Revisiting the Songs of the Prince of Flower Power
In this era of dread and anxiety, as we resist the anti-intellectual forces of the far-right, might we turn back to a spirit guide from the flower-power era?
In the brilliant Hulu dramedy “Reservation Dogs” the lead male character, Bear Smallhill (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), is flummoxed about his life and purpose and grappling to find his, well, bearings (sorry), as a young man without a father to help guide him. In the course of the series, he is periodically visited — often to his chagrin — by a warrior spirit guide (Dallas Goldtooth) who is keen and goofy and full of charisma. He whoops and sings and advises and eventually admits to Bear that all he is allowed to provide are aphorisms.
As parents (and grandparents), we tend to not have access to warrior spirit guides, but we can choose to turn our beloved young children on to books and music that might provide solace and even some subtle guidance. As for music, I’m not talking Mozart in utero, though I have no qualms about that; our two daughters were greeted into this world by the sounds of Beethoven (Piano Concerto 5, Adagio) and Schubert (Piano Sonata in A, Rondo). Studies show that students who have gone to preschool do much better later on; likewise, with books and music, parents can create a great cultural preschool for their sons and daughters.
It’s what far-right extremists in the United States who want to clamp down on human rights fear the most: knowledgeable and empathic young citizens.
In the midst of our national mental health crisis, caused by a pandemic and a criminal ex-president that a chunk of our population never wanted to view with any clarity, all of us could use a spirit guide, especially those of us who don’t particularly cotton to an American Christianity that devolved into the MAGA Church of the Prosperity Gospel and the Culture Wars and that is now encroaching on our rights, to control our own bodies or to read the books we want to read or to study history that gives us perspective on what actually happened.
Recently, it occurred to me that, beyond the glorious, almost entirely positive music of the Beatles, their good friend Donovan could act as a spirit guide of sorts — for younger children and the child that is still in all of us. Beyond the positive messages in his songs (about the environment, the slipperiness of happiness, the often fraught nature of love, about treating others with dignity), by getting groovy again we would be having some fun, which was always part of the appeals of the hippy generation, as they strove to maintain a balance in order to keep protesting the war in Vietnam and Cambodia and began fighting for the environment.
I had these thoughts while embarking on creating a playlist of Donovan’s songs. I didn’t know much about the Scottish (and English) singer/songwriter and mystical Celtic bard. I was merely a long-ago fan who had very much enjoyed seeing him play live once. Listening to him again not only brought a smile to my face, it reminded me that his music helped shape me as a person and my worldview. (Yeah, really.)
I knew much of the music but little of the man. What I did know was mostly what I’d gleaned through reading about him in the orbit of the Beatles (in particular he befriended Paul McCartney). He was present at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, in early 1968 to study transcendental meditation when the Beatles arrived a few weeks into the course. While there he taught John Lennon how to finger-pick his acoustic guitar (something Paul also began to learn in his own way), which became a seminal moment in Beatles history, as it led to a number of beautiful songs being composed. He provided a naturally Donovanean line for “Yellow Submarine” (“Sky of blue and sea of green”). It has long been said that you can hear Paul singing or laughing or whispering or shouting on the 1967 hit “Mellow Yellow,” but this would seem the definitive account of his involvement (except Donovan himself has a different story, that Paul is indeed in the mix).
Here’s what happened to start me in with Donovan. Down with my second bout of COVID, I found myself inspired after re-watching the 1999 Alexander Payne film “Election,” with its lovely use of one of Donovan’s sweetest songs. I set out to pull together a 50-song Donovan playlist on Spotify (I had recently done the same with the work of Paul Simon and Loudon Wainwright III). At first, I thought it might be difficult to find that many worthy songs, but the problem turned out to be the opposite; there were far too many good songs.
I thought I knew his music pretty well, but I found that there were fertile periods early on for Donovan of which I knew only the hits. The Dunning-Kruger Effect was perhaps a bit in play here, and I realized I was somewhere up on “Mount Stupid,” as we all are when we are overly enthusiastic about how much we understand something. As Donovan wrote in “There Is a Mountain,” alluding to Buddhist saying about the path to enlightenment, “First there is a mountain/then there is no mountain/then there is,” which is a perfect description of that effect.
Many poets and philosophers have said that superficial knowledge is the cause of our misery as human beings, the most famous being a couple of lines in “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” So, I started in listening to, and reading about, Donovan and (in Dunning-Kruger terms) walked happily down into the valley beyond Mount Stupid until the foothills of enlightenment at least came into view.
Digging in deep with any subject these days feels like a protest of sorts. And I was enjoying the heck out of this research. You may want to stop reading here because I got pretty obsessive with my listening. Enthusiastic? Self-indulgent? Where exactly is the line?
I didn’t want to create just a rundown of personal favorites from years of hearing this music when I was younger, starting with some of the pop singles we would hear on the radio and then my sister’s frequent playing of the “Barabajagal” album, when I was about 12 and up to “Cosmic Wheels,” “Essence to Essence,” and “7-Tease,” when I was a bit older and buying my own records. As I was still listening to Donovan, his music was competing with the work of mainstream rock (the solo Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel) and glam rock acts (T. Rex, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople), various prog rock outfits, and even emerging punk rock groups. (It should be noted that Donovan himself, like his old pal Brian Jones, was a bit glam; he knew and advised the young Marc Bolan.)
I dug into various contemporaneous accounts and reviews, including in the pages of Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. The reliably acerbic and always entertaining Robert Christgau summarily dismissed Donovan’s work in the 1970s, but his one-time critical colleague David Fricke wrote, in “The 40 Essential Albums of 1967” that the “Mellow Yellow” album was filled with “gently magnificent introspection.” I read current views of Donovan’s discography in sources like the AllMusic Guide, which also handily suggests selected songs, some of which I found to my taste.
What would be your quintessential Donovan song? It’s difficult for me to pick one because, after he finished what many critics considered his Dylan apprenticeship (it was much more complicated than that, with other influences that Robert Zimmerman, 5 years older than Donovan Leitch, also shared, largely Woody Guthrie) and found his own voice, they are nearly all quintessential Donovan, by which I mean poetic and quirky and tremulous and trippy and, well, like no one else.
Were I to pick one today, it might be “Oh, Gosh,” which was first heard in December 1967 on “A Gift From a Flower to a Garden,” which AllMusic’s Bruce Eder calls “[r]ock music’s first two-LP box set.” With its English (or Scottish) whimsy and insistence on our seeing just how, well, far out life is if one only takes the time to consider, the song provides a mysterious hopeful promise:
With the future safely dreamed of
And his kisses on your brow
Be only rest assured peace is coming
To think upon love that is fair
To look upon and to touch
Oh, gosh
Life is really too much (life is really too much)
You’ll see
Or I might choose “Happiness Runs,” a track from Donovan’s 1969 “Barabajagal” album, with backing vocals on the round provided by Graham Nash, singer-songwriter Lesley Duncan, and Michael McCartney (Paul’s brother). Originally titled “Pebble and the Man,” you can hear an early version of the song from his 1967 concert in Anaheim, California. One thing that strikes me now is that the ephemeral nature of happiness expressed in the song links nicely to the famous Keats poem “Ode on Melancholy,” where we find the deathless “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/Bidding adieu.” Really, one can imagine the young Donovan Leitch soaking in such Keatsean iambic pentameter:
She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine
When no one is around, sing that to yourself in the best Donovanean vibrato you can muster, and you’ll realize that he could have covered that poem straight up — part of the joy of listening to Donovan is that he does not flinch at singing such words as “adieu” and “nigh” (as well as tra-la-la-ing, and the like, whenever the spirit so takes him). Even as a young man I thought something along the lines of, “Okay, I’m digging how this guy is unafraid to do anything and stay close to his inner child.” Having such a realization would be good lesson for today’s young men, who are bearing a manufactured burden to “act like a man” with precisely zero guidance. Well, less than zero guidance, as the role models doing the most talking are terrible men.
And, oh, yes, happiness does run. Why-oh? Because. “Happiness runs in a circular motion/Falters like a little boat upon the sea/Everybody is a part of everything anyway/You can have everything if you let yourself be.” Critics like Christgau and Greil Marcus would likely call this fey silliness, but I find it lovely. They had the same problem with Donovan’s pal McCartney. And to paraphrase that guy, perhaps the world needs more fey silliness from time to time. Of course, one could speculate that the critics’ dismissals of his work may have helped to push McCartney to experiment, with Youth, as The Fireman and to produce other late-career gems like “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard,” “Memory Almost Full,” and “New.”
In his overview of “Fairytale” on AllMusic, John Bush waves a dismissive hand at the media’s early label of Donovan as “Britain’s answer to Dylan,” noting he shared “a sense of impressionism pioneered by Dylan, but Donovan flipped Dylan’s weariness on its head. His persona is the wistful hippie poet, continually moving on down the road, but never bitter about the past.”
In his autobiography, Donovan writes that transcendental meditation gave purpose to his songwriting. But even before his fateful visit to India, he was already aesthetically in sympathy with the non-violent flower-power movement against the Vietnam War (he had covered Buffy St. Marie’s “Universal Soldier”) and materialism in general. Take, for instance, “Turquoise” from his second album, “Fairytale,” with the lyric: “Take my hand/as you would a flower.”
In a heavy world, his lightness was more than welcome. Hearing it again amid our largely manufactured political and cultural strife (think of Steve Bannon’s determination to “flood the zone with shit” in order to cripple the media for Trump and thereby unravel our democracy), I find myself drawn to it, an antidote of sorts to something vile, toxic. And much of Donovan’s music could be a happy and meaningful salve for young people. He wrote an entire album for children called “HMS Donovan,” but many other songs are also childlike and would be appropriate for kids of various ages.
I’ve mentioned a few of my favorite songs. What about the rest? I won’t put you through my takes on all the music I selected, partly because that would put off the merely interested reader and partly because the list is still shifting as I hear more live material or a song insinuates itself back into my mind and I wonder how I could have ever been so dull as to cut it. But here are some thoughts, and things I learned, about a dozen of them:
Atlantis: A hit from the “Barabajagal” album (1969). In the U.K., it was the A-side (with “I Love My Shirt” as the B). For the 1970 U.S. release of the first single from the album, “To Susan on the West Coast Waiting” was featured, with “Atlantis” relegated to the B-side because it was thought it was not “radio-friendly.” The story goes that U.S. and Australian disc jockeys flipped the disc and liked the B-side better, and the song became a big hit — so big that director Martin Scorsese used it as shorthand for the year 1970 in the film “GoodFellas,” which, I suppose, is a huge compliment, but it was tied to the most violent scene in the film, which may have served as Scorsese’s commentary about the contrast between the hippie world and the real world on the mean streets. In any case, our daughters always loved this one.
I Like You: This pretty track, from “Cosmic Wheels” (1973), became a minor FM hit. Donovan’s vocals are particularly well recorded. I never could resist those female “la, la, la’s.” My wife and I saw Donovan play live, at the American Theatre in St. Louis (or at least we think we did; I can find no history of it or any review) when he was on his tour to support the album, and I remember smiling as we walked in and saw, placed downstage center, a large Turkish pillow and a microphone on a short stand. It was a great concert, and I remember the title track and this song particularly well.
Jennifer Juniper: Written while crushing on Jenny Boyd, younger sister of Patti (both of whom were in Rishikesh), this sprightly arranged song is lyrically spare and beautiful: “Is she dreaming?/Yes, I think so./Is she pretty?/Yes, ever so./Whatcha doing, Jennifer, my love?” The younger Boyd would not end up with Donovan (she called his wooing “courtly”) but she would title her 2020 memoir for the song. The song was well used in “Election,” in a montage where a young woman (brilliantly portrayed by — I’m sad to just now learn — the late Jessica Campbell, who, as it happens, attended the same high school as our daughters) finds her bliss in having to attend an all-girls’ Catholic school. Is this song a delight? Yes, ever so.
Sunny Goodge Street: Is it just me that hears Nick Drake on this track, which appeared on Donovan’s second album, “Fairytale” (1965)? Certainly, there’s no Nick Drake-ish open-tuned guitar work (or perhaps there is; I don’t know enough), but the sound of the vocals and the arrangement remind me of what Drake and his arranger, Robert Kirby, and producer Joe Boyd (who named his company Witchseason Productions, for the Donovan song) would be doing later while recording “Five Leaves Left” (1969) and “Bryter Layter” (1971), which decades later became two popular recordings. I decided to go with the live version, from the “In Concert [Live at Anaheim Stadium]” from 1967.
Ride-a-Mile: From the “7-Tease” album (1974), it might be considered a throw-away song to some, but it always hooked me. The song is sung by a character (who, of course, sounds quite like Donovan) who is mysteriously trapped, like a protagonist in an Edgar Allan Poe story, in a desolate house “full of doom/discontent in every room,” and who dreams of escape along a road he can see from a window. As Donovan sings the chorus, “I’m gonna ride on down those miles,” the piano plays down to a little fillip, a brumph, that I’ve always loved. Take out the hitchhiking, and this one might feel at home on the stunning “Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe,” the 1976 debut of The Alan Parson Project.
Hurdy Gurdy Man: In his autobiography (by that title), Donovan writes that George Harrison provided a final verse that was cut due to length consideration for the single and that both John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page played on this track just before the formation of Led Zeppelin. This hit song was ruined for my wife because of its use in the film “Zodiac,” but just ignore that because the song is great (and our daughters have always dug this one, too). Donovan wanted to give the song to Jimi Hendrix, but his producer at the time, Mickie Most, refused, recognizing it as a great single.
Where Is She: When I heard the songs of “Barabajagal” playing through my sister’s bedroom wall, I was 11 or 12 years old. The title track (subtitled “Love Is Hot”) and a number of other tracks (“Pamela Jo,” “Trude”), and this delicate one, spoke to the boy who was devoted to Susan Dey (and her real-life counterpart Susan Cowsill) and that woman on “Get Smart” and Emma Peel on “The Avengers” but didn’t quite know why. I mean, I knew it was about sex, but what was that really? At that tender age, it was all still somewhat inexplicable longing — hand-holding and kissing with my crushes Micah Jo Roseberry and Amy DeVore. “Where Is She,” indeed. In our era of grifters selling misogyny, Donovan wrote of innocent romantic love while also never shying away from expressions of natural lustfulness.
Honey Mouth: I’d never heard this one, a selection from a rarities album of 1970 demos and unreleased songs called “Buried Treasure 1.” A sweet little tune, with a lovely harmony.
The Ordinary Family: I’ll wager that you will find this on no other Donovan playlist, and (as our daughters are wont to say) I shan’t apologize. In fact, I love it even more now that I learn that all of “7-Tease” was intended as an autobiographical musical, with such lyrics:
When I was just a virgin lad,
my mother faked a suicide
because she found the tell-tale sign
of puberty upon the sheets.
So, I told her not to worry,
not to get in such a flurry;
we’re just an ordinary family,
with the usual calamity.
And the lyrics are pertinent to today’s so-called culture wars. “When I become a married man/with children of my very own/will I lay my inhibitions on/and criticize their sexuality?/Will I use them to protect ‘respect’?/Will I try to own them flesh and bone?”
Please Don’t Bend: The 1996 “Sutras” album was intended as a big comeback. As he had done a couple of years earlier for Johnny Cash, producer Rick Rubin set out to reintroduce Donovan to the public by recording him in spare arrangements with a focus on his voice. The album was critically praised but largely ignored. At the time, it reawakened my interest in Donovan’s music, and my enjoyment of it has not waned. I had to restrain myself to put only four songs from “Sutras” on the playlist.
Poorman’s Sunshine: This song is also from a hoped-for comeback album, 2004’s “Beat Cafe,” produced by John Chelew, who worked with many other artists he admired, including Richard Thompson, and won three Grammys producing Blind Boys of Alabama. Donovan turned to drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Danny Thompson to provide the beat in his recreation of a beatnik cafe with a simple quartet. (Donovan’s first record in the U.K., “What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid,” had only four musicians, and one was playing the kazoo.) The message here is simple, an incantation: Come out of the darkness and into the light/Come out of the blindness and into the sight.
The Dignity of Man: It’s often hard these days — almost laughable in the United States — to talk of the “dignity of man,” but in his own tumultuous times Donovan was wish-casting for all his listeners to consider our better, more enlightened selves. A lovely, anthemic song in which the phrase the dignity of man becomes a mantra:
Make a dream, dream weaver,
Full of hope and praise.
Sing of the joyful, sing of the joyful sadness
Of this human place.
Oh, gather all men’s wishes
Show them to be one.
We could use more of that thinking today when education, science and history are being attacked, conspiracy theories are in the air, and we are systematically being pulled apart by politicians to distract us from pressing issues and for their own political gain.
One needn’t reach for a gummy to fully inhabit this music. Donovan’s folk, jazz, rock, world music–inflected, often meditative work is the gummy. And that was his intent, to use his art to change consciousness.
And, sure, we know the jokes about flower-power music. Even the funny ones ignore (and undermine) the serious intent. As Donovan wrote in his autobiography: “Critics of my gentle approach to music were still missing the point. In contrast to the wild exuberance of rock and roll I was soothing with my songs. Peaceful music was needed then. Even more so now.”
As for your kids, there are many songs that will delight them. Maybe begin with “Happiness Runs” and “There Is a Mountain” and “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” and proceed from there, to “Riki Tiki Tavi,” “Mellow Yellow” and “Wear Your Love Like Heaven.” Years before the man he calls his spiritual brother, George Harrison, put out his box sets “All Things Must Pass” and “Concert for Bangladesh,” Donovan did it with “A Gift from a Flower to a Garden,” the second of the two albums being specifically “For Little Ones.”
I will return to this music, much as I do to great, beloved poems. And in the face of the climate change crisis and Republican intransigence about this country’s insane gun-fetish/toxic male culture, we need a regular dose of the flower-power reimagining of how we can best serve each other, the earth, and the younger people among us. As others have commented, we will never solve climate change without first achieving peace among countries, and peace on our streets (and schools and groceries and music venues and on and on in our true “American carnage”). And young people, especially boys and young men, ought to be turned more often to poetry and music to find relief. They need art, not the bloviations of “tough-guy” American know-nothing politicians (who seem to have deep issues themselves), to find their way in the world.
As the English playwright and poet William Congreve wrote: “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, to soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.” Can this musick he wrote of help us battle against rising fascism at home and abroad? One of Donovan’s (and Dylan’s) heroes, Woody Guthrie, sure thought so, and put the words on his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. (One can imagine that were Orwell writing his greatest novel today, Winston Smith might well covet a hidden copy of Shakespeare’s plays and listen with headphones to albums by Donovan.)
Working rather obsessively over a week or so on a playlist like this can render you a bit weary of the music you felt so engaged with. But I’m happy to have revisited Donovan, a true spirit guide, as keen, goofy, and full of charisma as the one I so enjoy on “Reservation Dogs.” I shall return for more lessons (likely soon, maybe later this afternoon, to tweak the list for the umpteenth time). But as Keats and Donovan told us, Joy is forever bidding adieu — and happiness runs. Children and younger people see how happiness runs and feel it especially keenly.
Perhaps no one has let them know they should sing about it.
You can hear “Donovan 50” on Spotify. (I cringe to use Spotify, knowing how absurdly stingy the company is with paying artists.) And, if you’re still reading, here’s an excellent explanation from the man himself of how it came to happen that he passed along his knowledge of guitar picking and chord structures to John, Paul, and George and how TM replaced sacred plants for him and benefited his life forever.
