Larry Schwartz
Country Joe McDonald had his moment of glory singing about the futility of the Vietnam War before the tie-dyed multitude at Woodstock; Donovan had his as The Prince of Flower Power. The two sat alongside each other earlier this year at a book-signing in Cleveland at a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall
of Fame exhibition on the late 1960s “psychedelic era”.
“You know of course,” the San Francisco folk-rocker told the self-styled British troubadour. “It was me.”
“I said, ‘what do you mean?’ ” says Donovan. “He said, ‘we thought that we would start this scam where you get high smoking banana peel. And then, it blew us out of our seats one week later (when) you released Mellow Yellow and the two things collided in people’s minds’.”
The Donovan song was erroneously credited with encouraging the dubious banana-smoking practice. Now 51 and a grandfather, Donovan Leitch can laugh at the confusion of the times. “In my song, ‘electrical banana’ was referencing the new sex toys that were coming on the market. The
backs of magazines have always been fascinating to me and other songwriters …”
It is decades since Donovan’s radiant blend of folk and pop yielded at least a dozen top-40 hits and brought him into the inner circle of popular music.
“I was in the middle of a rock’n’roll explosion,” he says. “And yet my music didn’t cut the excitement. My concerts were just as exciting but in a different way. As if it was OK to put a Donovan album on after the dance was over. And it was. It was OK.”
Then he was gone from the public eye. Despite a few strong albums in the 1970s, the dance was over. As the mood toughened, he seemed quaint, naive, twee and pretentious.
By the early 1980s, US critic Ben Fong-Torres would write: “Donovan was the quintessential flowerchild, dressed in flowing robes, surrounded by floating lilypads and cooing folk-pop songs in a baby’s breath of a voice.”
There was more to him than that. “When the mid-’70s came around it looked like ‘oh-oh, here come the punks’,” Donovan recalls. “But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there … There is within me just the same social discontent as I go through
my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.” The promotional blurb cites praise from the late John Lennon: “Donovan is as important and influential as Bob Dylan and we are … listen, the man’s a poet.” You wonder what he might say now.
Unaccompanied on his third visit to Australia in as many decades next month, the self-styled heir to the tradition of bards and troubadours will be “play(ing) my history”. Perhaps, a little bit of our history too.
He would appear to have lost none of the self-assuredness. “I went out and bought a Donovan CD,” says the 51 year-old Glasgow-born musician from his office in a converted stables in southern Ireland. “People laugh when I say that … this one I didn’t have on CD. I listened to the guitar
style when I was 18 and I thought, ‘God, this kid’s great!”‘
When he talks about the stars, he’s not just name-dropping. Back in 1965, when he was mistaken for a Scottish Bob Dylan, music paper headlines trumpeted ‘Dylan Digs Donovan’. “I suppose I sounded like Bob for five minutes,” he says. “I mean, everybody does…” They met through Joan
Baez. Dylan introduced him to the Beatles.
Two years later, Donovan went to India to learn transcendental meditation at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was there he taught Lennon an intricate guitar-picking featured on the song, Julia.
“The truth is India was very productive for both myself and John. They came back and did The White Album and all over it is this guitar style and acoustic music … and likewise I was influenced to do my album, Hurdy Gurdy Man, by listening to the Indian instruments George was using…”
Every street singer seems to know a Donovan song and his songs have been recorded by more than 200 artists – from Lou Rawls to Judy Collins; the Allman Brothers to the Butthole Surfers.
Every now and again, he meets a young woman called Jennifer, who tells him she was named for one of his songs. With two grandchildren now, he finds it reassuring to meet young fans whose parents introduced them to his music.
His son, Donovan, is singer in a glamrock band called Nancyboy. The elder Donovan listens to contemporary singer-songwriters. Alanis Morrissette “makes one smile”, Sheryl Crow is “an essence of rock’n’roll in modern music”.
For his return, Donovan had teamed up with the hot American producer, Rick Rubin, who has made rap albums by Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys and hard-rock records for Slayer and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rubin had shown himself to be innovative with acoustic music too, recording
a Johnny Cash album. Still Donovan was tentative. “When we met three years ago, I said to him, ‘what kind of record do you want to make?’ He said, ‘Look, let’s make an album that we like.”‘
Lovingly produced with sparse instrumentation, his 27th album, Sutra, is a celebration of gentle strengths. Has it sold well? “You could say it’s been treated more like an art film rather than a blockbuster,” Donovan says.
He is working on another album and writing memoirs. Sutra may not have recaptured the limelight but he talks as one whose time has come again. “To be considered someone who is interested in mystic ideas is quite hip today,” he says. “Although in a very curious way.”
The Sunday Age, 24th of August 1997
Larry Schwartz Writer 