Thy (Not So) Humble Minstrel

Flashing back on my 1996 encounter with the legendary Donovan

Yesterday was the 77th birthday of Donovan Phillips Leitch, better known as just plain Donovan.

I am an unabashed Donovan fan. I’ve been so since my sophomore year of college, when I first started digging beyond his hits and into the deeper cuts of albums like Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden and (my favorite) Hurdy Gurdy Man. I still fully believe that Donovan made some of the most wonderful folk-psych LPs of the 1960s — records that would now be hailed as masterpieces (and fetch hundreds of dollars from collectors) if they’d been released by obscure artists on tiny labels and achieved but a fraction of their actual sales. I also think the man gets far less credit than he deserves for his brilliant songwriting and guitar playing, or for his visionary embrace of “world music” years before Paul Simon figured out how to steal it for his own nefarious ends.

Which is not to say that I don’t also derive a great deal of amusement from his fey flower child shtick — things like signing off on missives to his fans with “Thy humble minstrel, Donovan” — or his tendency to be a little more, er, self-aggrandizing about his place in rock history than generally befits a man of his image and status. (Anyone who has read 2005’s absurdly inflated The Autobiography of Donovan: The Hurdy Gurdy Man will know of which I speak.)

Back in the early ‘90s, my band Lava Sutra once played an entire two-hour show that was lovingly devoted to his music. But we also spent a lot of time around the Sutra House conceptualizing a film — unfortunately never shot nor even fully scripted — that was basically an extended riff on his infamous song-trading scene with Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back, which had long been celebrated by rock critics (at least, the insecure male segment thereof) and Dylan obsessives as some kind of musical WWF Smackdown in which Donovan was forced to eat his own fisherman’s cap before being tossed from the ring. (“In your fuckin’ FACE, Donovan!”)

In our film — known only as “The Film” — Donovan (played by me) would encounter other musical luminaries (played by our friends who looked somewhat like the luminaries in question), all of whom would eventually get around to telling him how badly they thought he sucked. Jim Morrison would tell him that he sucked because he wasn’t “on the edge” enough; Levon Helm would tell him that he sucked because he wasn’t rootsy enough; Tom Jones would tell him that he sucked because he wasn’t sufficiently masculine; Richard Thompson would upbraid him for wasting his talent on silly songs like “Oh Gosh” and “I Love My Shirt”. The only character who wouldn’t rain abuse upon our humble minstrel was Marc Bolan (also played by me), who would instead share a chaste kiss with Donovan in a bucolic field of wind-waved poppies. Yes, we thought a lot about this. And yes, copious bong hits may have been involved…