Article published in RAVE magazine, June and September 1968

Donovan has joined the meditation game. In this special RAVE interview at his country home, he tells you how his life is suddenly lovely.

Everything In Donovan’s Garden Is Lovely! | When Donovan went to India it was the last straw. For months there’d been those airport interviews with all the trendiest people, either leaving for or returning from India. All wearing nervous, anxious expressions on the way out and radiating perfect calm on their return.

The feeling never quite left one that the whole thing was a giant put-on. Who was fooling who? Instant answers to anything are extremely suspicious. Especially when the provider of instant answers subsequently becomes very rich.

The Americans, of course, have always gone in for it in a very big way, but never the British. So when Donovan went transcendental one felt somehow betrayed. Donovan, for years, has been preaching peace, love and simplicity through his songs. What need could he possibly have of the Maharishi?

purple cottage

In order to find out I made a pilgrimage to his purple cottage, suitably surrounded by trees and flowers. It was one of those rare boiling hot English days. We sat in the garden soaking up the sun, while a pretty girl in a long Indian robe made us cups of tea.

“Now,” I said sternly. “What about this Maharishi?”

Donovan picked up a stick and threw it for the dog. “The Maharishi,” he said simply “is a saint.”

Oh dear.

“He understands all the suffering and pain in the world and knows how to put it right.

“Meditation is the only way to contact God again. That’s why the world is in such a state, because we’ve lost the way to God. Throughout the ages there has been only one way to get to Him, and that is through truth. The truth is covered up and people think they don’t need God. Or they can reach him on their own.

Everything In Donovan’s Garden Is Lovely!

But not everybody can, so it’s great when someone like the Maharishi stands up and says ‘This is how you do it’.” He looked at me. I nodded. “The whole world will be meditating soon because this generation is demanding it. Have you ever meditated ?”

I shook my head.

“It’s so simple. You just have to sit quietly and close your eyes. The Maharishi gives you a mantra, a pretty word that you say in your head. And then you just let the thoughts come. Of course you can do It all wrong. Like trying too hard. If you have to concentrate, you’re not really meditating properly. Actually I’m not a very good meditator. I keep wanting to get up and move about.

“It was lovely in India. We lived in a little bungalow high over the River Ganges on a plot of land the Maharishi had bought. The walls of the bungalow were very thick and damp inside, which was good in the hot weather. We could go in and just sit. There was a fence around the outside, more to keep the reporters out than to keep the people in.”

Everything In Donovan’s Garden Is Lovely!

Was there any special routine?

“No, not really. We could get up whenever we wanted to. Then we’d eat. There was an Indian cook and a couple of English boys who were hitch-hiking round the world and had stumbled upon India. We ate mainly Indian food—vegetables and mangoes. We used to sit up on the roof after dinner and think and sing and write songs.

“It was like a haven in the whole earth where tired writers and singers all flocked to an old sage with a white beard who told them to sit down and relax.

“In the evening there’d be a lecture by the Maharishi, and we’d all go along with a little notebook and take down all the great things he said.

“He’d give us mango juice and listen to our songs. And sometimes he’d go into meditation, when I could feel the silence around him. It was very powerful.”

What did he do for you?

“Not much actually. I think he was more aware of me than I was of him. I wasn’t really looking for any kind of answer to a problem. Other people used to ask him for secrets like tan men really fly?’ I asked him if I could have some more mango juice. Meditation doesn’t mean you are going to get rid of all your pain so that you’ll only feel joy all the time. It’s just a way back to God.”

the Maharishi

Back to brutal reality. How much did you pay the Maharishi?

Donovan smiled gently. “I didn’t pay him anything. Saints, after all, don’t charge. But if you have a movement, you’ve got to have a building and offices to contact people from.”

What about drugs? I asked. What part did they play?

“The drug scene is over. I don’t even like being in the company of people who take drugs any more. Drugs are a very degrading thing. You can’t hold yourself proudly and say ‘I’m alive and I’m happy about it’. Drugs are the false gods of desperation for millions of people.

Everything In Donovan’s Garden Is Lovely!

“The trouble with the people who take them is that they just sit getting high, not doing any work or getting satisfaction from anything. They should get up, go out and build something, paint a picture, sing, dance, scratch a rock—anything I”

Just then Donovan’s friend Gypsy Dave came out of the cottage and began to attack a piece of wood with an electric saw. The noise was deafening, so Donovan picked up a blanket and his guitar and went out into the woods that surround the house. He found a huge oak tree and looked up at it, puzzled.

“Oh,” he said. “I forgot it wasn’t summer.”

We sat under it anyway and he began to play. New songs. Songs he’d written in India. Songs the Beatles had written in India. All of them were gentle and full of peace. I was beginning to understand. Suddenly he stopped playing and said:

“You know, you don’t have to go to India. You can find it all right here. But it’s much harder. And many people, especially city people, don’t know how to try. Well it’s a pity just to leave them isn’t it? The main trouble is they’ve never had any experience of nature. They’ve always been locked up. Meditation helps people become aware. It’s like my songs, they make people feel free to go out and achieve things.

we’ve forgotten how to fly

“The trouble is we’ve all been held down for so long we’ve forgotten how to fly. Everyone must, of course, find freedom on their own. I can’t do it for them, nor can the Maharishi. He just provides a sort of road map. It’s our children who are going to change the world. All we have to do is prepare the world for them.

“I want there to be schools where children learn how to dance and sing and paint, leaving the academic subjects to the kids who have the flair for it. Isadora Duncan nearly got the world dancing again. We should have lots of festivals where people rejoice a lot and learn what it’s like to be happy . . . that’s really what it’s all about.”

The sun went behind a cloud and I suddenly realised that I’d been there all day. Donovan said that he had to go to the local police station and when I looked worried he laughed.

“I promised to play at their charity ball.”

Clearly not a man to bear a grudge.

We walked back to where the others were.

The girl in the Indian robe was crocheting table mats. While we had been gone someone had washed all of Donovan’s brightly coloured shirts and hung them out in the sun to dry. (Carole Adler)

Donovan’s interview with Alan Freeman, RAVE magazine February 1967

Donovan’s New Image

FREEDOM matters to us all. It matters more to Donovan more than most. To him freedom is saying “I love you” to anyone he wants to say it to; it’s being close to nature, and it’s leaving the country just as he has a record in the Charts.

To you or I it might be staying out late, doing something on the spur of the moment, not going to work on Monday morning. We have to do many things we dislike, but Donovan has arranged his life so he seldom has to do the things that he doesn’t want to. Why?

“Because I think it’s terrible to do as people expect of you. You owe it to yourself to be free. Of course, freedom means sacrifices. You can’t have a lot of money and a comfortable home and still do just as you like. Well I have, but I’m just luckier than most. If you want freedom you have to give up everything material.”

the Maharishi

Donovan was preaching this kind of freedom, and also the basic meditation theory long before the Maharishi came into his life.

“People are so aware of being made to look stupid,” he once told me. “They are taught to consider what other people think about them, so in the end they do very little that is pure or honest. If I am on a bus and I see a beautiful person I will go up to them and say , ‘You are beautiful, I love you.’ I don’t care if they think I am a little mad.

“I’m glad my career is a success because my songs are being heard and their message, which is love, is getting through. But I don’t need personal triumph, or the material things that go with it.”

He does own a cottage in the country, and makes thousands of pounds a year from record sales. Yet he thinks nothing of material things.

“Television programmes where people win things should be abolished. People think they’ve won something worth having, but they’ve lost. It isn’t free gifts that count, it’s truth and beauty and freedom.”

But how do you live without money?

drug-taking

“I did for ages and slept on the beaches, travelled the roads by foot. I want my children to be free and pure. Everyone is born pure, they are corrupted as they grow. What child knows evil if it isn’t taught it? It is the purity of children that makes me want to be with them.”

A year or so ago Donovan was preaching freedom of speech and love, and became involved in drug-taking. Now he has gone past that stage.

“Drugs are the false gods of desperation. They don’t do anything for you. You must be constructive all the time. Instead of taking a drug you should plant a tree, dig a hole, pick a flower and cherish its scent.”

He enjoyed his stay in India with the Maharishi because he was relaxed and able to write beautiful things while there.

“I wrote things of peace without trying to. Through meditation I have become even more aware. We have all been held down too long so we have forgotten how to fly. I can’t make you fly you have to want to. The Maharishi can’t make you fly either, but he can show you how.”

It has always seemed that Donovan preaches Christianity.

“I think meditation is the only way back to God,” he admitted. “But I just try to put myself into my songs, and I sing about the things I want other people to share. I’m not a religious teacher.”

Julie Felix

The reason he feels meditation helps us back to God is because today we are all busy, we all work hard, and play hard, and spend every minute of our lives in a kind of rush. To meditate is to be still and to have time to be still and think about things like loving, and helping people. It costs nothing to do this, but our own time.

Donovan has been close to two girl folk singers, Julie Felix, and Joan Baez. Both these girls have a maturity of mind that has come out of deep thinking. Joan has such a deep understanding of people that she sometimes gives one the impression she is a fortune-teller.

She isn’t, but she sees into one’s character so well that she knows what you are feeling even before you know you are feeling it yourself.

Of one friend of Don’s she said, “You are unhappy. You are trying to pretend all is well and it isn’t.” A year later the girl broke off her engagement. It was only after it all ended that I remembered what Joan had said,” she admitted.

Joan believes in Donovan.

“He has a special honesty. He has simplicity. Everyone can understand him and that is his strength.”

open like a book

He quietly influences the people who meet him because what he says is good and right. Who can deny it is good to be really honest? Can it be wrong to follow your feelings and do as you feel is right? As he explains, “Once you say ‘no, I will not do as I feel I will do something else’, then you are false and corrupt.”

Julie Felix says, “Don has retained something many of us lose after childhood, he is open like a book. Like a child, he is truthful and gentle.”

When Don writes songs he puts his feelings to music. If his songs are simple it is a pure simplicity like a flower. He doesn’t copy anyone. People once said he copied Dylan but he didn’t. He admires Dylan and was influenced by him, naturally.

“I don’t know how much Dylan influenced me subconsciously, but as he himself said once, ‘Every time I open my eyes and my mind I am influenced!’”

What sort of relationship does a boy like Don have with his parents? I spoke to his father who lives near him.

we have laughs

“Ours is the usual parent-child relationship. We’ve had ups and downs of course, but I’ve never stood in his way. We see each other almost every day. We talk a lot, and we have laughs. I’m proud of him. I wouldn’t want him any other way than as he is.”

From raw you entertainer pushed into the hard world of pop, how has Donovan changed? The answer is really that he hasn’t; his honesty, gentleness and talent is still the same.