Grip Monthly's own Brian Greene met with the esteemed Mr. Donovan Leitch at an Alexandria, Va. hotel room before the "Mellow Yellow" man's appearance at the Birchmere on Mar. 6, 1997. Donovan presented Brian with a set of Official Donovan Sutras wind chimes that he was giving away to "friends met along the way," and talked at some length about his classic days of creating hippy-dippy hits like "Sunshine Superman" and "Catch the Wind," the most recent "Sutras" album (produced painstakingly by Rick Rubin over a three-year period), and about that magical day he rediscovered his muse and walked away from super-stardom.
Grip Monthly: You just opened your American tour a few nights ago in New York-- how did that go?
Donovan: We had a great show. It was at the Symphony Space, which holds about 800 seats, and it sold out. There were a lot of friends, old and new, and the new songs were received very well. The concert was classic songs first, then I introduced my "Sutras," then it was back to classic songs. There was a special part of the show where I sat cross-legged, like I used to do the '60's, and presented songs in the Ravi Shankar style. It went very well, thanks.
Grip: You say the audience seemed to enjoy the new songs as well as your classics?
Donovan: Yes, and I was very pleased by that. It's been happening that way since I finished the album in October, on some of the presentations I've made of the new material. It's very similar to my earlier material, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Grip: Had you been writing songs before Rick Rubin first approached you three years ago?
Donovan: Yes, but not as intensely. Once the project began, I started writing daily. I wrote a hundred songs over a period of a year and a half.
Grip: I know Rick Rubin worked with you very closely-- did the nature of the songs start to change once you got with him?
Donovan: What you hear is 14 songs, so there's 86 songs that you haven't heard. It was basically the same process of songwriting as I've always used. In fact, of the other 86 there are some that you might recognize as similar to "Jennifer Juniper" and "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and "Sunshine Superman." There was jazz, folk. . . fusions. So, the songwriting revolved around the same themes as I've always been concerned with. But, then, it was different, because Rick wanted to make a mature voice of me, the now me.
Grip: Going back a bit, when you came out with the "Sunshine Superman" LP in 1966, you made a big jump, lyrically but also musically. How much of the musical jump had to do with you working with producer Mickie Most (one of the top U.K. producers of the era)?
Donovan: Well, I was already in the change. If you noticed from the "Fairy Tale" record there was one song, "Sunny Goodge Street," which I wrote before I met Mickie, which showed that a change was happening in my music. It was going away from the folk scene and into jazz, and into the mystical. From that song I realized that I could fuse these elements, and I thought, "this is extraordinary. Now I want to fuse many different elements." And of course Mickie put the pop element into it-- he made the singles. But, then, I was already a 'singles' kind of guy by then.
Grip: Could you compare your experiences in working with Most and with Rick Rubin?
Donovan: Well, I rate Rick with the greats. With Phil Spector, with George Martin, with Mickie Most. All the great producers that love songs. And Rick Rubin gives me the impression that he's more like a '50's or '60's producer than an '80's or '90's producer. He's not really high-tech, or (into) Digital. He likes tape. In fact, he's played my records to his other artists through his whole career, saying, "that's how a voice should sound. That's how a guitar, and a bass and drums should sound." So, here was a guy who impressed me immensely with his attention to the songs.
Grip: Is there talk of you doing another album with him down the line?
Donovan: I hope so, but I don't know. After he made this record with me he said he didn't want to do one with anyone else. So you can take that a couple of ways. You can take it that perhaps he's changing his job (laughs), or perhaps he realized that he'd done everything, once he made my record with me. So I don't quite know whether we can do another one. But I think maybe we can-- he did do a second album with Johnny Cash ("Unchained"), with a band.
Grip: There's some guest musicianship on "Sutras." You worked with Dave Navarro, and a couple of the Heartbreakers-- were you comfortable working with these guys?
Donovan: Yeah, sure. The first person I ever had play with me was Danny Thompson, and he played beautifully. Danny Thompson on the concert bass-- he knows how to play with a singer-songwriter. So when Rick asked who I wanted to play with I said, 'Danny' and he said 'right,' so we had Danny on seven songs. Then it became difficult for Rick, because we tried playing with an ensemble he put together, but he felt when I played these songs by myself, acoustically, they were much more powerful. He liked it "in your face" as he called it. So we recorded umpteen versions of many different songs in this personal, solo way, and then we would add things. He brought in Benmont Tench, and when I heard him I thought, 'he knows how to play with a singer-songwriter.' And of course he had, with Tom Petty and Dylan and others. He plays just the right amount of notes, which is difficult. Then, when Dave Navarro put in the electric sitar and the backup vocal, I was very happy with that. And I was very comfortable with the two musicians from the band Spain we worked with. Those guys play in this low-key tempo, which is kind of Leonard Cohen or J.J. Cale on downers. So they were great to have on the three songs we used them on. And the two cellists and Tom Petty's drummer-- they were all great.
Grip: Backing up again, after having a string of hits in the mid-to-late '60's, did you find it more relieving or distressing to be out of the limelight in the '70's and '80's?
Donovan: Well, it could have continued, but I walked away. It wasn't like I fell off the perch or anything. I was doing world tours up until '74, big ones. But by 1970 I had achieved everything that I could have possibly achieved. There was nowhere else to go. Thirteen Top 20 singles, five Gold albums, Madison Square Garden, Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House. . . and I was never really an entertainer with a capital "E." I didn't start out to entertain, really. I never wanted to end up in Vegas or have my own television show, that wasn't the idea at all. The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, which was my obsession and my compulsion when I was 16 years old. So, behind all of this fame and fortune, there was a seeker, on a spiritual path-- a young man who wanted to discover and share with others an alternative way of looking at the world. I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it. And there was the Buddhist way, and the Celtic way. I found myself at the top of the the ladder, with everything, but with one thing missing: that one thing was a companion. Because, it's cliche to say, but nothing really means anything in the end unless you're really doing what you want to do, and. . . I walked off a huge world tour, with a yacht and television specials, and record deals, and film deals. I walked away and my whole thing collapsed. I shocked my business world and walked back to my cottage, which I had been renting to two American girls. One of them was Cynthia, and I stayed with her for two days, then her friend Lori came back from Clapton's house, where there had been a party going on for almost a week. Lori came in with another friend, and it was Linda, my Sunshine Supergirl from 1965 whom I'd written all my songs for. We hadn't married then, because she had a child with Brian Jones and wasn't ready for another relationship. And it was good that we didn't marry back then, because my four years of '60's fame would have wrecked the marriage. But we met again, and I went away from fame and into the arms of my muse, my lover, and then my wife, and then the mother of my children. So the '70's, to me, were my family. But I also became a kind of studio animal and made nine albums. And they weren't as successful as my stuff from the '60's, but that's because I wouldn't really get behind them. Then the '80's came along and I made three more albums, and that made 26. And then I stopped.
Grip: Would you be up to going back out into the limelight now, if you could have a big single again?
Donovan: I don't think there's a big single on ("Sutras"), but I was never really sure what could and couldn't be a hit single. "Please Don't Bend" will be released as a single, but I'm not sure if it will be super successful. But if it is I'll be very pleased and I'll do more concerts. Because I still carry with me the same themes as always-- I'm still compelled to present mystic ideas, which was why Rick Rubin wanted to record me. And so, here I am, back with a new record, which may or may not become a success.
Grip: Looking back one last time, you said something in the liner notes to your 1968 album, "A Gift From a Flower to a Garden," which must have surprised a lot of people at the time, which was to make an anti-drug statement. My question about that comes in two parts: first, do you still hold to that, do you still think young people shouldn't experiment with drugs at all? And secondly, do you think you would have reached the spiritual plane that you have if you had never tried drugs?
Donovan: Up to '67, the drugs were, uh, soft. Marijuana, and even LSD, I considered soft drugs then. But, then, after '67, needle drugs and the strong amphetamines came in, and that's when the Beatles and Donovan stood up and said, 'Try meditation instead.' And I still stick by that, of course. You've got to be very, very careful. I'm talking about naive days, before the drug barons and the dealers took over. It was once a small, bohemian event. But it was when millions started wanting to get high that it got bad. And when Haight-Asbury turned into Skid Row, the Beatles and me stood up and said, 'Give it a rest.' The answer is that each individual must face the problem by himself. And meditation is an alternative. Meditation is a lot better for you, and it's great to be straight. To your second question: drugs didn't make the spiritual experience for me. But in the shamans of the pagan tribes, mushrooms were a ceremony. Tobacco, marijuana, alcohol and mushrooms were holy plants. They were used for ceremony and ritual. It was when they were synthesized and abused by the modern Western world that they became what we call addiction. When they were used by priests, monks and shamens from different tribes, it was a completely different view. The spiritual path has nothing to do with substances. You don't need to get high to follow meditation.
(This article was originally published in Grip Monthly #5, Mar. '97)