Sunshine Superman Still Flying: Talking to Donovan
Singer, songwriter, musician and poet Donovan Phillips Leitch is known as simply “Donovan” to his many fans. His long list of hit songs include “Sunshine Superman”, “Mellow Yellow”, “Catch the Wind” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” But with 28 studio albums to his credit he has an extensive catalogue beyond the hits. He recently stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about his career, and the release of his new cd “The Essential Donovan”.
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Ron Bennington: It’s good to see you. And congratulations on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Donovan: Thank you very much.
Ron Bennington: How much fun was that night for you?
Donovan: Fun? It was extraordinary. It was fun, but also extraordinary. I had never done a show like that before. That audience in Cleveland were extraordinarily hyped and ready to go. And to be on stage with Mellencamp doing “Season of the Witch” in a way that I’ve never done it before was amazing.
Ron Bennington: Well you have done that with your songs that you’ll change them up a little bit, right?
Donovan: No. I like to keep note for note myself. I like all the parts. But it was just the excitement, the edge we had for “Season of the Witch”. I’d never done a duet before you see and John and I had a bit of fun. You’ll see I guess in May.
Ron Bennington: Now there, Mellencamp when he brought you out, said a lot of people say they’re influenced by you, but they steal. They just have flat out stole things from you. And that happens in music I guess that you hear something, something comes up and you incorporate it.
Donovan: You can do it without thinking. And my wife told me when I had this song called “The Sensitive Kind” and we’d even recorded it and she said “Wait a minute” and she went over and played a JJ Cale song and it was exactly the same. And I had never even thought about it. The words were almost the same as well. But it wasn’t conscious. Now that can happen and that’s okay because if you don’t go to the shoemaker, how can you actually learn how to make shoes? And you’ll find yourself doing it. Nothing’s original. What is original is when you play the combinations of the artists you love and one day you will make mistake where you will create your own sound. And that’s how it works.
Ron Bennington: Well when you go over the album here, “The Essential Donovan”, you hear so many different influences. There’s jazz. There’s pure folk. There’s rock, blues, everything. Every type of music that you ever heard somehow plays in too.
Donovan: Yeah. I don’t think people knew where to put the finger on me. The genres that I played with were just fun for me. It was really having fun. When I was a young kid about 14, 15, 16 and I knew I wanted to go to Bohemia and I don’t mean the country. I mean the lifestyle. The older Bohemians, when they saw I was picking around with a bit of a guitar and writing a bit of lyric here and there, one of the Bohemians said “Alright, you’ve got to spend 2 days with vinyl collection”. Same thing happened to Dylan. Out of Duluth, in to Minneapolis. Same thing. He spent a couple of days with an older Bohemian’s vinyl collection. And I was blown away. I had everything that I could possibly need to learn. There was Baroque, there was jazz, there was blues, there was folk, there was native music, there was spoken word, there was theatrical. It was incredible. I got a schooling in 2 days. I loved it all. And I absorbed it all and it all bounced into my stuff. After the so-called folk period of ’65, late ’65, second album “Fairytale”, suddenly there was a sweep of classical and jazz and folk and beat poetry. And I thought that I needed to put these things together. Later I looked back and see it as everyone does that’s quite extraordinary.
Ron Bennington: Sure. And at the time it was also somewhat in the zeitgeist where all your peers were changing album by album. It was an amazing amazing time. And at the time, did you realize that you guys were making these vast changes or was it just playing it day by day?
Donovan: Well. Of course. One is full of oneself. If one doesn’t believe in oneself, who else is going to? And that lovely feeling of that kind of friendly jovial rivalry, as soon as I break through and make an extraordinary thing, you do want to play it to your peers. In a way sort of saying “Hey look what we just did?” And looking for different sounds as well. We would step out into the hallway with a microphone and get a sound where maybe your pals would say (whispers) “How did he get that sound?” And so you were playing with the actual sound of recording at the same time. Yeah. Things were happening very fast. Every 3 months, 2 months, something extraordinary was happening. And I think that was like all the great power of the ’60s was something that’d been held in reserve through the late ’50s and the generations of the musical friends that I know. And when we finally got a chance to do it in the studio, it let it go. The energy was so huge and absorbing and experimenting, that was the game.
Ron Bennington: And it wasn’t just music, I mean suddenly art was changing at the same time along with you guys, fashion was changing and you were right in the middle of it. If you look at you from like “Catch The Wind” to like “Sunshine Superman” it looks like perhaps 20 years had passed and it was just a couple of years, right?
Donovan: All of us had gone through art school in one way or the other. And both sides of the pond, America too, you can see a painter in Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. How you can see a painter in Ronnie Wood, John Lennon. And so this art school is a lot to blame for this. The actual way of actually dressing your songs up and dressing yourself up in the costumes of your songs, so it was a visual aspect as well. The visual art and of course fashion and music had been in bed together forever. But in the ’60s they really fell in love. And so the idea of looking like your music and to actually portraying it, look at The Who, Pete Townshend was taught actually by a pop artist called Peter Blake in art school and so what do you get? The Who are like pop. They’ve got Union Jacks. They got targets on their clothes. Me? I was kind of more into the Pre-Raphaelites of the Victorian days. And so I would go down and pick through some antique shop and get a bit of old velvet and stuff like that. But Brian Jones was before us all. He was doing that as well. So you dressed up in your dreams. The lyrics and the actual subjects, there was not only vinyl in the old Bohemians’ pads, there was the books. And these older Bohemians often would be the teachers of poetry or art in the art school. And definitely, they’d have a swinging pad that they’d been swinging in for the late ’50s or early ’60s. And on the shelves, the bookshelves would be the books. “On The Road”, Jack Kerouac was passed around. But then you had philosophy and you had Zen and you had Hinduism and Yoga and Unpanishads and the poets, beat poets, Ginsberg and Kerouac and Rexroth and Burroughs and McClure. And so this was all bubbling. And we had our British poets too, Dylan Thomas was really influential and Lennon’s lyricizing.
Ron Bennington: Well also the players that you played with, I know like an early version of Led Zeppelin backed you up.
Donovan: Well yeah. I mean Jimmy Page played on “Sunshine Superman”. No question, John Paul Jones on “Hurdy Gurdy Man”. But what was interesting about “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and the Zeppelin when they formed, this, how should we say, our rediscovery of own rock and roll. I turned Celtic rock. Because we were looking too American playing rhythms and styles of the American blues and the American jazz and the American rock and roll when it came along. I wasn’t so much a 4 piece band rhythm and blues guy, but I knew all about it. And so this Celtic rock thing that happens on “Hurdy Gurdy Man” is really, like the drums are not American. They’re like Irish Bodhran and the guitars are like power chords like modelled sound of Celtic music. And so that I think was an encouragement to Jimmy and Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. Especially Jimmy, to take the acoustic music and build power chords after it and then you’ve got Led Zeppelin.
Ron Bennington: And this zeitgeist was all going on, I mean all the people were in and around. I know Ronnie Wood played with you and you’re showing up at other stuff. And you’re going to India with The Beatles. So at one point, you guys are, I guess competitors, but another way, collaborators all the time, right? I mean on some level.
Donovan: Well somebody had to call somebody up. And with me it was Mickie Most. The producer’s an important part of this story were telling. Maybe the most important part. Because he’d say to me one day “Well, what have you got?” And I said here’s some new songs. And he would pick the singles and he’d pretty much say whatever you want to do on the albums. John Cameron was the arranger. And John Paul Jones was the arranger. And so we could work together on these album covers. Then the idea of actually having guitar players play with me, I didn’t have a band so it would be session guys. And I found that with Page and with Beck and with Spedding and with other guitar pickers, they enjoyed my songs. Because they were so quirky. And there was always interesting rhythms. See I used to be a drummer first. I loved the idea of being Art Blakey or Gene Krupa when I was 14. And so when I stopped that and realized you can’t take the drums on the road, I borrowed a guitar from a friend’s girlfriend, she never got it back. I was playing rhythms I knew I could play from drums and so I’ve always been an unfailing good rhythm guitar player whether I’m picking or not. Other guitar players love that. And I’m very very pleased to have played with such great ones. Especially Beck.
Ron Bennington: You know, Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Page. These are people who at the time are working as session guys, but they all came on to become legends. I mean everyone that we’re talking about there.
Donovan: Yeah. How do you become a legend? Well, you actually have to be dedicated. And you have to learn the skills. But Mickie Most said once, he said to me “Look there are many that have got everything. They’ve got looks, they’ve got songs, they’ve got lyrics, they’ve got technique, they’ve done their homework, they sound good, but they’re missing one thing”. I said “What’s that Mickie?” And this producer is one of the few who knew this. “They haven’t got the hunger”. And the hunger is the same for acting, the same for directing, the same for dance. There’s something, when you say “went on to become superstars themselves”, you’ve got to be dedicated. It really is a one view focus of what you want to do and what is that? Make money? No. Actually it’s to communicate. And that’s why we love artists, so popular. They want to communicate with the audience. And the audience wants to communicate with us. It’s an idea that people don’t talk much about. We have a relationship with the audience.
Ron Bennington: Well you in particular when you came over, not everybody could come over from England, but when you showed up in L.A. you were just perfect for that town. When you showed up on the Sunset Strip, everybody in L.A. reacted to it. It was gigantic. And not everybody gets that. Not everybody gets to make that kind of transformation.
Donovan: So, are you asking me to comment that?
Ron Bennington: Yeah, I mean just what it felt like, I mean it’s the Summer of Love and not only are you welcomed there, but put up on a pedestal right away.
Donovan: Well, I had the hunger. I also knew I had something to say. That I was a voice. When we stepped out of the limo on the Sunset Strip, of course the kids then, the boys were still with crew cuts and plaid trousers and the girls with ponytails and sneakers. I mean things hadn’t happened yet. So we looked like we’d fallen out a spaceship or something. But it wouldn’t be too long before that would change. And so this being accepted, if you want to talk about it, you have to talk about the value of my work to the generation that accepted it and supported it and raised me up. Maybe even too fast, too young and too much fame. And we didn’t expect that.
Ron Bennington: And yet you were, at no time did it seem like you had any misgivings about it. I mean you were ready to walk out on stage, do “Universal Soldier”, do stuff that at the time was pretty controversial in the states.
Donovan: We’re getting close to talking about the poet’s role. And when I said poet real young, I said “Poet? You’re just a singer, aren’t you? A songwriter”. Yeah, but when you look at it closely, poetry is what we brought back to popular culture. And with popular poetry came meaningful lyrics and with meaningful lyrics came ecology and spirituality and came talking about things that never were spoken about. Freedom of speech. Everything that the Bohemian poets said that they wanted to bring in through jazz came in through the folk ballad which entered rock and roll. So you might say Bohemian invaded popular culture. And therefore as a poet, I’ve always felt it, from the age of 16, I’m in service. And in the Pagan cultures, the poet was honored for his service because we will express what you cannot. And you will listen to plays and poems and songs that we will construct and we will present, but it’s all about you. It’s all about the audience. We are in service and many people think it’s entertainment, but in actual fact, it serves. And the healing art of music, the international language of music, the invisible sound that touches everybody, I’ve always felt personally, me, I don’t know about anybody else in my game, but I’m in service in a way. I’m a shaman. I’m a poet.
Ron Bennington: It’s “The Essential Donovan”. Donovan thanks so much for stopping by and congratulations on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Donovan: Thank you so much.
Ron Bennington: And I’ll see you next time coming through.
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