Article published in Rave magazine – February 1967
The Donovan of ’67 is a changed star from the one we once knew. A big, new, confident sound has replaced that frail voice and lonely, strumming guitar. And the coming release of his new disc “Mellow Yellow” should prove that Donovan is, at last, a mellow fellow!
Donovan mellow fellow: It was just over a year since Donovan had sat where he was siting now, his slender figure hunched forward as he talked. In that time a lot had happened and lot had changed, There had been suffering and there had been success. But most of all there had come maturity and the iron determination that marks off the real artist from the strike-it-lucky kind.
This was the new Donovan, his mistakes behind him and never to be repeated, in full control at last of his own ideas and his own career. He had always been worth listening to for the vivid, colourful freshness of his conversation.
But now, with the original shyness and hesitancy gone from his manner, it was really a kick to switch on one of the most fluent minds on the music scene today and to hear Don open up with total frankness.
Catch the wind
“It’s no good trying to catch the wind”, he had said and sung in the early days. And that’s one belief of his that hasn’t altered. “As I go on,” he said, “the more I look to the future. The past disappears, except for the real and intense things.”
Don made certain he would not spoil the wonderful chance that so many pop people get all the time but hardly ever seem to use—the chance of seeing the world. Not in an exhausting rush of dates and schedules, hotels and airports that hurt you halfway across the world, but prevent you from enjoying it.
That was no good for Donovan and his loyal friend Gypsy Dave. They wanted to give the experience the time it deserved, to taste the genuine flavour of far-away countries coolly and completely.
“l went to America and worked there for a while,” Don said. “Then I went on to Mexico and spent some time down there. Then I went on to Greece. I was able to concentrate on writing without the pressure of having to get records ready for fixed release dates. I was able to think and work in freedom.
The Trip
“First I worked in California at The Trip. That’s the big place on Sunset Strip. It’s turned into a Tamla-Motown scene now, but before it used to have Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful and the English influenced groups. We put on a show there that blew a lot of people’s minds.
Opening night was great. When I came off after one of my sets I realised that Anthony Newley had been sitting there digging me. For me that was a highlight, because I dig him so much.
“After The Trip I went down to Mexico, to this white sand beach and the steaming jungle behind it. Beautiful. I stayed there, a retired writer in the sun. It was as if the twentieth-century had never been. I’d flown into the sixteenth century, with Spanish ships bobbing in the bay, grass huts, scorpions, all the sounds of the jungle, and best of all, no crowds.
Ending up in Greece
There was Gyp and I, my manager Ashley Kovacs and his wife. Just the four of us at first, then later on music people we knew in California and New York would come down. The year went.
Next I ended up in Greece, on an island in the Aegean. I rented a stone dwelling on the mountain-side. The windows were just holes looking down on the valleys. I bought a donkey, and we used the donkey to get up and down the mountain.
We had good times there too. Very good times. I still have the house, but whether I’ll renew the lease I don’t know. I went there to find something and Greece didn’t have it. It was flooded with tourists, the sea was traversed with pleasure ships and the whole feel was lost.
“I came back to London, and just about then all my business things were coming to their inevitable end.”
No Control
I got some coffee for us, and said, “I heard around that a lot of people were doing well out of you.”
Don nodded ruefully. “You heard right Alan. They were into me pretty deep. The trouble was that I was always a bit removed from the pop scene, coming on as a folk singer. I never wanted to make that scene really, just wanted to make music in it.
All I wanted was enough money to let me do my own things my own way. But then I found that you can’t do anything you want to do unless you control it all yourself. Otherwise you don’t have a say in the product or the business.
“There were times when Gyp and I said, “Okay, let’s leave it. Let’s go-Istanbul, India, it doesn’t matter. They can have it.”
Stunted by Batman
“Then I thought: ‘No, there’s something here I want to do first’, So I stayed, and I got it written into my contracts that I would have control over artistic things and money as well, It’s all worked out well.
“It takes care of the packaging of Donovan the pop singer, but it also lets me move about in other fields, like children’s records, which I’m interested in. I want to sing not only to the young of this generation, but also to their children—the two year olds and three year olds of the mod marriages. I want to sing to them about truth and love, so that they don’t get stunted by Batman.
“I’m free now of all those business things that hung me up, so now I can involve myself with doing the art side. It’s a shame that a writer has to halve his earnings with other people, but I couldn’t revolutionise that. Anyhow, I’ve done something to improve it. What I’ve got now is good for me.
Donovan mellow fellow
I asked Don how he organises the work of writing, composing and transforming his ideas into records as well as turning out a steady stream of poems.
“I could put over my ideas for songs but couldn’t write the dots for music. So I started to work with John Cameron, the harpsichordist and pianist on my records. That turned out great, because he can write, not just arrange, for songs. He can paint under every word. John’s not like me at all. He’s a bear-drinking bloke from the Royal College of Music.
But we move together like glove in hand, Everything I do I play to him on guitar and tape. We don’t have to categorise. He knows when the thing should have a Mose Alison feel or an MJQ jazz feel or a classical feel.
“I’ve never recorded much of other people’s work, except at the beginning when I did some things by friends just to get them some money. It’s easy to interpret another man’s work, but the person I can get nearest Is me.
I write so much these days that I’m always ahead. I always have more songs than I can put on LPs.”
Don opened a packet he had brought with him. “By the way, Alan I wanted you to hear a couple of these – some new pieces I’ve done for an album. “He handed me several test discs in their plain white sleeves. “Don’t be too critical about the sound, because they’re just rough mixes.”
Jazz Influence
I slipped them on the Hi-Fi and we listened. The most noticeable aspect of Donovan’s latest work is the greater note of confidence that runs through it. Gone is the frail and plaintive little-guy-against-big-world feeling that he used to inspire on stage and disc alike.
The backings were bigger and fuller. Even the voice and guitar numbers had far more body and depth. And he swings more now, with a slight but evident jazz influence. But the lyrics and the ideas and the images of the songs still preserved the strikingly original light and shade of true poetry.
Here and there you can catch traces of the protest outlook, though Donovan’s personal type of protest never depended on moans and complaints. Instead of taking the easy way out and putting down the over-familiar targets, he has usually tried to make his dissatisfaction positive, assertive and creative.
Purring in the sunshine
To me, at any rate, a Donovan song has generally been a concept that said yes instead of no . . . a skilful, gentle formula that got its results by more or less saying: Okay, if this or that bugs you, dig whatever charms and delights you.
It’s easier than you think. But I suppose it’s no use picking a poem apart to see why it appeals to you – when you’re purring in the sunshine who cares that it’s made up of indigo and ultra-violet and hows-your-father?
“It’s like a record itself,” said Donovan. “I don’t know a lot about how a record works, but I dig it. You can say it’s just a way of putting music on a flat surface, a round piece of twentieth-century substance.
“But it’s a lot more than that. It’s a marvellous thing, a perfect thing. I would say that the response to a new record is the equivalent of the days when a generation used to await the coming of a new book by a popular author.
Donovan mellow fellow
It’s the right form for this time, We need a condensed form because life is lived fast now. So Paul McCartney writes the equivalent of a novel in two minutes forty-five, called ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
“Our generation has less time. So the time for peaceful thought is, say, ten minutes whereas it used to be three hours. Therefore they want to grasp at he essence, the realty, without wading through all the guff to get there.
“People talk about ‘pop music’. I call it the most important communication of today, because it’s listened to. They extract the feeling from it. And there’s only one subject really. It’s truth, compassion, softness. I’m very pleased and excited to be part of a movement like that.
But we’re working under the eyes of a world that doesn’t completely understand. Only the young eyes understand that there’s a change. And in that change is this movement that began six or seven years ago. Now pop music has matured, and the writers have matured, the one’s like McCartney, Lennon, Sebastian, Townshend and Dylan (if he comes back).
The movement is made up of lots of freak strains, different strains. Some will be nearer the essence and some farther away. But we’re all in it together, doing the same thing. And that’s why, although I was rebelling and putting down everyone else’s work two years ago, I don’t criticise anyone today.
Donovan mellow fellow
I’m thinking of all the young people in the world who are gong through this change or helping to make it.
At that moment in the conversation the evening papers came through the letter-box, with their glum tidings of Vietnam and the latest jailbreak. Don shrugged.
“They try to make their news so important, so intense, when we know it’s rubbish, just a bit of paper, the blues of the world moaning about their goofs. But when somebody young writes to you from Sweden or Germany or America about a song they’ve heard and say, ‘Yes that’s feeling’ . . . that’s when you start to understand how much love this is and how much love is wanted. That understanding is the beginning of living.
“The good things of life are lying there asleep under a thin layer of draggy things. Just by cutting that layer, anyone can find out the same things I found out. And personally I’m very happy now, more at peace than I’ve ever been.”
Law Scene
Sensing that I was circling as tactfully as I could towards a painful question, Donovan beat me to it with extraordinary frankness. “I think know what you were wanting ask Alan. That scene with the Law right?”
I nodded.
“Well,” he said, first of all I had to go through all this humdrum thing about business and earnings. I wanted to get what I should have been getting. So I had to hire lawyers to explain my side. It went on for a long time. It stopped me from working as I wanted to work. I was annoyed and depressed, very depressed, and I had this drug scene.
It all seemed as if it was going to cripple me in music, and I was scared. But I held on and followed it through and I was able to begin again.
Tip-off
“I was very lucky. Nobody gets two chances and wins an the second one. I believe that that year was meant to be a year of maturing for me. I had thought at the time that some force was out to pull me down, though I probably brought about the circumstances myself. But there was a certain group of people who wanted to take a punch at me, and they did.”
“You mean a tip-off?”
“Yes. But it’s not worth worrying about now. The wonderful part was the letters I got, even from Iceland, saying ‘Best of luck, Don. I hope it’s all over for you soon so you can start again’. There was abuse too, but then I got other letters afterwards, saying, ‘I’m sorry I wrote like that. Now that I’ve thought about it, I didn’t really mean it’.
I never wanted to disgust society – I wanted to do everything I could to enhance it and was lucky that so many people seemed to understand that and stood by me.”
I asked Don what lay ahead on his new road.
Donovan mellow fellow
He said, “I think the next word is going to be philosorock. I’ve been taking about that a lot lately. Sung poetry, with the matured writers as the exponents of it. I see everything merging into one great scene, the young scene. It’ll take in everything we think of as separate now – pop and classical songs, dancing, films, dramatics. I’ve got artists drawing for me. I’m writing operatic things, but we’re not going to think of it as drawing or opera. It’ll be just the pop scene, the new scene. There’s. big mining coming.”
Surfacing, from this busy vision, I remembered my courtesies as a host and said, “Is there anything I can mix for you before we break up?”
If it’s all the same to you,” said Donovan unpoetically, “I’ll settle for a cheese sandwich.”
I made one for each of us and we sat there with our feet up, munching and listening to people singing and changing the world and freaking-out and rebelling, and bringing up mod families and digging the essence and generally contributing to the universal scene of scenes. But somehow I got the feeling that Donovan was hearing more than I was in some of today’s records.
A great deal more. Still it’s a novelty to talk to somebody in these times who believes that the goodies are certain to win. According to the draggy headlines in the evening papers they were for the moment having as tough a time as ever.
All the same . . . stay bright!
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