'Masterpiece' - Scot blew the door of psychedelic revolution wide open

The Herald Scotland

31-05-2025

The Glasgow-born troubadour, whose mission was, in his own words, 'to bring poetic vision to popular music', began to make his name when, as yet unsigned, he appeared on the television show Ready Steady Go! in January 1965. On March 12 he sang his debut single, Catch the Wind, on TV, impressing a certain Little Steve Wonder, who was in the audience. The song zipped into the charts at number four, and continuing exposure on television and radio helped ensure that 'my name, my face and my music were in every home in Britain'.
America beckoned, and he found himself on the Ed Sullivan Show – the same show that had broken the Beatles in the USA, less than a year earlier. His refusal not to join the rest of the performers for a final bow at the end brought him to the attention of industry heavyweight Allen Klein, who rang the renowned record producer, Mickie Most, and recommended Donovan to him.
Donovan also toured Britain, where he was linked in the public mind with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the rising stars of folk music. A second single, Colours, reached the same chart position as Catch the Wind. His debut album, What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, was released in May, a few days after his 19th birthday; it peaked at number three in the charts.
Such sudden fame did not come without its critics, however. Some in the music press had sniped that Donovan was but a pale imitation of Dylan, but after Donovan had met Dylan in his room at London's Savoy Hotel, the American told Melody Maker: 'He played some songs to me. I like him. He's a nice guy'. So ended, the magazine reported, 'one of the biggest controversies that has ever split the British music scene'. One Savoy encounter, incidentally, was immortalised by D.A. Pennebaker for Dont Look Back, his documentary about Dylan's 1965 British tour; Donovan borrowed Dylan's guitar to play a song, To Sing for You; Dylan responded with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
Little could impede Donovan's rise. He played the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (the one in which Dylan famously 'went electric') and was feted in the States. He was friends with the Beatles (below), the Byrds and PJ Proby, was introduced to Paul Simon, had chart success with an EP featuring Buffy Saint-Marie's Universal Soldier, and took his first LSD trip. He had fallen in love, too, with a woman, Linda Lawrence, the former girlfriend of the Rolling Stones' guitarist Brian Jones, and mother to his son Julian.
The Beatles appeared on the same showA second Donovan album, Fairytale, was released in October 1965. It contained some of his finest songs: Colours, Sunny Goodge Street and Ballad of a Crystal Man, and a cover of Oh Deed I Do, the work of his fellow Scot, the brilliant pioneering guitarist, Bert Jansch.
In his memoir Donovan refers to the 'new way of seeing' that he was industriously developing at that time. He cites the lyrics to the jazz-fusion track, Sunny Goodge Street: 'I was describing the sub-culture emerging from the underground and the elusive search for the self. Two years before the beginning of 'Flower Power' and before the Beatles used the same refrain' he was singing … 'I tell you his name is/ Love, love, love''.
He also records that he 'felt the need to introduce key spiritual ideas' . [The album] set the scene for my performance as a 'Bard' who would present a way of seeing the wonder of the natural world. I was mocked as a simpleton, when I sang of birds and bees and flowers like a child. Indeed, I was keeping the 'wonder eye' open - just like a child'.
Among the many budding musicians who bought and loved Fairytale, here or in the States, was a young man in Indiana named John Mellencamp.
The year 1965 had not quite finished with Donovan: in December, at Abbey Road studios, he began work on his 'experimental' third album, Sunshine Superman, with producer Mickie Most and the noted arranger John Cameron. Most, Donovan writes, 'realised I was hearing sounds which came from many sources: classical, jazz, ethnic, medieval minstrelsy, and he saw the potential for a veritable new fusion of music, a 'world music' sound, before this term was thought of'.
Read more
The album itself was a clever blend of folk music and some of the first psychedelia to ever be committed to vinyl. Musicians such as the double bass player Danny Thompson guested on the album. Shawn Phillips, a Texan musician, contributed sitar.
By this time, Donovan's relationship with Linda, who was living thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, was looking uncertain. The title track (on which Jimmy Page, then a session guitarist, played) was the first song to emerge from his oppressive fog of sorrow. When Most heard it in the studio, he instinctively knew that it would be a hit single. He was right: it went to number two in the charts towards the end of 1966.
The second track, Legend of a Girl Child Linda, saw Donovan finger-picking his acoustic guitar in front of an orchestra. 'We certainly broke the mould of pop music – and folk music, for that matter', he recalls in Hurdy Gurdy Man. '…There were no songs like mine to compare with. It was all new directions, uncharted seas'.
Donovan continued to write songs for the new album in the new year of 1966. Linda appeared in most of the songs on one guise or another, including the gorgeous track, Celeste. Its aching lyric, Donovan notes, said he was disillusioned with everything. One striking line – 'I intend to come right through them all with you' – was in one respect about the changes his generation was encountering but at a deeper level was a song to Linda.
In February he enjoyed another turning-point in his career when he headlined at New York's prestigious Carnegie Hall, accompanied by Phillips on sitar and 12-string guitar. It was the first time that a Western pop audience had witnessed the former instrument on a stage.
Donovan writes entertainingly of his adventures in the States that year as he finished work on the new album in LA. 'This much I knew then: I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation. I was here to do this … I felt the spirit move within me. I knew that this album would be my masterpiece'.
When the album was released in the States in September, the LA Times's Pete Johnson said: 'Donovan, a very talented, if unearthly, writer and singer of folk songs, croons 10 songs to form an album follow-up to his very popular single record, 'Sunshine Superman'. The LP does not fulfill the promise of his single, but it supplies a good measure of his soft understated singing of the medieval-modern, dream-reality mystical imagery.
'The best tracks', Johnson added, 'are 'Sunshine Superman', 'The Trip', 'Season of the Witch', 'Legend of a Girl Child Linda' and 'The Fat Angel'. Like many other singers, Donovan has fallen under the spell of Indian music, which provides structure for most of his non-rock songs'.
For business-related reasons the album did not go on sale in the UK until June 1967. It reached 25 in the album charts, someway short of the exalted number-one status it enjoyed in many countries across the world. Melody Maker wrote that "every number has a mood, an atmosphere, a current along which the perceptive listener can float. Donovan glides playing beautiful guitar and singing his songs like they should be sung - with love'.
Much lay ahead of Donovan, including a sold-out January 1967 headline appearance at at the Royal Albert Hall, his continuing involvement with the Beatles, his lasting popularity in the States and elsewhere, his 1968 masterwork – the double album box-set, Gift From a Flower to a Garden – and bestselling singles such as Mellow Yellow, Jennifer Juniper and Hurdy Gurdy Man.
In a recent interview with Mojo magazine, John Cameron, Donovan's arranger and collaborator, reflected: 'The amount of work we did between '66 and '70 was phenomenal, we had a string section that rode motorbikes. They'd be on Yamahas with their Strads [violins] strapped to their backs, going from studio to studio. It was the only way they'd get from one to the other on time'.
Donovan himself reconnected with Linda, and they were married in October 1970. Having done everything he had wanted to do, he then took a decisive step back from the industry. New records followed, but his time in the cultural spotlight was over.
Read more On the Record
Interviewed by Mojo magazine's Sylvie Simmons in 1996, to promote his 'comeback' album, Sutras, which was produced by Rick Rubin, Donovan explained: "If I can do a thumbnail sketch of 20 years, around about 1970 I had achieved everything I could have possibly dreamed of and much more.
"Having been at the top of the ladder, there was nowhere else to go. So I walked onto a British Airways jet in Tokyo and out of a tax plan called a drop-out year where I was going to earn more millions of dollars than any young solo artist of his time. It had ended. I didn't burn out, I wasn't a drug addict, but I was wounded in some way, and I came home to my cottage in England.... I married Linda, my great love and teenage muse — four years of '60s madness had kept us apart — and I walked away from fame, the Rolls Royce, the yacht, the mansion.
"We went to Joshua Tree in the California desert for much of the '70s and brought up the children up as an alternative family... But something was happening while I wasn't watching. In the '80s, things were getting very dark, the earth was wounded, and I felt dispirited. In '83 I stopped making records completely, I had a personal crisis, musical crisis, and Linda saw me through it. I came out around 1990.
"A new impulse got me... I'd gone into the studio and started recording these song ideas... Rick Rubin had been in the studio with Tom Petty, who was playing one of my songs. Rick says, 'I love Donovan, I've always wanted to record him'. Tom says, 'Why don't you phone him up?'. So he did. We met and we found similarities extraordinarily alike."
Speaking to Record Collector magazine in January 2024, he said: 'When I started singing, the message was in the song. The revolution was on. The important part was giving young people a shock in that there were different things to talk about in songs, other than, 'I love you, why'd you make me blue?' This was important'
In the same interview he noted: 'I think my songwriting was very influential. Breaking all the rules and experimenting in the studio was encouraging to others'.
Things came full circle in a way in 2102, when Donovan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by none other than John Mellencamp. Donovan was introduced as the man who "blew the door of the psychedelic revolution wide open".
Recalling the first time he had bought a Donovan album, in 1965, Mellencamp told the audience: 'I was in the seventh grade, and back then we waited for every record and I waited for every album to come out so that I could learn to play those songs. I wasn't just listening to Donovan, I was living Donovan. I was stealing all the s— from Donovan'.
A few moments later, to applause and cheers, he held up his original, much-played copy of Donovan's second album, Fairytale. The word 'Mellencamp' was etched in ink along the top of the cover.
'See how it says Mellencamp?' he said. 'In Indiana, we used to use these things like money. If you didn't have any money, you would sell this for a dollar and a half or trade it for two Led Zeppelin records and then they'd trade it back. You always wanted to keep track of your stuff. That's why I have my name all over it'.
* Donovan is marking his 60th year as a recording artist with a week of events in Paris between June 1 and 7. Website: donovan.ie