“Welcome To The Phenomenon Of Donovan”
“Welcome To The Phenomenon Of Donovan”
And believe it or not, for a few years there he was biiiiig. Big the way Pearl Jam are big. Big the way people who are known by their first name alone can be big. He hung out with various Beatles and had them singing backup on his records. (He even returned the favor.) He sold out the Hollywood Bowl. He was a teen heartthrob. He was a cultural icon. If you’ll forgive him certain things such as “The Sun is a Very Magic Fellow,” he even managed to be a pretty good songwriter most of the time. Who among us can claim as much? “Sunny Goodge Street,” his first post-folkie recording, is to this day one of Paul McCartney’s ten favorite songs. Donovan was ahead of the Beatles artistically, in 1966 at least--the mid-60s pop eclecticism that was UK psychedelia found some of its most fertile ground within the grooves of Sunshine Superman, at a point when the Four had not yet managed to jettison all vestigial traces of Fab. You don’t think so? Play Revolver, then play Sunshine Superman, then play Sgt. Pepper, and all things will become known unto you. (The Floyd’s Piper was recorded just down the hall from Pepper, and they influenced each other, but Don was a year ahead of either. Ah, if only the Beach Boys’ Smile had been delivered, it would have been the Mecca to which all such albums must ultimately bow...)
On the other hand, when Don got pretentious, he was the most unintentionally hilarious artist this side of Eric Burdon. (And even moreso in the various tunes in which he made himself out to be a stud-muffin. But hey, compared to latter years’ models he was the epitome of good taste.) He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and managed to get himself busted for the dreaded marijuana (in the midst of it, the cop had the nerve to ask Don for his autograph!), and there was some disturbance when he was quoted as saying “I hope this won’t hurt my career.” It didn’t, though it had a disastrous effect on his music and his self-image. A year later he was saying things like “I call upon youth to stop the use of all drugs and heed the quest to seek the sun.” On the internal evidence of such a statement, it could be argued that one can do one, or the other, or neither, but not both.
His 70s albums, of course, were mostly pedestrian--a slog through the muck in search of the occasional good tune. For one reason or another his crowd got smaller, and he was reduced from a headliner to a cult artist to an opening act. Many’s the indignity he suffered in the stadiums of the 70s--I heard tell of one bill he shared with Yes and the J. Geils Band; Don’s set pretty much amounted to “[strum]...[strum]... Is anybody listening? ...[strum]... oh, dear... [strum] ...ah, what the hell, may as well try and catch the wind...” If it were me I’d have spliced “Rubber Duckie” into the middle of “Mellow Yellow,” asked the audience to sing this all together, and seen what happened. Nowadays, however, he plays to several generations of loyalists who pay to hear him; the singalongs take care of themselves. He’s still a lot of fun live, so go see him if you can. Don’s a headliner once again, in smaller clubs, and it’s all to the good.
Because we’re unlikely ever to see a deluge of coffee-table biographies chronicling the phenomenon of Donovan, there are a few Don mysteries that may never be cleared up. None of this matters much in the grand scheme o’ things (what does?), but nonetheless the aural vandalism that was inflicted upon Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow (his two finest achievements) cries out to the heavens for vengeance, cries out in vain. On vinyl (and even most CD) the “stereo” mix is reprocessed mono--highs in one channel, lows in the other. It’s excruciating in headphones, and lopsided too; true mono is far preferable. The mysterious part: in the Troubadour best-of, these tracks are presented in glorious undistorted mono. But on Greatest Hits, “Sunshine Superman” and “Season of the Witch” are in glorious true stereo. So quite possibly these were recorded that way. If so, what the hell happened to the rest of the album? I asked Don about it once, he just mumbled something about how “that’s what the studio did.” Even the Donovans of the world didn’t have creative control back in those days. As if they do now.
Ah, but he got away with some good’ns. There was a double album in 1968, A Gift From A Flower To A Garden. It was a boxed set that ran to all of 60 minutes, plus a Maharishi photo and hilarious antidrug liner notes. The material belied the lavish packaging--utterly minimal, the production and mix seemed to flaunt the fact that it had been recorded on a four-track, and the intricate arrangements that had graced the last couple of albums were mostly replaced by unobtrusive bass’n’drums, maybe a guitar, maybe a piano, maybe a Hammond organ (or maybe a godawful skating-rink Wurlitzer), and Don singing silly toons about “the land of doesn’t have to be.” Donovan’s Nashville Skyline? A year ahead of Dylan now, more power to him. The second disk, For Little Ones, was explicitly a children’s album--like the first, only moreso. What the...? But why not--if you have little kids, let Don sing them to sleep for a change. For all you know, they just might hate that damn Raffi tape.
Then there’s Don’s electrophobia. Did I just make up that word? Why yes, I did, but if there’s an official word for Fear of Electric Guitar, then David Byrne should have built a lyric around it so we’d know. Anyway, nobody’s pointed it out before, but the truth of it is that Don has rarely or never played electric guitar on one of his own albums. It had to be fun, having Jimmy Page on call as a session musician for just such emergencies (in fact he reportedly had most of Led Zeppelin behind him for “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” which if so is the first thing they recorded together--Clem Cattini got the drumming credit, but all that pounding sounds like Bonzo to me) but, given that his move from acoustic folkie to electric whatever was as abrupt as Dylan’s, it seems odd that he personally never got his feet wet. (Errr, figuratively.)
Once Don moved away from his trad roots and under the wing of pop-schlock producer Mickey Most (a Mickey Most Production) he was open to all manner of flower-pop experimentation. Who knows, maybe once he did lay down an electric rhythm track when Jimmy Page got stuck in traffic. Yet in all that time he never once--in amongst all those massed sitars and angelic harps and saxophones and harpsichords and string quartets--just said, “oh what the fuck,” plugged in, and unleashed some shrieking amphetamine-gazelle electrickal lead guitar, a la Dylan in “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat.” Or even afterward--past the point when he could have done anything that popped into his head, because it just didn’t matter anymore, say. But nay. I’ve checked the 70s and 80s stuff, and always he has a hired hand plucking away at the amplified six-string. Maybe the Maharishi told him that for the karmic misdemeanor of playing the sitar in public without first having spent several lifetimes mastering the dharma of raja yoga, Don’s penalty would be to have the ghost of Woody Guthrie come back to electrocute his imperialist Anglo butt should he ever dare attempt to upgrade his guitar from an acoustic Gibson. (Harrison only managed to escape the curse because that summer sojourn with the Maharishi was paid for on George’s tab.)
One thing about the later Donovan output is the way it tends to restore your faith in human nature. Not so much because the material itself is particularly uplifting (although Cosmic Wheels is a very fine 70s effort, not at all embarrassing--better than anything the ex-Beatles were doing at the time) but for the fact that it was ever released at all. To hear Mickey Most tell it, after the 60s ended Don recorded, oh, quite a few albums worth of material that was so monochromatic that nobody would issue it. (And indeed there is a boot called Old-Fashioned Picture Book, primarily of rough acoustic 1970-vintage demos that tend to prove Mickey’s point. One of the songs asks David Crosby not to do drugs anymore.)
Which is not to say that Don had forgotten how to have fun. One listen to “The Intergalactic Laxative” is all you’ll need to carry it around in your head for the rest of your life. It’s a cute little tune that sounds just like a jingle, all on the subject of how exactly people relieve themselves in the weightlessness of space. (“If shitting is your problem when you’re out there in the stars/The Intergalactic Laxative will get you from here to Mars.”) I’ll never forget the time they were playing “Stump The Band” on Johnny Carson, and some Canadian guy asked if they knew that one. They didn’t, so he obliged them with a chorus. He substituted “moving” for “shitting,” which ruined everything, but it’s the thought that counts. What a moment it could have been, though, hearing a word like that--sung, yet--on the Johnny Carson show, and courtesy of Donovan...a year or two before Madonna on Letterman as well.
Don’s trailblazing days were behind him. Nonetheless--and this is the part I love--throughout the 70s he managed to slug out an album almost every year, and two or three times he had a fairly major promo push behind him...for Donovan. In the 70s! Various record labels went to bat for him, in an era when he’d slipped so far from fashion he wasn’t even the butt of Frank Zappa’s jokes anymore. They say all record company execs are subhuman slime devils, yet several of them went out on a limb--for Don! Even David Bowie gave him a song, though a B-side is all that became of it. Graham Nash stepped in to get him a deal and produce an album. It warms my heart. Things got a little more problematic in the 80s; he had to settle for small Euro labels and general belt-tightening. Ironically, his albums (Neutronica and Love Is Only Feeling) improved, turning out better than anyone would have expected. Neutronica featured a catchy little tune about the neutron bomb and some downright queasy synthesizer playing which was no small part of its charm--not only was Don (as always) ahead of Neil Young, he (of all people!) was better at it. Humiliating for Neil, particularly since Devo were personal friends of his...even a personal relationship with Devo can only take you so far, or so it would seem.
Oddly, Don stumbled again when he next got an American deal--the result was the Lady Of The Stars LP, consisting mostly of remakes of his 60s and 70s classics. What was he thinking? A couple of the 70s tunes were perhaps improved upon, but there was no way it was ever going to matter--in 1983, a project such as this was dead before it hit the ground. (The reunited Spirit attempted a similar LP the following year, and suffered a similar fate.) It wasn’t a bad album necessarily, but it was such a pointless one that Classics Live (cruelly repackaged under a new title every couple of years) was all that would be heard from him for the next decade.
Somehow, in 1996 he managed to release Sutras, with a not-inconsiderable promo behind it. Lots of copies in the stores, favorable reviews and a little inset photo in the BMG catalog? Not at all shabby. Surprise, surprise--it hasn’t hit the bargain bin! Don’s done quite well this time. It doesn’t hurt that Sutras is the best thing he’s done since Cosmic Wheels. It’s even trendy in its way; very Celtic, his most acoustic album since the 60s. Thankfully his voice is up to it--unlike most of his peers’, it hasn’t changed much in 30 years. He takes himself too seriously, perhaps, and his very earnestness can be a little offputting, but it’s great to have him back. He’s enjoying himself and it’s a beautiful thing. Ah....but still--here we again, record company clout being thrown behind...a new Donovan album! *sigh* If only the Incredible String Band had had friends such as these...
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