Donovan
Interviewed by Josh Tyson

A concept album about bohemian, café culture should probably be stale and nostalgic, but Donovan’s Beat Café (2004) isn’t either of these things, mostly because neither is Donovan. I’m not sure that the album has garnered him a wider audience, but those who appreciate his jovial, inquisitive nature and his supple, infective songwriting will find a solid addition to his catalogue.

Early on in Donovan’s career there was a press-bred rivalry between he and Bob Dylan. Because of his foppish appearance and social consciousness, he was accused by music critics of copying Dylan’s “every antic.” The situation diffused somewhat when the two met in 1965, in a hotel room, while Dylan was touring in England. Donovan played him a few songs, Dylan responded positively (this meeting is captured in D.A. Pennebaker‘s Dylan tour documentary, Don’t Look Back).

Subsequent albums proved that Donovan had different aspirations. His scattershot arrangements harness jazz, blues, calypso, raga and—perhaps most importantly—the Celtic music of his native Scotland. Donovan’s true nature as a songwriter is that of an explorer, not a cynic. If anything, musically, Dylan and Donovan share little more than an allegiance to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Woody Guthrie.

Donovan has kept himself, more or less, out of the public sphere for the past thirty years. He spent most of the eighties living in the California desert, before moving to a remote location in Ireland in 1990. He resurfaced in 1996 with Sutras, produced by Rick Rubin. Between Sutras and Beat Café, he also released a children’s album, The Pied Piper. Many of his older songs frequently turn up as apt punctuation in movies like Rushmore, Goodfellas, Election, and The Rules of Attraction—reaffirming his cultural impact. When I spoke with him in January, he was on the Grecian island of Paros, working on his forthcoming autobiography.

What’s the weather like where you are?
Well, in wintertime the sun does shine, and the wind right now is from the south, so it’s quite warm.

When did you start writing your book?
Oh, over the years I’ve been doing bits and pieces. It goes as far back to 1970, when I made some hand-written pages where I managed to capture bohemian days, which were sixty-two, three and four. So I actually had names, conversations and events when I was a young man of sixteen, hitchhiking down to the south coast of England with my good buddy, Gypsy Dave.

Have you been remembering things you thought you’d long forgotten?
Well, yes. I am at a great advantage of course, because I’m a storyteller. I write songs, and so each of the periods that I’m covering in the book had very easy memories when I would listen to the songs, because the songs that I wrote were very autobiographical. The book goes up to 1970, so it’s lots of sixties, some childhood in Glasgow, teens in England, and yeah, it was quite easy through the songs. And, of course, I came down to Greece to see my old friend Gypsy Dave, who lives here on the island of Paros. He’s a sculptor now, and he and I have sat, in the last two months, on the two or three visits that I’ve made here. So things that I’d forgot, he’d remind me of. So it was great to top off the book with Gypsy Dave… We left home at sixteen [he and I]. We had realized that we weren’t going to join society, and I wanted to be a voice for the new movements that were happening and coming out of British bohemia, and of course, American bohemia. Very strongly influenced, we all were over here, we writers, by the Beat generation in America: Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. And in the music world, of course, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Then I found my own voice and started investigating my Celtic roots and became, as you know, a kind of a troubadour shaman, and a voice for a generation.

I’m 28 now, so I obviously heard “Mellow Yellow” on the radio quite a bit as a young child, but I really started getting into your music after hearing some of your other songs again in the early nineties, in old skateboard videos [primarily, Foundation’s Super Conductor Super Collider]. To me it was a perfect fit. I don’t know if you’re familiar with skateboard culture, but it shares a lot of common threads with bohemian culture, in that it is a counter-culture and it encompasses a different way of looking at your environment.
Correct. All young people look for that space, the place outside of their upbringing. I’m glad to hear you say that. My songs seem to relate. I’ve written on so many different subjects, I guess I have a song for every situation. What seems to be an element in the music that I’ve made is that it can be applied to any generation, and lots of young singer/songwriters do get influenced by my work. I think it’s not the melodies, and it’s not the sound; it’s the attitude. I’m experimental—experimental all the time. I didn’t really have one genre that I would stick to, although it is just me and the guitar. I’m adventurous.

I like what you said about the attitude being more important in your music than the melody, because that’s what’s endearing about your music. It’s immediately catchy, but they are the kind of songs that make it easy to latch on to the attitude of experimentation.
Yeah, you said it… From one song to the other on Beat Café—and on my thirteen top-30 records—each of them are different, each of them are an exploration. I couldn’t sit and repeat the last hit. If you look at a set of my hits, it’s quite extraordinary how different they are from each other. There are genres in there. I guess the most powerful genre that influences young players is “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Season of the Witch.”

They are both dark songs, but also very accessible.
It’s spooky. “Hurdy Gurdy Man” has got this repetitious sort of drone thing going for it, and drummers love it because they can really open up. In a way the songs have become educational for young bands, and they continue to have an influence, and I love that. I will be re-presenting them. But I don’t just want to go out and say, “Look at me. Look what I’ve done; aren’t I great?” Each of the songs represent a very important valuable development in music and thought, and I think those thoughts still apply today. Especially because we don’t have a new explosion of sound from singer/songwriters; they‘re working very carefully. I hate I when new singer/songwriters are compared to me, or Dylan, or Nick Drake, or the Stones, or Leonard Cohen. It belittles the new songwriter, you know? It’s best that the new songwriter takes what we did and builds their own. But the record companies are in the business of looking for three pretty girls that can sing and dance, or five guys that can sing in harmony. It’s not very encouraging for young artists.

Listening to contemporary music, do you feel that there are any musicians out there that have the same discipline and sense of social responsibility as Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie?
This idea of social protest, you don’t see that a lot, but what is the social protest today? Would you consider Eminem a protest singer?

Not really.
The first reaction was that the parents of the children that were listening wanted to close him down. That is the proof that somebody is saying something that the establishment doesn’t want.

I’d say that ultimately he proved to be so marketable that they kind of laid off.
It’s not up to us singer/songwriters to stop becoming commercial, because millions of people want to hear it. How we deal with it, then, is how we deal with it. It’s a personal thing for an artist—how he deals with his success. But, just before the success, if there’s ever a revolt against what we are trying to do, it means that something important is happening. Who is out there today? What is the great protest today? I guess the protest today is the inhumanity of man, you know? Ecology has become an extraordinary issue in the world. It looks like the industrial nations are trying to destroy the earth. I guess young people, like yourself, can become a bit disillusioned—where all you see is the destruction of the earth. It must be sung about. But all the agendas that are on the table in Western nations, they’re important, and you can sing about pretty much whatever you want now. Whether it will make any change, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s sung, and as long as the word is out there. Whether there’s a new Pete Seeger in the works, I don’t know; or a Donovan or a Buffy St. Marie or a Joan Baez. We will have to wait and see.

There is a somewhat underground folk revival going on here right now…
Oh, it’s enormous, yeah! That is so good because that has to go back, back to the roots is what it’s called. I was just listening to a station here, and I don’t know where it’s coming from, but my God is it eclectic.

Well, there is some great music coming out of it, and there are some people who are inclined to do all sorts of experimentation, but what I find disappointing is that there was a stronger, unified message in the stuff that was done in the sixties, now there’s kind of a vacancy.
I don’t know. The actual creation of music is an extraordinary thing. It’s the most powerful art, because it’s invisible. Music has an effect before one looks for meaning. The logical mind, that wants to hear what the music is saying, comes second. The actual sound of the music, and the way the singer is singing, it comes first. It can chill you; it can thrill you (laughs); it can upset you; it can groove you. It can make you dance; it make you cry. The power of music comes through before the meaning, so the musician is like a shaman—like in the old tribes.

Do you feel under-appreciated or misrepresented in the canon of pop music?
I am a strange fish in the history of music. It’s very hard to place me. I’m understood by the musical fraternity very well, but pop music history finds it hard to place me. I do find that I’m out of step with pop history, but appreciated. I do feel appreciated, more and more. When we songwriters write a song, the only ones we really want to impress are our peers. So, to know that my fellow musicians and songwriters, young and older, appreciate what I do is enough.

Donovan, I thank you for your time.
Well, thank you Josh. I especially liked the bit you said about the skateboard culture. The small countercultures are where it’s at. It always cooks underneath before it comes over ground. When it goes over ground, I’m afraid it becomes awful. The Beatles, me, Dylan and the others, when we became superstars, it was absolute hell. Dylan’s book speaks about it, my book will speak about it. We can’t stop people from loving us to death, Josh. When it becomes over ground, it’s in the hands of big business, we’ve got no way of controlling that. I’m going to play with that this year, and I am working with the big labels on my historical music, and so I hope to turn a little edge in the next two years, and encourage younger bands to do the same.