The New Cue #532 September 29: Donovan
"I’m a superstar, I’ve got a limousine."
Good morning,
We’ve got a big one for you today, as legendary singer-songwriter Donovan takes on our Life & Times questionnaire. There is a bonanza of a final answer waiting for you at the end of the interview.
“I remember when I first began in this game of questions and answers, it was so naïve,” he told me, Niall, ahead of our chat in the bar of his west London hotel a few weeks ago. “It was, ‘What’s your favourite colour?’.”
Well, no prizes for that one – Donovan was a purple advocate long before Prince took up the mantle. “I asked a guitar maker once ‘I want you to stain the guitar in three blues so it looks like the evening sun is going down,” he said. “A dark blue, a lighter blue, an even lighter blue, he called me up, it was the great Tony Zemaitus, he said, ‘Don, I started putting the blues on and it went fucking purple!’. I said, ‘Great, keep going!’”
And then he glanced down at our L&T questions, ready to take them on. He has a lot to draw on – he’s celebrating his 60th anniversary in music with a series of gigs over the next few months, the first of which is a show in Richmond in a few weeks - there are more details here.
Before we get the chat, a reminder that today’s edition is free but if you’d like to become a paying subscriber to The New Cue, it costs £5 a month and means we can keep up our shenanigans:
Enjoy the edition,
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of… Donovan
What was the first record you loved?
Everyday by Buddy Holly. This guy appealed to me when I was 14, he’s 19 in the late 50s and then he dies in a plane crash and there was something magic about what he was doing. He wrote the songs, he recorded the songs, he performed the songs and he played the guitar. It appealed to me, here’s a guy who’s doing it all. I didn’t have any urges in school to want to start a band. I wanted to play drums but my mate said, ‘Don’t you want to join a band?’. I said, ‘No, I like doing it all myself’. The Crickets were only three so it was really all Buddy. I met the drummer and the bass player later in life and they said, ‘We were just tagging along’. Woody Guthrie would be my folk hero but Buddy Holly would be my rock’n’roll hero.
And the last?
That’s difficult because I don’t keep up with a lot of new releases and the indie-folk girls and boys really turn me on but the last one that made sense to me in the world of not pop but kind of rhythm and blues funk from the [Donovan puts on a Texan accent here] Southern states of the United States was The Sensitive Kind by J.J. Cale. He released it a long time ago but it comes back to me again and again.
It has a very curious history with me. On an album I made, I recorded a whole song and my wife Linda, who is very up on music, she said, “Don, you said you wrote this song and you recorded this whole song: it’s a J.J. Cale song.” Now, this can happen to a songwriter, especially a guy like me who writes lots of songs. There are songs sat there on a shelf in my head and I loved it so much that when they said, ‘We’re missing a song on the album’, I said, ‘OK, I’ve got one!’ The band played incredible and we recorded it and it was amazing, on an album called One Night In Time which escaped and never was released. The label didn’t even know they had it. Now it’s bootlegged but I’m going to re-release it. The song was called The Sensitive Kind. I played J.J Cale’s version and the version I’d recorded, it was note for note, it had just stayed there.
I spoke to George Harrison about this. He said, ‘Some tunes and some songs are so impressive they remain there and then one day you think you’re writing a new song and it’s a melody or a new lyric from somebody else’s’. Isn’t that amazing?
What’s your earliest memory?
My father reading poems. He never sang. My mother did, and all her sisters in Glasgow. I was Scots-Irish, but mostly Irish, and they all sang. My father couldn’t sing a note but what he did was he read poetry and monologues. Late at night, he would keep everybody in stitches with these monologues and poems. Funny ones. But could he sing? No. He was Scots with an Irish mother, an O’Kelly. He would read the poems of a Scot, Robert Service, and one of the most famous ones was Dangerous Dan McGrew [The Shooting Of Dan McGrew]. It was all about what happened up there in the [he puts on an American accent again] in the great Northwest of the United States, up in Alaska and all that.
What’s your daily domestic routine?
We start, Linda and I -and I did it before Linda and I married - with transcendental meditation, TM. It’s a meditation, as close as possible to waking up. It’s a technique, not a religion. The Beatles and I went to India to study with the guy who presented it but he didn’t invent it. It’s an old form of ‘how do you sit still before anything else happens’ and use a mantra, which is a meaningless word, and you drop your attachment to thoughts out of the picture by breathing in a certain way. It was The Beatles and I who brought it back from the west. We presented it and promoted it as an alternative to a weekend journey within that one can do on LSD, a temporary forget all the troubles of the world with a nice blast of cannabis. Or even worse still when people are like, ‘I need to go partying now, I’m gonna take some uppers’ and then wake up and take some downers.
We were very conscious, The Beatles and I, that all of these highs were needed at the time, but we’d read about another one you could do yourself breathing in a certain way and using a mantra. I do it every day. You’re supposed to do it at the end of the day too, but most of my days are very busy.
What’s your worst habit?
My father told me this very early: procrastination.
When were you most creatively satisfied?
When I pick up the guitar. I don’t have to pick it up because there’s a reason. If the guitar is there and I pick it up, something happens, some phrase that I heard or something I’ve been thinking about, I strum the guitar, creativity happens. My ten fingers and these six strings have a relationship and when I strum them, a rhythm is suggested. “Take me in your arms” – I remember that phrase. I’d written it down and I pick up the guitar and when I said, “Take me in your arms”, the pattern was a Latin groove in A minor. The guitar tells me, if I’ve got a phrase, what pattern I should play. A lot of songwriter friends tell me, ‘We spend weeks, hours trying to look for a melody’ and I say, ‘I’m really sorry if it makes you feel bad but when I pick up the guitar, it’s almost like the guitar is saying, ‘Try this’.’
My wife sometimes says, ‘That’s not another new song you’re writing, is it?’. She means, ‘You’ll never get round to recording them all, why do you do it?’. Because I can’t help it.
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
Because I was looking for a way to get high without getting high, when I met Maharishi, the yogi, it was in California. The Beatles had already gone down to see him in Bangor in Wales when he visited, they couldn’t help themselves and the whole press followed, of course. George Harrison and I talked about it, we were mates, and said, ‘We need one of these guys who can teach us how to do it and we’ve got to check it and see whether he’s a charlatan and he’s having us on and the only way we can do it is maybe bump into one of them’.
Now, this might take a little while… When George wanted to study sitar, he was so famous he could call Ravi Shankar and he was invited by Ravi to India. Why not? He sat down and the first thing George had to learn was to sit cross-legged without getting a back ache. That was not easy. And then Ravi said, ‘George, it’s not enough to learn the sitar, you have to learn the table first because all the patterns of the table are what you’re going to play when you play the sitar, it’s a lifetime’s work.’ George went, ‘Oh, I see’. But whilst he’s learning sitar in India, his wife Patty is there and she’s concerned these four guys are under so much pressure, can you imagine, they can’t go anywhere without being chased. They can’t get out of the country unless the government says they can and they take their passports, they’re controlled by their fame. She knows it and she’s concerned.
Whilst he’s studying the sitar with Ravi, the Shankar family take her out to an Indian dance, Indian restaurants, all Indian culture, and they take her one night to a new yogi who’s just come from the caves in the Himalayas and his name is Maharishi. She goes and sees him that evening about what he does and what he’s teaching and she said, ‘I bet that’s the guy we’re all looking for’. And she forgets it, they go back to England and one night they’re sitting in the mansion… no, it’s before the mansion, it’s the little rock’n’roll house. On the TV comes Maharishi, who’s just arrived in England. She says, ‘George, there’s the guy that I went to see, you’ve got to come down and see him’. The other three Beatles are told and George says, ‘If we don’t, we could be in real shit street because we’re under pressure that nobody knows about’. So they go down… the question is, was I ever in awe of anybody… I’m waiting to meet such a guy, George and I have been talking all the time for about a year and a half about this, George calls me up, ‘We’ve just been down to Bangor, we’ve just met him’. I said, ‘Who?’. ‘The guy we’ve been looking for?’. ‘You’ve found him?’. ‘Yes, we’re going to India’. So that’s how we went, but before that, I’m in America at the end of a tour and George says, ‘You’ve got to meet him, he’s in California doing his bit, talking’.
So I go to one of these universities he speaks at. His henchmen, the people who look after him, know I want to come and they contact me. So I go and, after this show, his speech, I go backstage. Now, I don’t like backstage, I never go backstage. He comes walking towards me on wooden sandals, clip clip clip, he’s got just linen on and a Kashmiri shawl that they call a ring shawl that they were in the Himalayas when they’re too fucking cold in the snow. But I know it’s a yogi and he’s walking towards me. I hear him talking to a couple of his guys, ‘Who is this?’. I’m super famous already and I hear the henchmen say, ‘Like The Beatles… his name is Donovan’. I’d usually just turn around and walk away, what do I care, but as he walked towards me I said, ‘Shit, this is the guy’. He puts his hand out and I touch it and I realise this guy has been up there in the caves and he’s actually got it, he’s been told by his guy to come down and give to the west a real simple version… when he touched my hand, I felt this thing. I said, ‘Shit, this is a real yogi’. He said, ‘Come to see me, I will give you the mantra’. I was starstruck for a moment. I got in the limousine - I’m a superstar, I’ve got a limousine – I light a joint and I say to myself, ‘I’m gonna go and see this guy’. But I was starstruck for a moment.
What was your first job?
Washing dishes in St Ives, which is a bohemian seaside town where all the painters and the artists and the singers and the songwriters went and I had to go there when I left home. My main job, I felt, was that ‘I’m getting £2.10 a week and I’ll be able to buy some strings for my guitar’.
What’s the secret to a happy relationship?
It’s very simple, you have to attract your soulmate. But everybody thinks a soulmate is somebody you look for, but in actual fact you can’t look, you have to find each other. If you look, that’s the worst thing, you’ll never find her. But how do you find her? Well, each of you has to have not just the same interests but there’s a deeper level and it’s to do with meditation. The word soulmate, you have to understand what soul is, it’s that part of you you can contact, if you want to, and you need meditation to do it.
Do you mind getting older?
No. Mark Twain said ‘Getting old is an issue of mind over matter, if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter’.
What’s your greatest regret?
I’ve got no regrets. With meditation, it helps but I already knew before meditation that there is no past to regret and the future is like the past: it doesn’t exist yet, so really there’s only now.
What’s the secret to a long life?
Plant-based food, that’s the answer. Historically, it’s McCartney and I, when they said to him, ‘Hey, you look OK, what are you doing’ and he said, ‘I’m vegetarian’. ‘Oh, Donovan’s a vegetarian too, is there something in it we should know?’. It was considered freaky to be a vegetarian and when you went to a restaurant and had to order something, it would be pasta and a tomato, but not a balanced one. In those early days, it was impossible to get a vegetarian meal, unless you got it at home. The body uses up so much energy bringing down meats and fats, it wears out the body, so long life means the least amount of work the body has to do – and I never liked steak – but now and again I can’t help it, I have to have a bit of fish.
Which talent would you most like to have?
I’ve already got it. When I was young and I heard Buddy Holly and I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing?!’ I was already writing poetry and I got very excited about, ‘How do you do this?’ and I very quickly realised I had a talent for words and poems and then I picked up the guitar and found I really loved that. At 16 and 17, as I really got going on the guitar, I realised I already had the talent so I did need one now, I have it, it’s here… come to Richmond and hear it onstage, October 12th!
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
It should be what I’ve achieved but I realised that, as a catalyst, that what I suggested with what to do with blending and fusing styles of music, how one can write in a popular song words that are not just ‘I love you, why’d you make me blue?’. That you could put material that was helpful for millions of young people into one song and one chorus. I didn’t know what to call that achievement, but I worked it out when George Harrison said, ‘Donovan is a catalyst’. A catalyst can put two things together and create something completely different.
The greatest achievement was that first I realised I was a catalyst and then second, that’s it much better not to tell people what you’re giving them to possibly achieve, it’s best they don’t know it’s happening at the time. To be a conscious catalyst is a huge achievement. Being a catalyst, I’ve helped multiple possible changes for various important artists in the world, but it’s best to go, ‘Ssh, I didn’t do it, you guys did it.’ But some of them have to come to me and tell me, ‘You were my catalyst’.
One of the ones was David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. He said, ‘You know I bought your cottage?’ I said, ‘Yeah? Why’d you buy my cottage?’ and he said, ‘You wrote all those bloody songs there’. One song on Sunshine Superman was called Three King Fishers and he said, ‘When I heard that song, my future with the band I was with, which I suppose was Floyd, I knew my direction from one of your songs’. That’s the effect of a catalyst but I didn’t even know that until he told me. And he didn’t know he bought my cottage. He said, ‘Maybe all that happened there would rub off on me’. A catalyst is a strange animal… a human animal… me.
Talking Led Zeppelin. Robert Plant and I, we started chatting about what happened, he was gone from Zeppelin and all that. He said to me one night, ‘You know I bought your 1965 Aston Martin’, just like David said. I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I thought it was cos it was so beautiful, you had a headlining put in it and it was custom made’. I said, ‘But what was the real reason?’. He said, ‘Maybe you wrote a couple of songs in that car’.
My two daughters fell in love with Shaun and Paul Ryder of the Happy Mondays. I was in a gig with Linda’s boy Julian, who’s Brian Jones’ son, and Julian was roadie’ing me on an acoustic tour. After the show, he said there’s somebody at the back door with a van and they’re from Manchester. I said, ‘What do they want?’ He said, ‘They want to capture you and take you to the Hacienda’. This is the 80s. I said, ‘Why?’ ‘They’re not telling’. I said, ‘Some other day’. I finally do go and hang with them and Shaun says, ‘You know I stole your song Sunshine Superman and I’m not giving you any fookin’ royalties’. I said, ‘That’s OK, you can take my melody, it’s terribly OK, it’s OK you took the song because I am a catalyst but you just nicked it, why did you do that?’. He said, ‘When we were nine, me and Paul and the band, we were thieves all over Manchester’, and he was in my room at the time when he told me this. After a while, when we got high, they were leaving and Bez has got a fucking screwdriver and he’s taking off the fucking door handles in my first class hotel room. Another one of them is trying to take a picture off the wall. I said, ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’. ‘Ah, it’s an old habit, we were thieves when we were young’. I said, ‘Stop it, leave that stuff alone, I don’t want to get into trouble.’ ‘Alright’. And then Shaun said, ‘Sorry I stole your song’ and I said, ‘It’s OK, it’s free, you can have it’. Linda said the Happy Mondays were the Rolling Stones of the 80s, there’s no question about it, they just went out there and went, ‘Watch this’.
So being a catalyst has very many different ways. My greatest achievement is that they all want a bit of what I do. That’s OK.