way songs are written. The Beatles learned from me as well as from Bob.”

Blimey. This is the egomania which spoils those chapters of his book dealing with his years of pop success; in the 1960s his head expanded along with his mind. But far from repenting, he exults. “The Celts boast,” he says. “And why should we not boast? Read Celtic mythology; every Celtic hero tale is boastful. We have to stand up and announce how strong we are because poetry in the 20th century was looked down on with derision; a poet was an effeminate, weak creature who should have a real job. Standing up and banging a staff was the ancient pagan way of the poet announcing himself. So boasting in my book is totally honest. In the book it looks like I am really full of myself, but we’ve got to be full of ourselves because when you start nobody believes in you.”

I’m tempted to believe that a basic insecurity is at the root of Donovan’s extraordinary ego – the sick child picked on by schoolkids, then again by snooty folkies and snidey journalists, giving himself the love that others denied him. Interestingly, his creative insecurity seems to manifest itself as sexual jealousy. There is a scene in the book where he has gone to bed with the American folk singer Joan Baez, but when she reminisces about sex with Bob Dylan his ardour is considerably dampened.

More significantly, Donovan’s relationship with Linda Lawrence, his wife since 1970, struggled in its early days because he suspected she was still in love with Brian Jones, who Donovan regarded as “the most creative and brilliant guitar player” in London. Jones and Lawrence had met in 1962 when she was 15, and she became pregnant in 1963. However as The Rolling Stones rose to prominence, Jones was encouraged to make a financial settlement and keep away from her and his son, Julian. By 1965, the year Donovan met Lawrence, it was more or less over between them.

Why did Linda’s relationship with Brian Jones make it difficult for him to admit his feelings for her? “Because she still wanted it to work out between her and Brian. She had a boy with him. And when you are 16 and you fall in love there is something unresolved. So I always felt that Brian was somewhere there in the background.

“You have to remember what Brian represented in those days. He was the business. And you have to beware of such a guy. Did he still have the love of my Linda’s heart? She didn’t feel guilty about anything, she just loved him. It was a love made in heaven, but it was bound for difficulties, bound for problems. She knew it. But surely that young girl would feel an ache for the father of her child? He wanted to marry her, but was convinced otherwise.”

In 1969, Brian Jones’s body was discovered in his swimming pool. I can’t help but wonder whether Donovan was glad his rival was gone. “I didn’t feel: ‘Oh well, maybe she’ll come running to me,’” he says. “I was too involved in my own trauma in 1969. I didn’t know where my life was going. No, I didn’t say: ‘Good, Brian’s gone. Now I can have Linda.’ That would be calculating and totally against my character ...”

I interrupt him. Surely it would be quite natural to feel glad? “No, I wouldn’t feel that,” he says. “I’m way beyond that. I didn’t worry that Brian was going to take Linda away from me. What I hated was not Brian but the love that Linda may have felt for him.”

As he struggled with these feelings, Donovan became involved with the American model Enid Karl, with whom he had a son and a daughter – Donovan and Ione. However this relationship failed and he did not see his children grow up; he didn’t meet Ione until she was an adult, and at one time expressed doubt that he was the father. In his book he writes that he felt powerless to be a dad, but doesn’t really explain why. So I ask him.

“Physically, geographically it was impossible because I was a rambling musician,” he says. “So that was difficult. And there was a great heartache that our relationship didn’t work, and it was being transferred to the children. I found that to be wrong when I spoke to my daughter, Ione, many years later. She said she would rather have gone through that heartache than the heartache of not knowing her father.

“I made a decision. Was it wrong? No, it was perfectly right. I can’t go back and change it. But in retrospect, children who don’t see a parent for years and years feel that they would rather be in a tug of love than not see the parent at all. I didn’t know that then, so I was wrong in that sense. All I can say to Ione is that had I known then what I know now, I would have gone through that [difficult experience of spending time with the children]. But when I did see the child, Dono, Enid would be bitter and call him back after two days. I thought it was breaking his heart.”

Hmmm. “Did you not think,” I ask, “that you were doing to Enid and your children what Brian Jones did to Linda and Julian?”

“No, I didn’t know that then,” he says. “Not until Linda said, ‘Don’t let this hap pen.’ I knew then, but I still couldn’t do it. I felt torn. Recently, of course, me and my American children have tried to repair those bridges, to meet and talk about it.

“But don’t imagine that was the only thing happening to me then. There was great fame and the overpowering trauma of the personal experience I was going through as a superstar, as all my friends were. The 1960s were coming to an end, and we were in danger, not only from ourselves through drugs and alcohol abuse, but also from the great fan base out there who wanted to love us to death.

“If you read the mythologies of the world, the hero is honoured to a point and then he is killed either by his own hand or by others. I was feeling a lot of other things, not just about my relationship with my children, but about my life and career, and also a great sense of boredom. I didn’t want to do any of it any more. I wanted out.”

He effectively dropped out of the music business at the end of the 1960s, married Linda Lawrence , had two daughters with her – Astrella and Oriole – and raised Julian as his own. He has released music and toured sporadically since then, but his association with flower power still clings to him like pollen. It must be odd being almost 60 and having your entire life defined by those five years in which you were truly famous.

Donovan is not an easy man to like nor to understand. His constant references to Buddhism and Celtic mythology tend to cloud his meaning, and there is definitely a sour irony in an icon of the love generation, the son of a loving and influential father, effectively cutting himself out of the lives of two of his own children.

Not that he has any regrets, or at least none he will admit to. He tends to overvalue his achievements, just as posterity has undervalued them, but to hear Donovan tell it, his life has turned out just as he planned.

“At 16, I knew what I wanted to do,” he says. “I intended everything. There was no luck in it whatsoever.”

The Hurdy Gurdy Man is published by Century, price £17.99. Donovan’s new album, Beat Café, is out now

09 October 2005

Just tryin' to get the facts straight, ma'am.

On the plus side, he did actually do that funny thing with his voice live and also his guitar playing was amazing.

teehee

and the best, which is jason donovan of course, was 5000% times better

Oh my God, that is hilarious.

-- hurdy gurdy man (hurdygurdyma...) (webmail), September 22nd, 2005 7:28 PM.

I thought Donovan helped out with 'Yellow Submarine'?

Hmmm...I bet Macca wrote 'Mother Nature's Son' for himself. It was inspired by on a lecture by the Maharishi, as was a John Lennon song 'Child of Nature' (he later scrapped the lyrics and turned it into 'Jealous Guy').

Sep/Oct 2005
Reviews
Reissues
Donovan

Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan

Epic/Legacy
By Richard C. Walls
Let’s give Donovan his due. Often dismissed for not being Dylan, for being, at times, too airy-fairy and too embarrassing a relic of the hippie era, the fact remains that when he was good he managed to be both distinct and representational, one of those unique performers who, for better or worse, had ingested and then reflected a portion of the temper of the times. His two best records, Sunshine Superman (’66) and Mellow Yellow (’67) are period pieces, but then so is Sgt. Pepper’s, and their pop/rock/folk fusion still sounds like nothing done before or since. More often than not Donovan constructed a vibe that sounded like a new twist on the emerging language of the youth culture. And he was, it seemed, a little ahead of the Zeitgeist curve. “The Trip” is genuinely trippy before that became a wretched cliché and “Sunny South Kensington” is cobbled from so many then-contempo influences, from the Beatles to garage rock, that it sounds sui generis. And if Donovan was never quite as deep as he seems to think he was (and that alone would make him a good spokesman for the era), he could still be a lot of fun.

That said, this box set does much more than portray Donovan as a late-’60s avatar, comprising three discs and a bonus DVD, 60 tracks and 12 previously unreleased songs, with a noncritical but informative liner essay by Anthony DeCurtis (Who’d have thought that Donovan’s breathy close-to-the-mic style was an idea he got from listening to Buddy Holly?). And given the hit-and-miss quality of the post-Mellow stuff, the box is ultimately for the dedicated fan. For every song that reminds one what a clever boy he could be (e.g., “Epistle to Dippy”, “Hurdy Gurdy Man”), there’s a handful where the preciousness is layered on with coyly mannered abandon and the results are just too bloody twee. When the poet-troubadour moves past the point where he engaged us by making spontaneous history, he can become a taste you may no longer be inclined to acquire.

DONOVAN
Try For the Sun: The Journey of Donovan
(RCA/Legacy)
Rating: 8
US release date: 13 September 2005
UK release date: 12 September 2005
by Maura McAndrew



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A decade before Bruce Springsteen held the title of "the new Dylan", a British teenager named Donovan Leitch lay claim to it, even befriending the man himself. Donovan rose to fame strumming earnest folk songs and psychedelic rockers in the late 1960s, recording his first album when he was in his teens and gaining international stardom by age 20. Inspired by Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly as well as his peers, Donovan collaborated with and befriended some of the great musicians of his time, such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Mamas and the Papas, The Animals, Jeff Beck, Ron Wood, and members of Led Zeppelin. After a short, successful career, this particular "new Dylan" seemed content to fade into the background, withdrawing from the spotlight in the 1970s and releasing few albums after that. As a result, Donovan's rightful place among the great folk-rockers of the '60s and '70s has been somewhat overlooked.

I never knew much about Donovan aside from the oh-so-'60s party tune "Mellow Yellow", and I had always thought of him as just some silly hippie. I would smirk at my mother's copy of Donovan's Greatest Hits and its close-up shot of the young Donovan with his wild hair, large honest eyes, and boyish grin. Though Donovan was silly, it was a good silly, and his songs were not only catchy; they really said something about the spirit of a certain era of rock 'n roll. Epic/Legacy's new three-disc box set (including a live DVD and previously unreleased recent material) will perhaps put Donovan back on the minds of all the Dylan and Beatles-worshippers who have neglected his influence.

The box set, though a big project to tackle for any but the most obsessed Donovan fans, is extremely well put together. The first disc is the one that will attract casual fans: it contains the early Dylan-esque folk tracks "Catch the Wind" and "Josie", as well as the fantastic über-hit "Sunshine Superman", which I instantly recognized from years of oldies radio and my parents' records. This song is, to me, as emblematic of the 1960s as any of The Beatles' hits. Also heard here are "Season of the Witch" and the strangely endearing "Mellow Yellow". One highlight of this box set is its killer liner notes, written with obsessive glee by Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis. He lets the fans in on Donovan's days partying in swinging '60s London, as well as little known collaborations (like Paul McCartney's barely audible cameo on "Mellow Yellow").

What is startling about Donovan, both in the story of his life and in his music, is how honest everything is. There is no mystery about him, which is most likely why he was never a cult figure like Dylan. He is not evasive, not depressed, and his lyrics are not cryptic. When he writes a song about a woman, he calls it "Jennifer Juniper", "Legend of a Girl Child Linda" or "Celia of the Seals". He doesn't change names, nor does he hide behind metaphors. Song One on the second disc, the hopeful "Epistle to Dippy", was written for Donovan's childhood friend, nicknamed "Dippy". When Dippy heard the song, he and Donovan got back in touch with one another. This is Donovan through and through: earnest and well intentioned. Throughout Disc Two this is displayed in hits such as "Hurdy Gurdy Man", and the flute-laden "Lalena".

Disc Three showcases more of Donovan's confessional folk from the early 1970s, most of which draws on the Celtic influences of his Scottish upbringing. A trio of more recent tracks, 1994's "Please Don't Bend", 2003's "Love Floats" and 2004's "Happiness Runs" show him growing with the times, but not neglecting his classic style. Especially "Happiness Runs", an updated version of his 1969 song, which sounds like something any modern folk hero would die to create.

These three discs are not only packed with the hits of Donovan's heyday, but are also full of surprises. His delicate Celtic timbre, combined with his honest lyrics and sunny melodies, make him much more than a silly hippie or a 1960s throwback. He is an important musician with a real place in rock history. Don't let the earnest smile fool you; with Donovan, happiness is just as beautiful as sadness.

— 14 September 2005