50 years on, Donovan still the ‘Sunshine Superman’
Half a century ago, he was a broke teenage hippie, sitting cross-legged on the floor, writing songs in a London apartment.
Donovan never dreamed about touring the world 50 years later, celebrating the anniversary of his first No. 1 hit, “Sunshine Superman.”
“We were Bohemians in the music world. We didn’t think about future. Fifty years? We didn’t know what we were doing next Tuesday,” Donovan said. “I come from an Irish and Scot family. We have always been wanderers. It was very common for a 16- or 17-year-old to leave home like I did.”
Donovan will be at Cullen Theater in Wortham Center on Sept. 21, still sitting crosslegged on the floor, just him and an acoustic guitar, performing “Sunshine Superman” and other memorable hits, including “Catch the Wind,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” “Atlantis,” “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” “Mellow Yellow” and many others.
He will do the songs and tell stories about what was happening back in the ’60s when he wrote them.
His first single, “Catch the Wind,” almost didn’t happen and wouldn’t have happened if Donovan had listened to the men who ran show business in 1965.
“I was on a show called ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ which aired on Friday nights in England. The whole country stopped to watch it. I was on, even though I didn’t have a record contract. I was doing Woody Guthrie songs. I was on for three weeks in a row. I was the only performer who sang live. Everybody else, the Hollies, the Animals, they all mimed to a recording,” Donovan said.
“After three weeks, a record company called and asked for ‘the kid with the curly hair and the guitar.’ The executive said, ‘We want you to record an American song called ‘We Will Sing in the Sunshine.’ I said no, I wouldn’t do that. I did have a song I was working on. I finished ‘Catch the Wind’ in a couple of hours. We recorded it. It went on the charts, and about two weeks later, I met Linda.”
Linda Lawrence was the exgirlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. It’s the 50th anniversary tour of “Sunshine Superman.” It’s Donovan and Linda’s golden anniversary, too.
“I realize that I was writing ‘Catch the Wind’ about a girl I hadn’t yet met. It turned out that Linda was the ‘Catch the Wind’ girl.” To feel you all around me, And to take your hand along the sand,
Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.
Donovan said the song is about a girl, but the “poetry is from my father.”
“Poetry is spoken quite naturally among the Irish and the Scots. When I was growing up in Glasgow, my father read poetry and ballads to us. It was very natural for the family to get together, clear out the living room except for a chair in the middle, and we’d take turns either singing a song or telling a story or reading poetry. I come from that tradition.”
After “Catch the Wind” hit the charts, Donovan “couldn’t stop writing songs — three a day.”
“Some of ‘Sunshine Superman’ came from comic books, the Superman and Green Lantern lines. But the superman is really part of Bohemian philosophy, of expanding your consciousness. Jimmy Page, who later created Led Zeppelin, is on the recording on ‘Sunshine Superman.’ He was just playing sessions then. I paid him $6 for the session and $2 cab fare.”
While I had Donovan on the phone, I had to ask. I’ve always heard that Paul McCartney is on “Mellow Yellow” and that’s him saying “quite rightly” after you say, “They call me Mellow Yellow.” True?
“Partly. Paul is on the recording, but he’s only singing background. That’s my voice saying ‘quite rightly.’ Paul just happened to be in the studio that day and pitched in.”
Donovan and the Beatles go way back.
During their 1968 trip to India to see the Maharishi, Donovan showed Paul McCartney and John Lennon a style of guitar picking called clawhammer. That’s Paul doing it on “Blackbird” and John on “Julia.”
“One day, Paul came over to my apartment and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Writing songs.’ So we sat on the floor and showed each other what we were working on. That was very common back then. Paul had a song about ‘Miss Daisy Hawkins.’ It went something like ‘Ola Na Tungee, blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay.’ That later became ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ He also was working on a song about a yellow submarine. He was missing a line and I said, “Sky of blue, sea of green.’ Paul said, ‘That’ll do.’ We all helped each other.”
During that visit, there was a knock on the door. It was a cop, about to write a ticket for the Aston Martin parked illegally out front.
“Paul came around to the door, and the cop recognized him. He asked Paul if that was his car. Paul said yes. The car with the radio left on and disturbing the neighborhood? Yes. The car parked with one tire on the sidewalk? Yes. You know that’s illegal, right? Yes.
“Then the cop said, ‘Well, Mr. McCartney, if you’ll give me the keys, I’ll go turn down the radio and park the car legally for you.’ He then saluted Paul! I turned to Paul and asked, ‘Is that the way it is?’ Paul said, ‘That’s the way it is.’ The Beatles were royalty in England — everywhere in the world.”
One of Donovan’s more unusual hits was “Atlantis,” a spoken-word recitation of Plato’s fable about a lost continent. Disc jockeys flipped the single, originally the B-side of an antiVietnam War song, “To Susan on the West Coast Waiting,” and “Atlantis” became a smash, a flower-power anthem.
“That was me telling a story, like in my family’s living room. At the time, the only spokenword record was ‘MacArthur Park’ — ‘Somebody left a cake out in the rain,’ that one. The record company didn’t think it would be a hit because I speak most of it, then the chorus of ‘Way down below the ocean, where I want to be, she may be.’ Those are the only lyrics sung, and it does go on a while, most of the record, in fact.”
Donovan was inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, and to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2014.