Fitzgerald Donovan

In The 1960s
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-640-0
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Donovan is one of the musicians who defined the 1960s. From his humble, working-class roots as a teenager with big dreams, he rose to become an icon of the times, the troubadour of the flower power generation. His story is one filled with tales of romance, legendary friendships, and screaming fans. But it's also the story of a spiritual journey and of a personal mission to bring his message of love to the world. Most of all, though, it's about the music.
Defying the press who dubbed him a mere Dylan imitator, Donovan found his own unique voice and produced some of the most creative and enduring music of the '60s; songs that captured the imagination with memorable melodies and poetic, thought-provoking lyrics. He transcended his folk roots to blend in rock, pop, jazz, classical and world music elements like no one had done before. The mythical, magical decade of the 1960s was the time that Donovan made his mark on the world. This book tells his story through a deep dive into the music he created in those times, including new insights from John Cameron, who arranged and played on many of Donovan's classic songs of the era.

Jeff Fitzgerald started as a radio DJ in the 1980s, producing such weekly music programmes as Electronic Realizations and Canadian Rock. More recently, he was the host of the River Gibbs FM show Prog World. Artists he has interviewed include Saga, Triumph, Suzanne Ciani, Damo Suzuki, King Black Acid and Nash the Slash. Jeff is a musician himself and has also been writing about music for over 20 years for online webzines such as Aural Innovations and his own blog, Psychedelic Waves. He lives in Edmonton, Canada, with his wife Stephanie and their cat Maya. This is his first book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzgerald, Jeff

Leseproben

Chapter 2

2: The Folk Years 1964–65

After the summer, he returned to St. Albans, settling there. There was a thriving folk scene with a number of clubs in St. Albans at the time, and here, Donovan would watch the more experienced musicians performing, not only to enjoy their music but to carefully observe their guitar picking techniques. He listened to records over and over again, trying to replicate what he was hearing. He learned all the popular songs by artists such as Woody Guthrie, Derroll Adams, Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, Jesse Fuller and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Donovan slowly built his own repertoire.

One weekend, a local popular R&B band called Cops ’n’ Robbers got a gig just south of St. Albans in Southend-on-Sea. Much of the St. Albans crowd went down to support them and Donovan was given the opportunity to play a song between sets, so he got up on stage with his guitar and harmonica and played Jesse Fuller’s classic song ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’.

Unbeknown to Donovan, two record managers, Geoff Stevens and Peter Eden, were sitting in the back. After his performance, Donovan felt a bit ill from too much beer and stage fright, so he went out back behind the club to get some air. The two managers followed him, saying they wished to talk to him. But the ill-feeling overwhelmed Donovan and he promptly puked all over them! They took it in good stride, though and asked him if he’d like to come up to London to record some demos.

On the day they had agreed upon, Donovan hitched a ride up to London and met the two managers in a recording studio in the basement of an old building on Denmark Street, the Tin Pan Alley of London.

With his Zenith acoustic guitar in hand, Donovan recorded a series of demos, some covers and some of his own original compositions. The demos weren’t intended for release, just to be given to record executives to show them what Donovan sounded like. A couple of the demos did eventually appear on the Troubadour anthology in 1992 – covers of ‘London Town’ and ‘Cod’ine’.

‘London Town’ had originally been recorded by Mick Taylor, an itinerant American folk-blues musician residing in London at the time, and released as a single in 1965. He, along with his partner Sheena McCall, would go on to design album covers, flyers and concert programmes for Donovan. Peter Eden had produced the Mick Taylor single. Eden was, of course, one of the managers who had discovered Donovan, and he played the song to the young musician in the studio, suggesting it would be a good one to cover. Based on a blues/folk song, ‘Green Rocky Road’, ‘London Town’ was in the traditional repertoire at the time and lots of people played it, often changing the lyric so that the writer’s credit was ‘Trad[itional] arr[anged] by …’ But Donovan liked Taylor’s version of it and decided to record it as one of his demos.

Canadian-American folk singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote and first recorded ‘Cod’ine’. It detailed her experiences after she became addicted to codeine that had been given to her for a bronchial infection. It appeared on her debut album, It’s My Way, released just a few months before Donovan recorded his version and became a popular song to cover by artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Donovan’s version was just a demo, he was one of the first to record a cover of it. Donovan’s version follows the same arrangement as Sainte-Marie’s version, but Sainte-Marie’s displays a very unique vocal vibrato. Although that kind of vibrato would become one of Donovan’s distinct vocal stylings later on, he doesn’t use it in this song. His vocals are more akin to Dylan’s vocal style on this track. Whereas Sainte-Marie’s original version has a searing, desperate feel to it, Donovan’s version is cooler and more detached, perhaps because Donovan wasn’t singing from personal experience. Yet his version still hints at that disconnection from reality that the addict feels. Donovan would eventually record and score a hit in 1965 with a cover of another Buffy Sainte-Marie song, ‘Universal Soldier’.

The rest of the demos finally saw an official release in 2004 on the appropriately titled album Sixty-Four. Some of the covers included the Jesse Fuller song ‘Crazy ’Bout a Woman’, the Ewan MacColl song ‘Dirty Old Town’ and a version of ‘Keep on Truckin’’, a song that would later appear in a different version on Donovan’s debut album.

Two of Donovan’s original demos appeared later in slightly different versions. He reworked ‘Isle of Sadness’ into ‘Belated Forgiveness Plea’, which appeared on the Fairytale album. Also, ‘Darkness of My Night’ was later re-recorded and renamed ‘Breezes of Patchouli’ around the time of the Sunshine Superman sessions, although it wasn’t released until 1992 on the Troubadour anthology. ‘Talkin’ Pop Star Blues’ was another original demo which Donovan played live on the 5 March 1965 broadcast of Ready Steady Go!

In fact, on the strength of Donovan’s demos, the show’s producer, Elkan Allan, booked him on the programme. Ready Steady Go! was a TV show oriented towards the youth market that featured performers playing their songs ‘live’ while the studio audience (of mainly young people) danced. Donovan, quite unusually, was invited to perform on the show despite not having an actual commercial release to his name yet. He first appeared on the show on 29 January 1965. While most of the performers on Ready Steady Go! would lip-synch to the studio versions of their records, Donovan insisted on performing live. His first three appearances happened prior to releasing a record and included performances of covers such as Jesse Fuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ and originals, such as the aforementioned ‘Talkin’ Pop Star Blues’. On his fourth appearance, Donovan would perform ‘Catch the Wind’, the song that would propel him to fame.

Donovan’s managers secured him a recording contract with Pye Records. Pye wanted him to record a cover song as his first single, a song they’d found about a wandering hobo, which they felt fit his image at the time. But Donovan had been working on more new material of his own and insisted that his first single should be one of his originals. As he’d done with Ready Steady Go!, he pushed back with clear intent. Donovan had his own vision, one that didn’t include his first single being a cover. As he told Goldmine in 1992, ‘At the stage of late 1964, I had everything intact. I’d already had a year and a half of songwriting. So, everything that was to happen in 1965 was already formed and shaped in my mind in 1964.’ ‘Catch the Wind’ impressed the execs at Pye records, who realised that this young musician was more than just another cookie-cutter teen pop star, so they agreed to let him have his own original song as his debut single.

On his 12 March appearance on Ready Steady Go!, he performed ‘Catch the Wind’, the same day as it was released as a single. After the show, in the green room, Donovan was hobnobbing with the show’s hosts and the other musicians when he met a young woman who would go on to have an enormous impact on his life and his music. While chatting with one of the show’s hosts, Michael Aldred, Donovan noticed a girl standing alone on the other side of the room. He pointed her out to Aldred, who happened to be a friend of the girl, so he introduced the young musician to Linda Anne Lawrence. It was to be a pivotal moment in Donovan’s life. After hanging out together backstage, the pair went to Donovan’s place and talked and listened to music till the sun was rising. Donovan, enchanted, asked for Linda’s number before she left to go home.

While he thought of her over the next few days, ‘Catch the Wind’ stormed into the Top 40, rising to number four on the UK charts. It even made a serious dent in the US charts when Hickory Records released it there a few months later, reaching number 23. Donovan was on his way to stardom. His new love life, however, took an unexpected twist. He invited Linda to one of his gigs and that’s when he found out that she had a son, and the father was Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. She said she wasn’t together with Jones anymore, but over the next few weeks, as Donovan got to know her more, he detected a certain sadness in her and began to torture himself with thoughts that she may still be in love with Jones.

Even as his love life wavered, Donovan’s career was steadily growing. He had taken a bit of flak from some journalists in the music press, who called him a Bob Dylan imitator and a fake. But when New Musical Express (NME) conducted its annual readers’ poll on the best artists and performances of the year for 1964–65, fans said differently. Donovan won the category of ‘Best New Disc or TV Singer’. He was invited to perform before 10,000 screaming fans at the 1965 NME Annual Poll Winners’ All-Star Concert at London’s Wembley Empire Pool on 11 April, where he shared the stage with such artists as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, The Seekers, Them, Dusty Springfield, The Animals and The Kinks among others. In his review in the 16 April 1965 edition of NME, Alan Smith wrote:

This was the act so many fans had been waiting for, if only for its curiosity value. Would Donovan match up...