Donovan is credited for influencing The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, teaching John Lennon how to fingerpick the guitar, and spearheading bohemian culture in the United Kingdom with his road buddy Gypsy Dave. Here, the songwriter talks about the execs who helped him achieve success
This year marks the 50th year of Donovan’s music career, which saw him at the forefront of the ‘60s UK bohemian counter culture movement, befriending The Beatles and influencing their work with his views on peace and love and his take on folk, blues and pioneering psychedelic pop. In the words of George Harrison: “Donovan is all over the White Album.” He tells Music Week that him and influential pal and road buddy Gyspy Dave met at a jazz club in Welwyn Garden City. The pair then “cooked up a plan” to enter popular culture.
“What was happening in 1962 is what was going to happen in the ’60s,” he says. “Bohemia, folk, jazz and blues clubs were going to invade popular culture, [which] at the time was the likes of Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Nobody was making albums, but folk, jazz and blues artists made albums and we were standing in the wings of the pop explosion.
“Gypsy and I knew we had something. History will tell that the reason why The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and all the other important singer/songwriters in the ‘60s welcomed Gypsy and I into their community, into their houses and into their lives, was because we represented something in Britain, which was happening in America, where folk music and ‘bohemian manifesto and bohemian culture’ would invade popular culture.”
To celebrate his five colourful and story-filled decades of making music, Donovan will be releasing a 2xCD anthology via recent BMG acquisition Union Square Music (ex-Pye Records). Managing director Peter Stack, says: “USM is thrilled to be working with Donovan. He is a genuine musical legend, hugely influential with a fantastic catalogue of hit singles and era-defining albums. We really look forward to helping Donovan celebrate his 50 years in the business.”
The anthology includes brand new single, One English Summer, as well as his biggest hits (such as Sunshine Superman), and other tracks that he felt represented his career best. “I’m three years younger than The Beatles or The Rolling Stones and Dylan,” he says. “Not many people might know that, but it’s my turn now and I get a chance to present my work, which is a wonderful thing.”
Donovan tells Music Week that his music career started with a publishing deal. “Publishing is really the centre of the music business,” he says. “It was here before radio, it was here before television and it will be here forever. Without the song, without the lyrics, you haven’t got anything to actually record.”
He has been published by Peer Music, (formerly Southern Music) since 1964 after songwriter Geoff Stevens, who wrote The Crying Game, saw him supporting St. Albans-based RnB band Cops And Robbers at a gig in Southend-on-Sea.
“I got up for three songs and Geoff Stevens was courting them as a possible RnB sensation like The Yardbirds or The Rolling Stones. Stevens and his partner Peter Eden saw what I was doing, came up to me and said, Hey, why don’t you come up to Southern Music in Tin Pan Alley and record some demos. I said, That is exactly what I want to do.
“I walked in through the door and onto this thread bare carpet, wallpaper peeling off the wall. It was like a Dickens novel. On one wall was a photograph of Buddy Holly. On the other wall there was a photo of The Carter Family. I was yet to understand, when I went down in the basement with a four-track tape recorder with Terry Kennedy, that I was walking into a world that understood that in the beginning was the song and in the beginning was Tin Pan Alley.”
Donovan subsequently recorded nine demos in Southern Music’s basement at No.8 Denmark Street, while The Rolling Stones worked on their own demos three doors down at Essex Music. Southern Music’s Bob Kingston, pleased with what he heard and seeing Donovan’s potential, offered him a publishing deal. Those original demos have recently resurfaced and have been released on iTunes.
“I am very happy because they nurtured me,” says Donovan. “When I was brought into that basement to record, I didn’t know that I was part of a tradition and part of the first music publisher responsible, in 1923-1928, for beginning popular music out of the roots world.” Peer Music founder Ralph Peer Senior is credited with making the first country music recording, with Fiddlin’ John Carson.
Donovan’s next big break came in the form of TV show Ready Steady Go, which ran from 1963-1966 and provided a platform that would showcase not only Donovan, but also The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Dave Clark Five, The Zombies and countless others. “It was the big breakthrough show that would present us all, but everybody’s miming,” says Donovan.
"[Peer] signed me, but I didn’t have a record, so I couldn’t mime. I had to play live. I was the first live artist, at 18 years of age, on Ready Steady Go. Duncan Allen, who ran the show, said to Michael Howard who was the director, I don’t know if we should have this kid.
“Brian Jones, who happened to be going on the show that night, said to Duncan Allen, I went down in to the basement of Southern music while I was doing some demos with my band. I saw Donovan and I think he’s going to be the next thing. If you don’t bring folk music and blues and his style into your show, you’re going to miss something. Brian Jones made sure that I would stay on Ready Steady Go.”
Donovan was let go after three weeks on the show playing his own songs and Woody Guthrie covers. Although he had not yet released a record, the TV station was flooded with fan mail demanding his reinstatement as an item on the show. “Where’s the kid? Bring him back!”
Donovan remembers: “They brought me back in March 1965, and Geoff Stevens, who’s not stupid said, We need a single now, so we recorded Catch the Wind. I already had a demo of it in Southern Music and then Pye Records would release that record. That’s how I got on Pye.”
Catch The Wind was a hit, entering the Top 10 shortly after its release and winning the 1965 Ivor Novello Award. Follow up single Colours also entered the Top 10. Donovan was officially considered a recording artist at that point, and with four week’s worth of appearances on Ready Steady Go and two hit singles, his agent Olly Newman got a call from The Ed Sullivan show in New York.
“They said, Donovan. We need him. They saw to it that three weeks after the Ready Steady Go single release I was sitting on the Ed Sullivan show.” Sat in the audience during one of his Ed Sullivan appearances was the now infamous exec Allen Klein, who once managed Sam Cooke, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.
“Allen Klein was sitting there, and I didn’t know this until Linda Lawrence, my lovely muse and wife still, actually told me. She was also there one night when Phil Spector and Allen Klein were sitting looking at what’s happening in Britain and picking the target artists that they would like [to work with]. This is the business. And we love this. This is not negative, this is positive.
“So Klein called up my manager, Ashley Kozac at the right time, which was after my first three or four Top 20 hits, during my folk period in 1965, and said, Ashley Kozak, I want to talk to you, I think that Donovan needs a producer now. I’ll manage him in the United States. That’s how I was introduced to Mickie Most, which was the greatest thing and the thing I was looking for. I had produced with Geoff Stevens and Peter Eden and the engineer Terry Kennedy in the basement for the folk world and then came Allen Klein.”
Klein proceeded to “tear up the Pye contract” and Donovan was sued. He’d already recorded his breakthrough record Sunshine Superman which had to be shelved while legal proceedings were carried out. “Mickie Most said to me, While Allen Klein sorts this out Don, don’t play it to Paul McCartney. Of course I did,” says Donovan. “Mickie said in 1966, Donovan and I already did flower power in 1965, we already did love and peace. Everything that Donovan records, The Beatles copy.
“When we make our work, and we really are a true singer/songwriter, obsessional artist, we want our peers to hear what we are doing, so it didn’t bother me,” says Donovan. “By the way, Paul, John, George, Ringo and I got together through Bob Dylan.
“I met Joan Baez and she said, I can’t believe what you’re doing, you’ve got to come down and meet Dylan. That was May of 1965 when Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were in London. On that last night before Bobby went back to America, The Beatles were there and he said, Have you met these guys? And that’s when The Beatles and I started our friendship.”
Klein ended up making a deal on Donovan’s behalf with CBS Records president Clive Davis and Donovan became Davis’ first signing on CBS/Epic Records, where he enjoyed substantial US success with producer Mickie Most. And in spite of Klein’s reputation for his well-documented unorthodox business practices, Donovan says he saw their relationship “not in the dark sense that he’s the devil or a great ogre”.
Adds Donovan: “I agree with Keith Richards, who said that Allen took us from a small part of the business to a large part of the business. It wasn’t easy. I was sued like crazy and the Sunshine Superman album was held back. Historically it is now placed properly as an influential album before Sgt. Pepper. So that’s what Allen Klein did for me and I am so happy. It really worked and Mickie Most and I were the best team, I believe, in the whole sixties, except for maybe George Martin and The Beatles!”
Now operating in a digital age, Donovan has as many views on modern methods of music distribution as he does on one of the oldest parts of the business - publishing. His music has been streamed millions of times on Spotify, but he calls the payments he receives from it “infinitesimal”.
“It’s very similar to the jukebox world,” he suggests. “The guys who owned all the jukeboxes said, We can’t tell you how many plays a kid in a northern town dances to with his girlfriend in a coffee house. In the jukebox days, I believe there was a deal where they said, Look we’ll give you some money and you distribute it amongst all the artists that actually release records. That’s the way it is today, right?”
Donovan emphasises the importance of protecting copyright and the promotion of fair compensation for music creators. He says that the older generation are partly to blame for the development of the instant-music-for-free culture borne out of the digital revolution.
“Nigel Elderton from Peer Music Europe and I often talk about how the battle is getting on. It’s very important, copyright. The problem is that when Napster arrived, the young ones realised, This is great, why don’t you listen to my record collection too? Was this any different to what the super DJs, who are now millionaires, were doing when they were kids? They would make a cassette. So were we. I would make cassettes, wouldn’t you? All these young kids saw us doing it and thought, Let’s do it, too.
“So when Napster came along, all hell breaks loose, because what happens to copyright? Sometimes a songwriter only has one song [with which] to put kids into college, to pay a mortgage. I’ve got more than one song, but what about the guy who has one song? It’s not good. So now the battle is on.
“A mentor of mine was Peter Cameron, who always wanted to remain anonymous. He was a mover and shaker, let me tell you, of many movements of music and film in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He said, Everything will settle. Like silt in a river. Everything will settle to what people want. The people that supply it and how much the people need to pay for it. So let’s hope this can be sorted out soon. Somebody’s got to pay for the use of and for listening to music.”