Fame & Fortune: Donovan,
the Hurdy-Gurdy man
Record money comes and goes but songs
live on forever |
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Bankrate: Were your parents
musical?
Donovan: My father
didn't sing, but my mother sang, as all Irish gals sing. But I didn't
get taught music growing up.
Bankrate:
Do you remember your first guitar?
Donovan: Guitar was not
my first instrument; it was drums. I fancied myself as Art Blakely
or Gene Krupa, a jazz guy. I played drums for a bit. My pal Mick
Sharman strummed guitar and I played wire brushes on a snare and
our friend 'Dippy' Gale played sax. We were sort of a little band
there for a while, but then when I traveled, I had my sights set
on playing guitar straightaway. My first guitar was a classical
that had been converted to steel strings. That was difficult, a
hard one to play. The guitar that I used on the first recordings
was an old Zenith. It looked like the old blues ones with the F
hole in it.
Bankrate: Did you hit
the road with the intention of making it in music?
Donovan: Well, at first
Gypsy and I just hitchhiked away with no thoughts of tomorrow. He
told fortunes, and I would sing songs, so a sandwich and a cup of
tea was all one needed. But to make it? It wasn't so much to make
it as to want to communicate. You may say we bring these intentions
with us from previous lives if you're a Buddhist or a Celt or you
believe that you come fully prepared to follow a vocation. And vocation,
of course, is an interesting word: voc, vocal, vox, the vocal, the
call. I listened to it, and I followed it. Nobody knew how successful
it would be. I just knew I needed to be a communicator and be part
of this voice that was coming out of bohemia, out of the beat bars
and poetry circles.
Bankrate: How did you survive financially?
Donovan: I washed dishes
for a bit, to be honest. I bused for a little bit, but only really
to pick up girls and get them to buy me a cup of tea and a sandwich.
Really, it sounds like destitution, but it was living the gypsy
life. There was always something to eat.
Bankrate: Thanks to the
success of "Ready Steady Go!" you never had to work your
way up through the club circuit?
Donovan: No, I never went
through a struggling phase as a professional musician like The Beatles
did in Hamburg or Brian Jones and The Stones did in the clubs. I
didn't work for years and years doing three shows a night; it all
happened immediately on television. In 1964 that brand-new television
show, and television in general across the Western world, was now
in everybody's living room. I was a television star overnight before
I made a record.
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